In Antigonish

In the small, predominantly Roman Catholic town of Antigonish in Nova Scotia, churchmen of three faiths last week made a great and happy to-do over cooperatives. At Antigonish's small Roman Catholic St. Francis Xavier University were 1,000 people--among them 250 clergymen and educators from the U. S.--to attend a Rural and Industrial Conference, to behold how the 100% Christian economics of cooperatives had put the whole region on its feet.

Eight years ago. Rev. James J. ("Father Jimmy") Tompkins. a plain, grizzled parish priest, persuaded St. Xavier University to branch into the field of adult education. Father Jimmy had studied the famed cooperatives begun in Rochdale, England a century ago, had organized Nova Scotian miners and fishermen into study groups to learn about cooperatives.

Working through the University's extension department, with the help of its big, forthright director, Rev. Dr. Moses Mathias Coady, Father Tompkins preached the doctrines of cooperation so effectively that Nova Scotia today has 142 flourishing credit unions (small banks with revolving funds), 42 cooperative stores, 28 cooperative lobster and fish processing plants.

Last fortnight Nova Scotia's Premier Angus Macdonald, a graduate of St. Francis Xavier University, spoke at the opening of a cooperative housing project at a new town, Tompkinsville, named for Father Tompkins. When Father Jimmy rose to speak at the University conference, his audience roared applause. Two days later, an outsider, Political Economist Harold Adams Innis of the University of Toronto, told the conference: "You have reached the dangerous stage in which all men think well of you." Less gallant was the University's Peter Nearing's plea for group medical care: "Our women are . . . puny, with few Venuses among them. We see our men as undersized and misshapen. . . . Our beaches look like circus sideshows." Nova Scotians supposed that soon Father Jimmy would fix that, too.

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