Canadian reforms the Catholic Church needs
To the surprise of absolutely nobody, the meeting in Rome last month between Pope Francis and select Catholic bishops has produced absolutely nothing concrete. It’s now clear that no serious reforms are in sight. And it’s even clearer that no bishop anywhere understands that his office — and that of the pope — is the biggest problem in desperate need of reform.
While bishops fiddled in Rome, Catholics around the world are demanding concrete structural reforms to the church. Part of the unwillingness of the bishops stems, of course, from the ageold problem that those who have power will rarely surrender it voluntarily. But we must also recognize that many Catholics feel handicapped by not having examples of effective models of a restructured church.
What if Canada had some answers? What if, reaching back a decade before Confederation, we found a pioneering model for structuring a church that was then a new and revolutionary model — but which, in a few short decades, was the norm across our newly confederated country?
In 1857, Anglicans in southwestern Ontario in the Diocese of Huron (hugging the lake of that name and headquartered in London, Ont.) made world history by electing their bishop instead of waiting for Queen Victoria to send one. That model was unprecedented at the time, but within a few short decades it spread across Canada and around the world so that today election of bishops is the norm almost everywhere in the global Anglican Communion (except England).
But Anglicans in Huron did much more than elect a bishop. They also structured their churches to achieve a marvellous balance of power between three orders: the order of the laity; of the clergy; and of the bishops. No serious electoral or legislative matter can proceed without majority approval in all three orders.
Bishops are elected by their people and accountable to them annually in synods. Clergy are appointed after a parish council comes to an agreement with the bishop on suitable candidates. And if clergy are removed, the parish council must be told why. These two features alone would go a long way to helping the Catholic Church hold bishops accountable and stop them from secretly shuffling abusers from parish to parish. This Anglican system recognizes that each order must be involved in church governance and that nobody should be trusted with a monopoly of power, which is the fatal flaw in the Catholic system, as Canadians have been seeing for a full 30 years now.
Back in early 1989, the horrors of Mount Cashel Orphanage in St. John’s began to make headlines across the country and I have never forgotten the searing reports about the demonic offences committed and covered up by Catholic churchmen.
By 1992, the Canadian bishops had published a short booklet on the crisis and I used it at the University of Ottawa to write my first paper on sex abuse in the church for a child psychology class. It was obvious to me then that the system needed serious reform.
In the past year, as I was writing my book Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power (Angelico Press, 2019), I have talked to Catholics in Canada, the U.S., Europe, Malta and Australia, and the demand for major reforms is higher and more unrelenting than anything I have seen in three decades.
Now, more than ever, Catholics are willing to look to unprecedented places for models of serious restructuring and reform. My book highlights Canadian Anglican structures alongside another improbable source: the Armenian Apostolic Church, which even more sharply insists on clear lines of accountability between the people, the priests and the bishops.
Perhaps, as the Catholic Church madly flounders to find models of reform and restructuring, Anglicans and Armenians in Canada can offer their own experiences very much as an “ecumenical gift exchange,” as the late Pope John Paul II put it. Heaven knows the Catholic Church needs all the help it can get.
A.A.J. DeVille is a Canadian citizen currently living in Indiana, where he is associate professor and director of humanities at the University of Saint Francis.