by WGO staff
Cape Breton University invites everyone to the book launch party for Father Greg—A Life on Wednesday, August 14, in the Cape Breton University Library. Starting at 12 noon and hosted by President David C. Dingwall, this book signing will provide a light lunch and music by Jason Kempt.
Written by Daniel Doucet, Father Greg is a new biography of Greg MacLeod, the beloved priest, educator, mentor, social activist, and friend.
Father Greg MacLeod lived a life devoted to Cape Breton Island, all humanity, and God. He loved good food, friendship and Cape Breton’s music—and he was always ready to dance. MacLeod loved to inspire progressive attitudes and community activism aimed at a better life for all people.
As Doucet writes, “It is not enough to say that Greg chose the priesthood. It was not so much a choice between the practical and the spiritual, as it was responding to the urgent need to give oneself to both human development and the teachings of our faith.” MacLeod himself said, “I viewed [the priesthood] as a kind of a reform movement. You joined a movement to bring about change in the world.”
Rooted in his birthplace of Sydney Mines, Greg MacLeod was a delighted world traveler, seeking to bring home knowledge to his economically troubled Cape Breton. Wherever he landed, from Japan to Mexico, Greg expanded on the revolutionary ideas of Moses Coady and Jimmy Tompkins, organizing for Community Economic Development based on co-operative action and worker control.
Author Dan Doucet traveled with Father Greg for over forty years. He quotes extensively from Greg’s papers and richly detailed private journals, giving insight into Greg’s voraciously quick mind and his relentless pursuit of ideas and ideals.
In Cape Breton, Greg’s name is synonymous with a wide range of bold projects that include New Dawn Enterprises, Cape Breton University’s Tompkins Institute, BCA Holdings, Wentworth Condominium, East Coast Rope, the Scotia Rail Development Society and many more. Abroad, he inhaled the education and politics of Eastern and Western Europe and Latin America, wrestling with troubling economic disparities and helping found credit unions and co-operative businesses.
Father Greg springs to life in this vigorous biography, delivering a powerful sense of Greg’s incredible range of thinking, engagement and activism, all glued together by Doucet’s straightforward and well-informed writing. This is a lasting tribute to a remarkable and influential man, warm and human, with countless examples of Greg’s spectacular intellectual engagement with ideas that can still be put into practice to move communities forward for the general good. As Doucet writes, “Somehow loving people and mobilizing them, for Greg, were one and the same thing.”
With 208 pages and a generous section of photographs, Father Greg—A Life by Daniel Doucet is available in stores throughout Cape Breton and across Canada, and online at www.capebretonbooks.com.
