Episcopal discipline and election confirmation for the Diocese of Montreal

I. On episcopal discipline II. Can an episcopal election be challenged?

Last week I published a piece analyzing the misconduct policies of the Diocese of Montreal, policies which have contributed to a crisis in our process for electing a new bishop. In that piece, I argued that our policies are, frankly, a mess. They are nearly impossible to use. They also concentrate essentially all power in the hands of the bishop.

Since I published the piece, an article in The Living Church has shed more light on the safe church concerns involving our episcopal candidate slate. Reporting has revealed that the search committee had serious safe church concerns about three of the seven candidates (including the candidate who it has been revealed was the subject of a non-sexual harassment complaint). The committee’s concerns about one of these candidates were so serious that they unanimously voted to ask the individual to withdraw from consideration, but they were prevented from doing so by diocesan authorities. This seems to be why nearly half the search committee resigned when the slate was made public. Meanwhile, diocesan leadership continues to insist that there are no serious issues with the election and would not comment for this story.¹

As we approach the election, I wanted to discuss two topics that I left out of last week’s piece but are of immediate relevance: first, how episcopal discipline works for bishops of Montreal; second, what procedures exist for contesting the result of an episcopal election.

I. How is episcopal misconduct handled?

Let’s begin with procedures for making misconduct complaints against the bishop. I think this is important to discuss not only for the sake of comprehensiveness, but also because of the alleged safe church issues with three of the seven candidates for bishop. Depending on the outcome of the election in this diocese, we may need to know how to use these policies. But unfortunately, such knowledge may not be enough. Just like the Montreal policies for handling clergy misconduct, the provincial episcopal misconduct procedures are almost impossible to use and concentrate a vast amount of power in just one person.

In the Canadian system, misconduct complaints against bishops are handled at the provincial level (a province is a group of dioceses, headed by a metropolitan who is also a diocesan bishop). This matches the general pattern we saw in the national disciplinary canon, Canon 18, of decentralizing disciplinary systems. Thus, complaints about priests and deacons are handled at the diocesan level, and complaints about bishops (or appeals from diocesan disciplinary processes) are handled at the provincial level. What these disciplinary processes look like is largely up to the diocese or province in question.

The Diocese of Montreal is in the Ecclesiastical Province of Canada. And so, to see what episcopal discipline looks like for bishops of Montreal, you have to look at the provincial canons. The relevant provincial canon is Canon 5. It stipulates that to bring a disciplinary case against a bishop, either three bishops of the province or six individuals from the diocese, three clergy and three lay synod delegates, have to make a formal accusation. The possible grounds for accusation are laid out in Section 7 of national Canon 18. Like the diocesan misconduct canon, this is a rather old-fashioned list, for better and worse. Most of what gets discussed today as clergy misconduct or abuse would fall under the general and undefined category of “immorality” in this canon.

If a complaint is made, then the metropolitan appoints a Committee of Inquiry of three people to decide whether or not a trial is warranted (unless the subject of the complaint waives this process). If the committee says that such a trial is not necessary, the complaint is dismissed. If the committee says that a trial is necessary or if the committee process was waived, then the metropolitan may either judge the case and assign consequences him/herself or send it to be judged by the provincial court (if this sounds reminiscent of the diocesan Canon 25 process, it should).

As far as the trial goes, for offenses against bishops, the provincial court is made up of five members: three bishops, a priest or deacon, and a layperson. The bishops are to be chosen directly by the metropolitan. The clergy and lay members are also chosen by the metropolitan, but must be drawn from a pool of two clergy and laity per diocese chosen by the Provincial Council. The provincial canon does not specify the sort of witness testimony that is acceptable or how exactly consequences are determined after a conviction.

Once again as in the Montreal diocesan Canon 25, there are some limited possibilities of appeal. If a bishop is convicted of an offense by the metropolitan without a provincial trial, the bishop or the relevant diocesan Executive Council may require the provincial court to review the conviction and penalty. The decisions of provincial courts in cases against bishops can be appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeal for the Anglican Church of Canada (see national Canon 20).

Evaluating the episcopal misconduct policy

What does this all mean? The first thing to note is that it is incredibly difficult to bring charges against bishops. Imagine someone who has been subject to bullying or sexual harassment by their bishop. First of all, they would need to figure out how to make a complaint. The only way to do this is to read the canons of the province — that is, the church governance documents for a level of ACC polity that many people are only dimly aware exists! This is a very confusing setup, and it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s nothing stopping Anglicans from doing something like the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Montreal, which puts a ‘Make a complaint’ on the archdiocesan website header. Instead, we make it nearly impossible for ordinary people to learn how to file misconduct complaints against the most powerful people in our church polity (who, as I explained in last week’s piece, decide how nearly all other forms of misconduct are handled). This is a problem.

But let’s assume that our would-be complainant has the time and mental energy to find their way to the right webpage and has taken the time to read Canon 5. Then this person would discover that only complaints made by three bishops or three licensed clergy and three lay synod delegates can be considered. And so our survivor of sexual or other misconduct has to either approach three bishops probably unknown to them, or six relatively prominent people in the diocese (incidentally, in Montreal, it’s not always easy to figure out who lay synod delegates are). These people would all need to be convinced that the allegation is serious before the disciplinary process even begins. It’s as though you, as a survivor and potential complainant, would have to go through three to six mini-trials in which you lay out your experiences before the formal disciplinary process even begins.

This very high bar for lodging complaints means that the instructions given in Montreal’s own safe church policies for bringing complaints against a bishop would not result in a formal disciplinary process. You may recall that only one of the (many!) Montreal diocesan policy guides or canons imagines the possibility of the bishop committing misconduct, namely the diocesan Safe Church Policy and Guide. This guide says that the proper way to respond to sexual misconduct committed by the bishop is to inform the metropolitan. But if you did so — if you followed the instructions in the guide to the letter — the metropolitan could not initiate a disciplinary procedure, because a multi-person complaint from very specific people is necessary. I want to emphasize this: the only instructions the Diocese of Montreal gives for pursuing a misconduct claim against a bishop would never lead to formal discipline for that bishop.

And then (as in the processes at the diocesan level), assuming a formal complaint is even made, a great deal of power is vested in the metropolitan to decide on its merits and any consequences to follow. The metropolitan gets to choose whether to decide a disciplinary case him/herself or refer it to the court. And even if it is referred to the court, the court is appointed by the metropolitan (albeit with some constraints). This once again requires heroic levels of virtue from a figure who is given a huge amount of authority to decide cases involving a fellow bishop — a figure who is a close colleague and likely even a friend of the said bishop.

The problem here is fundamentally the same as with the diocesan misconduct system. This policy is very difficult to use, both in the sense that it would not be trivial for a complainant to find and in the sense that it has an incredibly high bar for even bringing an accusation. And it concentrates almost all power in a single person. It is a bad system, and it needs to change.

II. Challenging an episcopal election

Something else that I have been asked to discuss is what, if anything, could be done to challenge the result of an episcopal election. What happens if a dangerous candidate is elected bishop here? Is there any redress? Now, this isn’t technically about episcopal misconduct, but I think it is sufficiently important and related to be worth discussing here too.

Once again, the place to look for answers is the provincial canons, in this case Canon 3. Here is how the election confirmation process works: after an election, the president and secretaries of the electoral synod certify the election to the metropolitan. The metropolitan then notifies the other bishops of the province of this result. Each bishop then has seven days to either concur or object to the election. The possible grounds of objection are as follows:

A bishop may object to an election on the ground that the person elected either has not attained 30 years of age, is not a priest or bishop of the Anglican Church of Canada or of a church in full communion therewith, is deficient in learning, training or experience, has either directly or indirectly secured or attempted to secure the office by improper means, is guilty of crime or immorality, or teaches or holds, or within the previous five years has taught or held, anything contrary to the doctrine or discipline of the Anglican Church of Canada.

If an objection to the election is raised on these grounds by a bishop of the province, the provincial House of Bishops must make a decision about it. The canon says that the provincial bishops’ decision in relation to an objection is final, but it does not say anything more about the process the provincial House of Bishops is to use.

And so, there is a check in the Canadian system for an episcopal election. Unlike, say, the Episcopal Church, where bishops and diocesan Standing Committees throughout the entire church must confirm an episcopal election, here the ability to challenge an electoral result is limited to bishops and limited to the provincial level. This fits the general pattern we have seen in the Anglican Church of Canada of governance that is decentralized at the national level and puts an enormous amount of power in the hands of bishops. But beyond this, it’s hard to say much about this process, because the relevant canon simply does not tell us how it works. That is to say, I don’t feel that the canonical description of the process gives us sufficient information to evaluate it — which is itself a real problem.

Most concretely, here’s what this means if the election goes forward on Saturday and if a candidate about whom people have very serious concerns is elected: the only canonical way to potentially overturn the election is by getting a bishop of the province to refuse to confirm the election, which will then lead to some sort of decision among the provincial bishops about whether or not the election stands.

Summing Up

What this all makes clear for the short term is that it is of utmost importance that a good bishop be elected for this diocese. Overturning the election results is technically possible but, frankly, unlikely (and the process involved is unclear). And, once a bishop is consecrated, bringing disciplinary charges against that person is very difficult.

This makes the current situation in our diocese all the more alarming. According to recent reporting, the search committee had concerns on safe church/misconduct grounds about a full three of the seven candidates for bishop here. The committee's concerns about one candidate were so serious that they unanimously voted to ask the candidate to withdraw only to be overruled by diocesan authorities. And we still don't know who that candidate was or what the allegations against this person were. These are the circumstances in which electors are being asked to vote to make someone very powerful and very difficult to remove. I truly do not know how they can be expected to act in this situation.

But more broadly, this analysis shows some real weaknesses of the provincial canons. The procedure for responding to objections about an episcopal election should be made clear. More importantly, the process for making complaints against bishops is disastrous: information about it is difficult to find, it has an extremely high bar for even bringing complaints, and it vests an enormous amount of power in just one person, the metropolitan. For those who read my piece about the Montreal misconduct policies, this is a familiar evaluation.

And, finally, even though this piece isn’t really about the Montreal diocesan policies, once again we see their shortcomings: the one Montreal Safe Church policy that addresses episcopal misconduct gives instructions that could never actually lead to discipline for a bishop in question.

The provincial canons — and this Montreal policy — are inadequate and need to be changed.

For regular Draw Near With Faith readers, I expect that I will be posting less about the Diocese of Montreal and more about sixteenth century esoterica again shortly. But as with church decline (another thing I am often beating my drum about!), I think it is desperately important for the church to discuss clergy misconduct, and I hope that my own writing here can in whatever small way further the conversation. And for now, please pray for us.

Thanks once again to Arlie Coles for the enormously helpful diagrams. Subscribe to her Substack here.

1. For a helpful round-up of all official statements and press coverage of the election, see this Substack by Jesse Zink.