A lifelong advocate inside and outside the Anglican Church of Canada for social and environmental justice, peace and nuclear disarmament, Canon (lay) Phyllis Creighton died on June 25 at the age of 94.
Creighton served as the Anglican Church of Canada’s representative to Project Ploughshares, the peace research institute of the Canadian Council of Churches, from 1987 to 1988 and from 1990 to 1998. Elected consistently to General Synod from 1983 to 2007, she played a key role in pushing for the church to take a strong stand against militarism and nuclear weapons.
In 1983, General Synod carried a motion presented by Creighton condemning the development, production and use of nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction as “contrary to the will of God and the mind of Christ.” In 2007, Creighton moved a motion carried by General Synod that committed the Anglican Church of Canada to support the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.
Ernie Regehr, co-founder of Project Ploughshares and currently senior fellow in defence and Arctic security at the Simons Foundation Canada, described Creighton as a “prominent and valued presence in and around Project Ploughshares” since the 1980s.
Creighton “was a close reader of everything we produced, regularly responding with appreciation, encouragement, and often with constructive editorial comments and suggestions,” Regehr said. “And she was always brimming with ideas of what more we could and should be doing.”
“Phyllis integrated a deep grounding in ethics, informed by her active participation in Anglican life, with a passion for the pursuit of peace and justice. It was a combination that sustained her through decades of commitment and action, and that in turn infected all of us who were blessed to find a place within her generous orbit.”
Born in 1930, Creighton was 15 years old when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the Second World War. Creighton told the Anglican Journal in a 2019 interview that she was “horrified” by the bombings.
“I had, as the daughter of a First World War artillery officer, enthusiastically supported the fight against Hitler,” she told photographer Michael Barker in The Peace Builders, a 2019 profile of members of Toronto’s Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition, an alliance of local peace, faith and community groups. “But with all the adults cheering at the end of the war with Japan, I felt isolated,” she added. “On top of the [bombings of] Dresden and Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki turned me against war.”
Earning a master’s degree in history from the University of Toronto, Creighton taught as a high school history teacher from 1953 to 1955. Starting in 1967, she began working as a translations editor for the Dictionary of Canadian Biography/Dictionnaire Biographique du Canada (DCB/DBC), continuing in that position for about 50 years. The DCB/DBC said in an online post following her death that Creighton was deeply devoted to the organization “and insisted on maintaining the highest possible standards in her work. She remained engaged with the project after her retirement and was particularly enthusiastic about our recent biographies of enslaved people in Canada.”
In the 1980s, Creighton’s ongoing concern about nuclear weapons led her to participate in the Toronto-Volgograd Initiative, a citizen-exchange venture that sought to build ties between residents of Toronto and Volgograd, the Russian city formerly known as Stalingrad. Over the course of three visits in 1984, 1991 and 1993, Creighton said in The Peace Builders, “We succeeded in building mutual trust and establishing a sister-city agreement between the two cities.”
Creighton was known as an outspoken supporter of gay rights, serving as a member of the Primate’s Commission on Human Sexuality in the early 1990s. She also championed mental health care, chairing the Ontario Mental Health Foundation and the Addiction Research Foundation’s clinical institute.
In addition to her work with Project Ploughshares, Creighton volunteered on numerous other groups that aimed for a world free of nuclear weapons. She served as a board and executive member of Science for Peace (SfP), representing the group at the Canadian Network to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and on the Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition. She was a board and executive member of Veterans Against Nuclear Weapons and a member of the Canadian Pugwash Group executive.
For more than 20 years, Creighton was a member of the Raging Grannies, an international group that seeks to promote “peace, justice, social and economic equality through song and humour.” The Toronto Raging Grannies grieved the death of Creighton, with fellow member Kate Chung describing Creighton in a sympathy message as “our long-time role model.”
In 2012, Creighton received Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Medal. In 2013, she was appointed to the Order of Ontario, the province’s highest honour, in recognition of her work as a “passionate advocate for mental and reproductive health care, social justice, peace and the environment.”
Heather McCance, president of the Atlantic School of Theology, said Creighton was a formative influence on many young women. “Phyllis was one of those people you thought would be there forever,” McCance said in a Facebook post that cited Creighton’s “passion for justice, her deep faith, her wicked sense of humour” and her “drive to empower younger women, of whom I was one.”
Predeceased by her husband Philip, Creighton is survived by four adult children, six grandchildren, one great-grandchild and two sisters. A memorial service was held July 8 at Morley Bedford Funeral Services.
