Another safeguarding process failure in the Anglican Church of Canada

Or, how the only way to address a safe church complaint in Newfoundland was to deviate from the church's own procedures

I’ve written a bit lately about safeguarding and clergy misconduct in the Anglican Church of Canada, focusing on how clergy misconduct is handled in the Diocese of Montreal and what episcopal discipline looks like in the Ecclesiastical Province of Canada (the province to which the Diocese of Montreal belongs). Montreal-focused as this writing has been, I’m increasingly of the opinion, as ACCtoo has argued for years, that a failure to take safeguarding seriously is not just a problem of one diocese but rather one endemic to the the ACC as a whole. Yet another situation of clergy misconduct in the ACC, this time by a bishop, has recently hit the church news, and (alas!) confirms me in this opinion.

This time, the problem emerged in the Diocese of Western Newfoundland. In January of this year, the bishop, John Organ, dismissed the cathedral dean, Kay Short, publicly announced this dismissal while airing his complaints against the dean in place of a sermon during Sunday worship, and then refused to meet with the cathedral vestry. The entire cathedral vestry then resigned and congregants held public protests. Initially, both the metropolitan of the Ecclesiastical Province of Canada, David Edwards, and the acting primate of the Anglican Church of Canada as a whole, Anne Germond, said that they had no jurisdiction and so couldn’t do anything about it.¹ The dean then filed a safe church complaint under the Province of Canada’s safe church policy.

This policy offers a misconduct procedure that, rather confusingly, is different from the canonical procedure for episcopal discipline in the province that I discussed a few months ago. This policy, which covers the bishops of the province among others requires a provincial misconduct officer and a provincial misconduct committee to do its work. This officer and committee are to be appointed by the Provincial Council (the body that carries on the work of the Provincial Synod between meetings).

The way the policy is supposed to work is that complaints are made to the provincial misconduct officer, who passes them on to the provincial misconduct committee to investigate, which then returns an investigation report to the provincial misconduct officer or (in the case of complaints against bishops) the metropolitan to make a determination.

On June 13, the metropolitan, Archbishop David Edwards, released his determination. And his determination made clear that neither the diocese nor the province has a functional system for handling clergy misconduct.

Edwards writes in the determination that he first sought to determine whether the bishop should be investigated under his diocese’s own safe church policy. After all, recall that Archbishop Edwards had initially protested to the press that he had no jurisdiction in this matter. Now, frankly, advocating for a bishop to be investigated for misconduct under a diocesan misconduct procedure strikes me as an odd choice. There is a reason that the formal disciplinary canons always call for bishop disciplinary processes to be handled at a level higher than the diocese. Otherwise, you have a bishop investigated by a misconduct process that the bishop him/herself oversees.²

But in this case, Edwards chose to authorize an investigation at the provincial level. He did this because, in his words, “Western Newfoundland and Labrador Straits’s lengthy Charter consists of worthy generalizations and thoughtful discussions but is deficient on the nuts and bolts of investigation.” Specifically, “this document provides no process for investigation of complaints.” Nor is this document publicly available on the diocesan website. That is — let me stress this — the diocese in question simply does not have a misconduct policy. It has some nice ideas about how to handle misconduct in a document to which complainants have no access, but there is no misconduct policy worthy of the name.

But utilizing the provincial misconduct policy turned out to have problems too. This is because the provincial misconduct committee charged with investigating complaints doesn’t actually exist. As a result, Edwards chose to deviate from procedures set forth in the provincial policy and instead have the provincial misconduct officer investigate. On the basis of this investigation, Edwards then made a determination. What this means is that the provincial misconduct policy could not be used as written because the province hadn’t filled the necessary positions; the archbishop had to break the procedures outlined in the misconduct policy to render a judgment.

In this case, the misconduct officer and the archbishop seem to have done a good job investigating and making a determination — at any rate, the dean is mostly satisfied with the outcome. This is a good thing! But the only way they were able to do so is by failing to abide by the procedures set forth in the provincial misconduct policy in such a way that the power to receive complaints and investigate them was concentrated much more narrowly than the policy intended. And, as I’ve argued in my examination of the Montreal policy, such narrow concentration of power is simply not the best practice for responding to misconduct allegations, even if in this case it seems to have worked out all right.

To sum up:

First, lest this sound too doom-and-gloom, let me repeat the good: I am glad that, despite apparent initial reticence to get involved, Archbishop Edwards and his provincial misconduct officer carried out a thorough investigation and reached what seems to be, on the basis of publicly available information, a just settlement. This is a good thing.

But it also reveals some real problems. As far as the bishop’s misconduct itself goes, it is quite awful that the bishop apparently didn’t know (or at least didn’t bother to follow) the canons about how to properly revoke a license and thought it proper to lambast the cathedral dean for her failings in front of her congregation during Christian worship. The equivalent would get you in trouble even at many secular companies. I’d hope that bishops in the Church of Christ can live up to a higher standard.

This case also reveals continued shortcomings in our misconduct procedures. It is, frankly, appalling that a diocese of the Anglican Church of Canada doesn’t have a policy for dealing with clergy misconduct.³ It is also appalling that an ecclesiastical province of the ACC can’t follow its own procedures for handling misconduct because it hasn’t bothered to appoint the necessary people. And while David Edwards seems to have ultimately handled the matter responsibly, it is also concerning to me that an archbishop of the church thinks that misconduct complaints against diocesan bishops should best be handled at the diocesan level. I would hope that we would have at least as clear an understanding of how bishops’ power and jurisdiction makes it difficult for them to be investigated in their own dioceses as the framers of our nineteenth century disciplinary canons!

Frankly, I think we are in a tough spot as a church. I believe that we would be best served by a set of clear churchwide misconduct/disciplinary policies and procedures, because it is evident that dioceses and provinces struggle to write and then use responsible safeguarding policies. But unfortunately, the devolution of disciplinary matters to the diocesan level is longstanding in the Anglican Church of Canada. What’s more, I am not sure that the national church at present has the institutional capacity to supervise a churchwide process or even to push through the canonical changes that would be necessary to put such a process in place. Now, there are some bright spots in an overall grim picture; Edmonton’s misconduct policy is well regarded, and I know that some other dioceses are planning on adopting it. But I fear that the dioceses that most fail to handle misconduct are also the least likely to be proactive about adopting new policies. And the apparent reticence by both the primate and provincial archbishops to address failures by bishops is a problem all its own, given that episcopal discipline basically depends upon the willingness of these senior bishops to hold their colleagues accountable.

What happened here was probably the best possible outcome. I reiterate again my thanks to Archbishop Edwards and to his provincial misconduct officer. But that this was the best outcome shows, I think, just what a mess we’re in. Lord, have mercy.

1. This is not the first time that Anne Germond has responded to allegations of clergy misconduct by protesting that she can’t do anything about them. In response to a letter outlining serious allegations of clergy misconduct within the Anglican Church of Canada, Germond responded by simply saying “It is not within the purview of the Primate to become involved in allegations about events within dioceses.” She urged the complainants to use diocesan procedures, even though the letter she received made it clear that the complainants had good reasons to doubt that diocesan processes would be fair.

2. In Edwards’ determination, he holds up the model safe church policy the province provides to dioceses as an example, noting in particular that it allows for complaints against bishops to be investigated. But, while the model diocesan safe church policy does require the metropolitan to make the determination when a complaint is made against the bishop, it requires such complaints to be made to and investigated by the diocesan misconduct committee, appointed by diocesan council. It is well known that the independence of diocesan councils from the relevant diocesan bishop varies significantly diocese-to-diocese. Entrusting a body appointed by diocesan council to investigate complaints against a diocesan bishop strikes me as a mistake.

3. It is perhaps worth noting that this diocese does have a disciplinary canon, which looks much like that of the Diocese of Montreal. But of course the diocesan bishop cannot be tried under the diocesan disciplinary canon, and Edwards at any rate did not bring it up at all in his determination. I do not quite understand why the model in Canada seems to be to keep old disciplinary canons on the books but supplement them with misconduct procedures rather than, as in the Episcopal Church, revising the disciplinary canons.