On the misconduct policies of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal

A look at a shockingly bad disciplinary system

The diocese in which I serve, the Anglican Diocese of Montreal, is currently in turmoil over our search for a new bishop. In late March, a slate of seven episcopal candidates was released. Simultaneously, nearly half of the members of the search committee resigned, citing concerns about safe church practices and ballot integrity. The current bishop, the Rt. Rev. Mary Irwin-Gibson, has defended the election process. In a March 28 Anglican Journal article, Bishop Irwin-Gibson stated that no one had made formal safe church complaints against members of the slate and that there were no problems with the diocese’s safe church policies. Another Anglican Journal article on April 16 reported that a formal misconduct complaint had earlier been filed against one or more members of the slate (the details were redacted). When asked for comment, the bishop stated that she should have originally said that there were no unresolved formal complaints, and added that the diocese had formed a committee to update its safe church policies.

Now, there is a lot here for reporters to sort out, but I am not a reporter. Rather, I’m going to do something much more in the Draw Near With Faith wheelhouse: look at some canons and policies. Much of the dispute around the episcopal slate has to do with the diocese’s safe church policies. And so I think it’s worth asking: what are the official safe church policies of the Diocese of Montreal, and are these policies appropriate in their current form?

I want to be clear about why I’m doing this. I have spent my entire ordained ministry in this diocese. I love the congregation I serve and the people of the diocese more broadly. And so at this moment in which our diocese is reexamining our safe church policies, I want to do my part. As a pastor in Christ’s church, I know that I am responsible before God for the well-being of the Christians under my care. It matters deeply to me that the policies that we have in the diocese where I serve protect the sheep from wolves.

There’s a lot of nitty-gritty analysis of various canons and policy documents to follow, so I’ll give you a preview of my findings here: having taken a close look at the relevant documents, I am convinced that our diocesan policies are shockingly inadequate for dealing with clergy misconduct, especially of a serious but non-criminal nature. There are two primary issues I found. In short, our policies as they exist are incredibly difficult (in fact nearly impossible) to use, and concentrate almost all power in the hands of the bishop.

The are incredibly difficult to use in that:

• The sheer number of different policies and canons, their competing and contradictory jurisdictions, and the variety of different, mutually exclusive processes make it impossible to know how to bring a complaint forward.

• In some cases it is very difficult for a survivor to know to whom they are supposed to make a complaint, because the identities of people who fill various necessary positions in these disciplinary processes are not made publicly available.

• Some of the processes not only contradict other processes but are internally contradictory, meaning once again that one does not know how to file a complaint.

They concentrate power in hands of the bishop in that:

• In many of the pathways for resolving complaints, the bishop has the sole power to investigate a complaint, decide upon its merits, and impose consequences.

• Those pathways which deputize another individual or body to investigate a complaint and determine its accuracy result in secret reports that may not be shared and leave the bishop free to impose consequences or not as the bishop sees fit.

• Even in the case of ecclesiastical trials, where a verdict about a complaint is rendered not by the bishop but by a body of priests, the bishop alone gets to impose whatever consequences he or she thinks best.

• There are minimal possibilities for appealing episcopal disciplinary decisions beyond the bishop. Appeal processes, where they exist, generally just require the bishop to review the bishop’s earlier decision.

Now, what follows is an exhaustive — and somewhat exhausting — look through our various policy documents to explain how I reached this conclusion. I have done my best to be brief, but I fear that the very complexity of the polices in question means that this is a long piece. I should add that I’ve spent hours with these documents but still find some of them confusing and ambiguous. This in itself is, I think, quite telling. The basic takeaway, though, is quite clear: because our policies are very difficult to use and concentrate power in one person, the result is a system that is ripe for abuse. This abuse does not require ignoring the existing policies but is compatible with following them to the letter. Our diocese’s misconduct processes are not fit for use and are in desperate need of overhaul.¹

I. Clergy Discipline in the Anglican Church of Canada

Let’s begin with a look at the disciplinary system at the level of the Anglican Church of Canada as a whole. The key feature of this system is that the ACC vests the ability to set out specific structures and procedures around discipline at the diocesan level in order to maintain bishops’ authority within their dioceses. Indeed, this is a central aim of the national disciplinary canon (Canon 18), which begins by asserting that the canon seeks to preserve the “ecclesiastical jurisdiction, authority and power of discipline” of bishops within their dioceses. There are a few bare-bones requirements set out by the canon, such as the primary role of the bishop, the necessity of establishing a diocesan ecclesiastical court, and some stipulations for appeal provisions, but beyond this each individual diocese gets to develop its own system via diocesan synod.²

As advocates for abuse survivors in Canada have noted, this highly decentralized, diocese-by-diocese model has its drawbacks, in particular a lack of recourse or appeal beyond the diocesan level if a given bishop is not handling misconduct appropriately.³ In the Episcopal Church in the United States, concerns like these motivated reform movements for church discipline in the 1990s. In this period, as Arlie Coles has traced in her very helpful work on the history of Title IV (the Episcopal Church’s disciplinary canon), the Episcopal Church moved from a decentralized, diocese-based system like the current Canadian one to one that standardized it at the churchwide level. But this sort of disciplinary reform never happened in Canada. So, to understand the procedures in place for dealing with clergy misconduct in the diocese of Montreal, we need to focus less on national-level canons than the diocesan canons and policies.

II. The misconduct policy of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal

So, what is the misconduct policy of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal? We can find the answer in the diocesan canons and Safe Church policy documents. There are two different canons and four policy documents all currently in effect, which we will go through in chronological order.

IIa. The disciplinary canon

In the diocesan canons, each of the canons has a year or set of years written next to it, which seem to indicate the year that that canon was last made or modified. Canon 25 has the years 1864 and 1871 written next to it, suggesting that it was last updated in the mid-nineteenth century.

Small surprise, then, that the set of abuses listed in the canon has a decidedly nineteenth century feel. This is not entirely a bad thing; it could be helpful if more clergy faced the possibility of discipline “for heresy, or teaching or maintaining heretical doctrines; or for teaching or inculcating doctrines contrary to those of the Church.” That said, I expect there are few today who would be keen to see prosecutions for “circulating books containing unsound doctrines,” another offense listed in the current canon. More to the point, this means that more modern concerns about abuse of power and sexual misconduct are not reflected in the grounds for discipline except under the general heading of “immorality.” This seems to me to be a problem.

Under this canon, if an allegation is made against someone and it comes to the bishop’s attention, the bishop has an incredible degree of latitude for handling it as the bishop sees fit. Imagine, for example, a lay person is experiencing regular but non-criminal sexual harassment from a member of the clergy. If they take this complaint to the bishop under the disciplinary canon, the bishop can really do just about whatever they want in choosing whether to pursue an investigation or not; the lay person generally has to accept the bishop’s decision.

For example, in this hypothetical or a similar case, the bishop can summon the accused and, if the accused confesses, assign what penalty the bishop thinks appropriate. The bishop is also free to decide whether this accusation and subsequent confession is of sufficient seriousness to merit being recorded. If the accused does not confess, the bishop can decide whether or not the case merits further investigation. At the most serious level, the bishop can choose to create a commission of five priests who investigate the issue. This commission produces a report which the bishop gets to decide how, if at all, to use.

The bishop may, in response to such a report, convene the diocesan court to try the case in an ecclesiastical trial. The bishop’s decision alone is sufficient to convene this court. But if the bishop will not act, it is possible – though difficult – to force a trial to be held. You need five clergy of the diocese or ten members of the parish where the offense is alleged to have been committed to make a signed charge, at which point the bishop is obligated to hold a trial. Needless to say, this is a high bar.

This court is made up of fifteen priests, elected at the Diocesan Synod. In court testimony proceedings the testimony of two witnesses as evidence is required to substantiate a charge. This seems to mean that in the example above of a sexually harassing cleric, if the sexual harassment happened while you and the cleric were alone, your testimony would not be admissible in an ecclesiastical trial under this canon — because you would only be one witness. In such a trial, a majority vote is required to convict. The proceedings of this court are generally private unless the accused requests that they be public. Upon a conviction, however, the bishop alone decides what sort of sentences is appropriate; there is no canonical provision for the court to even make recommendations in this regard.

Now, there are some possibilities for appealing episcopal disciplinary decisions and court judgments. If you think that you have been unjustly disciplined by the bishop in a process that did not involve an ecclesiastical court trial, you can (under the national Canon 18) request a trial by the diocesan court. Under the same canon, if the Executive Council (Standing Committee-equivalent for my US readers) thinks that the bishop decided wrongly about an ecclesiastical offense or its punishment, it can also refer the matter to the diocesan ecclesiastical court. It is also, according to national Canon 18, possible to appeal decisions made by ecclesiastical courts (but apparently only decisions made by ecclesiastical courts) at a provincial court of appeals. For Montreal, this is the Ecclesiastical Province of Canada, and the appeals stipulations fall under provincial Canon 5. Note that this is the only possibility in the entire misconduct structure for a complaint to move beyond the diocesan level.

So, to sum up, Canon 25 uses a nineteenth-century understanding of clergy misconduct. It vests most disciplinary power in the bishop, who has broad latitude in deciding whether and how to record and investigate allegations, whether to try the matter formally before the diocesan court, and what sort of discipline to impose. The only alternative is going around the bishop to initiate ecclesiastical court proceedings. But to do so is not easy, and this court has a higher standard for admissible evidence than in the Canadian criminal justice system and is made up entirely of clergy. This all-clergy make-up might raise worries about court deference towards fellow members of the clerical guild. And even here the actual imposition of discipline is entirely up to the bishop. There are some limited possibilities for appealing the bishop’s decision or the judgment of a diocesan court.

IIb. The misconduct canon

As I mentioned above, the disciplinary canon is not the only canon that deals with misconduct. There is also the 2003 Canon 34, entitled “Misconduct.” This canon describes its purpose as “to define and reaffirm the policy of the Diocese on misconduct and to discourage and prevent misconduct by creating a complaint resolution procedure (CRP) within the Diocese…” It does not replace the disciplinary canon, which remains in force. Rather, the canon describes itself as a way of resolving conflict “alternative to civil recourses.” There is a great deal of overlap between Canon 34 and the disciplinary canon in the sorts of offenses covered. Basically, those disciplinary offenses that fall under the broad category of workplace misconduct could also be subject to a Canon 34 complaint. Specifically, the allegations this canon deals with are either ones of either vexatious behaviour (generally abusive, insulting, threatening, or discriminatory behaviour) or sexual or financial misconduct (either criminal or non-criminal).

For this process, anyone who wishes to complain of misconduct must make their complaint in writing to a member of the Committee of Inquiry (a body of three clergy and three lay members, appointed directly by the bishop). The committee then investigates. If the committee decides that what is at issue is vexatious behaviour and the complaint is well-founded, they make recommendations to the bishop and to the accused’s superior. The bishop and the accused’s superior have “absolute discretion,” according to the canon, in using these recommendations (or not), and the recommendations must be kept confidential. This report cannot then be used in disciplinary proceedings.

If the complaint relates to financial or sexual misconduct, the system is a bit more complicated but the basic outcome is the same. There are more steps, including determining whether the accusation is criminal and, if so, involving the police. According to the canonical process, this sort of misconduct calls for mediation and then, if mediation fails, binding arbitration. Binding, that is, for the complainant. They cannot appeal the report or recommendations produced via the arbitration process. However, it is not binding at all on the bishop. Once again, a confidential report is produced which is sent to the complainant, the accused, the bishop, and the accused’s superior. It must be kept entirely confidential. The bishop and/or the accused’s superior may accept these recommendations, but are in no way obligated to do so. This should sound familiar; it is essentially a more elaborate version of the process dealing with complaints of vexatious behaviour.

Evaluating Canon 34

Here we have what seems to be a much more modern way of handling misconduct. The committee that receives complaints has balanced lay and clergy representation, and can begin this process upon receiving an individual complaint rather than requiring (like an ecclesiastical court) either the bishop, five priests, or ten laity to endorse a disciplinary charge. Furthermore, either the Committee of Inquiry (in the case of vexatious behaviour) or an arbitration panel (in the case of financial or sexual misconduct) gets to make a judgement as to the well-foundedness of the allegations and to make recommendations for outcomes; this isn’t just up to the bishop.

But I fear that this system has serious problems too. First of all, the way to kick this process off is by a written complaint to a member of the Committee of Inquiry, but it’s not clear to me who is on this body, or if it even exists on a permanent basis. I have looked through the last few Diocesan Synod circulars to see if there was ever a reference to it with no avail. A search on the diocesan website comes up with nothing. There is, as far as I can tell, no way for a complainant to follow the canons as written to initiate a Canon 34 process by writing to a Committee member.

Perhaps this Committee is instead appointed as needed by the bishop upon receiving notice that someone wishes to use it for dispute resolution. Canon 34 just says that this committee is “appointed from time to time by the Bishop,” without saying whether it is a permanent body or not. If this is the case, a would-be complainant would need to somehow know that contacting the bishop is a necessary first step for starting the Canon 34 process, despite the fact that this is nowhere stipulated. Moreover, this also makes it clear that the separation between the committee handling the process and the bishop is less than it appears: the Committee of Inquiry is appointed directly and solely by the bishop (for what it’s worth, the panel that performs binding arbitration is not).

Further, the outcome of an investigation or arbitration must be kept confidential and its recommendations are totally nonbinding. The bishop or the immediate superior of the accused may use the report’s recommendations to require adjustments to the accused’s behavior, and the bishop may even use the report stemming from arbitration as part of a disciplinary proceeding under Canon 25. But they are not required to do so. They are not even required to tell the complainant whether or not they have done so. Indeed, they could just as well choose to ignore the report, and the complainant would seem to have no recourse.

And so, for another concrete example, let’s say you’re being repeatedly bullied by a clergyperson. This would qualify as vexatious behaviour under Canon 34. If you are even able to figure out how to lodge a complaint with the Committee of Inquiry, then they will make an investigation and draw up a report. You’ll be able to see it, but you won’t be able to talk about what’s in it. The report and any recommendations the Committee makes will sent to the bishop and that cleric’s superior. These individuals can, if they want, use the report and its recommendations to try to get your bully to change his or her behaviour. But they aren’t obligated to do so. Even if the Committee reports that the cleric’s behaviour is a problem, if the bishop thinks it’s no big deal and you just have too thin of a skin, then there is nothing stopping the bishop from letting the situation continue. Then you have to decide whether you want to continue to put up with it or find a new church.

IIc. The safe church policies

So much for the canons. But there are also four Safe Church policy guides which were all last revised in February 2018. Given that the Safe Church link on the diocesan website takes you to them rather than laying out the Canon 25 or Canon 34 procedures, we can assume they are the most frequently used. These deal with non-doctrinal and non-financial offenses that are interpersonal in nature, that is, the sorts of things that we generally talk about as clergy abuse. One of these policy guides deals with non-sexual clergy misconduct; the other three deal with sexual misconduct. I’ll begin with the one dealing with non-sexual misconduct before turning to the others.

The place to go to find out how to make a complaint about non-sexual misconduct is the Safe Church Harassment Policy. One might think that a policy named “harassment policy” would deal with sexual harassment but in fact, per this policy statement, sexual harassment is to be dealt with using the Canon 34 process. The definition for harassment given here comes from various Quebec and federal statutes, plus what the policy calls “personal harassment,” that is, disrespectful or demeaning behavior that would not fall under these statutes. Given that the Anglican Journal article about the misconduct proceeding against an episcopal slate member calls it a harassment claim and the bishop refers to it as stemming from a workplace dispute, I think we can safely say that it was a complaint made under this policy.

So how does this policy work? The key figure here is an individual called the Safe Church Coordinator, a position which the policy says should exist at both the level of the individual parish and the diocese as a whole. This Coordinator is to work with the complainant in determining how to respond to an incident of misconduct that falls under this policy. The policy provides four possible responses to an instance of harassment. First, confronting the harasser directly, which the policy admits might not always be possible. Second, an informal procedure, in which a person asks for help from the local Safe Church Coordinator to deal with a matter informally; in this case, the bishop will typically be informed. Third, a mediation procedure, which seems to function like mediation under Canon 34. Finally, a formal complaint made in writing to the Safe Church Coordinator, using a form given as an appendix to this policy.

If such a formal complaint is filed, the Safe Church Coordinator must then write up a investigatory report which is then sent to the bishop. The bishop gets to decide what to do with it, deciding whether or not the accused is guilty and what consequences (if any) there should be. The decision must be communicated in writing to the complainant, the accused, and the safe church coordinator. Either the complainant or the accused may choose to appeal the bishop’s decision — but this appeal merely goes back to the bishop, who looks over the evidence and decides the matter again. As in the Canon 34 process, this process strongly emphasizes the importance of confidentiality for all parties involved, including the complainant.

What about Safe Church policies for sexual misconduct?

The first of the three policy documents that addresses sexual misconduct is the Safe Church Policies and Guidelines. Despite the name, this is not a general set of procedures for handling complaints in general, but rather a procedure for responding to allegations of sexual abuse or abuse against children. The definition of sexual abuse it uses is “sexual harassment, sexual exploitation, sexual misconduct or sexual assault.” You might recall that the procedure for non-sexual misconduct specifically says that sexual harassment is to be dealt with under Canon 34, but this policy guide instead says that it provides the proper procedure for dealing with sexual harassment.

This guide says that the proper way to make complaints of sexual abuse against a bishop is to make a complaint to a senior bishop, metropolitan, or primate. To make a complaint of sexual abuse against a deacon or priest, the complaint must be brought to the diocesan bishop.⁴ If the complaints are criminal in nature, the police must be immediately involved. For noncriminal complaints of adult sexual misconduct, the bishop (aided by an advisory committee of the bishop’s selection, if the bishop so chooses), has the power to investigate and decide whether or not the accused is guilty. For a bishop to find an accused person guilty, the allegation must be established “beyond a reasonable doubt.” This is, of course, a familiar standard from criminal legal proceedings – but it is worth noting that unlike a criminal court, the bishop has no power of subpoena or finding people in contempt.⁵ If the bishop determines that the accused is guilty according to this standard, the bishop can issue a number of responses from a verbal caution to suspension, or refer the matter to the diocesan court. Appeal is possible; the bishop may (but is not required to) convene an appeals review committee to consider the matter or may simply reconsider the matter him/herself. Even if such a committee is constituted, it can only issue recommendations; it is the bishop who ultimately decides.

The second document dealing with sexual misconduct is the Safe Church Sexual Misconduct Policy. This policy lists as its ambit complaints of sexual misconduct, which per this policy includes complaints of sexual assault and sexual harassment. However, the Safe Church Policies document, as we have seen, declares that sexual abuse, meaning sexual misconduct, sexual exploitation, sexual harassment, and sexual assault, are under its purview. And the Safe Church Harassment Policy says that sexual harassment is to be dealt with using the Canon 34 process. It is not clear to me what is supposed to fall under this policy versus the others.

As for the procedure it stipulates, the informal process is similar to the informal one for non-sexual harassment, but rather than the Safe Church Coordinator, what this policy calls the “First Line Designate” is to be involved. For a priest, deacon, or layperson, this is the diocesan executive officer.⁶ For a complaint against the executive officer, this is the bishop. There is no possibility for a complaint against the bishop under this policy. For a formal complaint, the First Line Designate must be contacted in writing and the Diocesan Archivist copied. Of course, the First Line Designate is also supposed to be contacted for an informal complaint and such an informal complaint could also be made in writing. It is not clear what exactly differentiates a formal from an informal complaint, except perhaps the copying of the Archivist. At any rate, if a formal complaint is made, the procedure for investigation found in Canon 34 is followed — which, as you’ll recall, results in the case of non-criminal complaints with the production of a confidential report. Discipline can then be imposed at the bishop’s discretion under Canon 18 (the misconduct canon).

Finally, the Safe Church Sexual Abuse Policy. Once again we have the same jurisdictional problem as earlier: the Safe Church Policies document discussed above also purports to deal with sexual abuse. It’s not clear which policy should be followed in the case of an allegation. This policy requires that police be involved if accusations are made of abuse of a minor. For allegations made concerning adults, the Canon 34 process is followed, but the accused must be placed on leave with pay. This is the only policy that requires that an accused cleric be placed on leave.

Evaluating the Safe Church Policies

These policies, on first reading, seem up to date indeed. They talk about power imbalances and nondiscrimination, They use contemporary language for misconduct and its consequences. All this suggests some awareness of the transformation in how both religious and secular settings have handled misconduct claims in the last decades. But when you drill down to how they actually work, you find some real issues.

First of all, it is often unclear which (very different) policy is to be followed in a given situation or how the policies relate to the canons. In fact, the policies directly contradict each other on this question. There are three separate policies appointed to deal with the same broad categories of sexual misconduct, each of which follows a different process. And of course, the Harassment Policy specifically says that sexual harassment is to be handled via Canon 34 rather than any of these three (despite these policies’ statements to the contrary). In a similar vein, the ‘vexatious behaviour’ category for Canon 34 and the Safe Church Harassment Policy seem to deal with the same forms of misconduct but with different procedures. I have no idea what procedure is to be followed in a given case, or who gets to decide – despite the very different consequences of one pathway being used rather than another!

Let’s return to that example of the sexually harassing cleric from earlier. If you were being sexually harassed and tried to handle this offense using these Safe Church policies rather than (as in the earlier example) the disciplinary canon, I genuinely don’t know how you would decide which process to use. Imagine how frustrating it would be to have suffered this misconduct, made the decision to report it, done the work of tracking down the diocese’s safe church resources…only to find that there are no less than three different and mutually exclusive options for dealing with sexual harassment given.⁷ Imagine how much worse it would feel if you chose one and started the reporting process, only to be told later that you had chosen wrongly and needed to begin again.

There are not only contradictions between policies, but also within a single policy statement. The Harassment Policy guidelines state that it is recommended (but apparently not required) that complaints under this policy be brought within a calendar year of the incident in question (thus leaving open the possibility of older complaints being brought) whereas the complaint form attached to these guidelines requires that charges be brought within one year. This is a significant difference, one with real consequences for the survivors of misconduct, and I have no way of knowing which is the “official” position.

The policy document, which lists 1 year as the recommended — but not necessarily strictly required — deadline for filing a formal complaint.

The complaint form itself, which unambiguously requires that a complaint be made within a year of the alleged misconduct.

Second, missing positions or unclear instructions make initiating formal complaints very difficult in some cases, just as with the case of the mysterious “Committee of Inquiry” making it difficult to actually initiate a Canon 34 process,. For the Harassment Policy, the Safe Church Coordinator is the key figure. In fact, the only way to file a formal complaint under the Harassment Policy is via the Safe Church Coordinator at either the parish or the diocesan level. Unfortunately, the diocese makes it very difficult to find out who the safe church coordinator is.

There are supposed to be safe church coordinators at the parish level, who the Harassment Policy states can also be church wardens. At least one parish in the diocese lists the parish safe church coordinator on its website, but most do not. It is unclear to me whether church wardens fill this role by default.

What about at the diocesan level? A search on the diocesan website turns up nothing.

Now, there is in fact a diocesan safe church coordinator, who is also the bishop’s personal assistant. The only place that I was able to find this published on the diocesan website is buried in, of all places, a prayer rota. If memory serves, this is also mentioned during clergy Safe Church training. But it is unclear to me how an average would-be lay complainant could be expected to know this. That is, I do not know how in practice a formal complaint under the Harassment Policy can be filed by someone who is not also an expert on diocesan procedures.

Similarly, for the Sexual Misconduct Policy, I assume that the “Executive Officer” who one is supposed to contact to file either an informal or formal complaint is the Executive Archdeacon – but I’m not 100% sure. And if you search the diocesan website with this title in order to find out who to make a complaint to, all you would find out is that the bishop’s husband once held the Executive Officer position. I also note that the difference between a formal and informal complaint under this policy is not entirely clear, and seems to rely on the complaint being sent to the Diocesan Archivist – but I don’t know who has to do this. While not quite as forbidding as the Harassment Policy, filing charges under this policy is not a simple matter either.

Third, the Safe Church policies continue to vest an extraordinary amount of power in the bishop alone. For noncriminal complaints, be they of sexual misconduct or non-sexual harassment, there are three options. The bishop may directly get to make a judgment on the guilt of the accused and any consequences. The matter might go to the Canon 34 process for investigation and the bishop then decides canonical consequences under Canon 18. Or, the full Canon 34 process might be followed, which results in enforced silence and a nonbinding report which the bishop and the accused’s superior gets to decide how to use. There is no opportunity for appeal beyond the bishop.

III. Summing up: evaluating the Diocese of Montreal’s misconduct policies

So, what should we make of all this? In short, I respectfully dispute the bishop’s assertion that there is nothing wrong with the diocese’s policies for dealing with clergy misconduct. Instead, I think our current policies have very serious errors which impede their use. I think this is true primarily in two ways. First, the policies are incredibly difficult to use because there are so many of them, they sometimes contradict each other or even themselves internally, and various key steps are inaccessible to the average complainant. Second, almost all of the power to determine guilt and consequences rests with one person only, the bishop.

The diocesan misconduct policies are incredibly difficult to use…

When I consider the proliferation of contradictory policies with hard-to-find complaint recipients, the word Kafkaesque comes to mind. Think again of what it would be like to be a survivor of clergy misconduct who decides to take the already difficult step to come forward to seek justice, and just how difficult it would be to navigate the diocese’s policies. Presumably you would find your way first to the Safe Church policies page on the diocesan website. But once there, if you are the victim of non-sexual misconduct, assuming you even find your way to the proper page (the Harassment Policy), how are you supposed to find out who the Safe Church Coordinator is to file a formal complaint? And if the complaint is of sexual misconduct, how do you decide which of the three processes to use? It would be easier by far to find a new church than make your way through this labyrinth, frankly.

Now, I would hope that an email to the bishop’s office asking how to proceed would quickly result in a helpful and complete response. But even with the best intentions in the world, emails can slip through the cracks. And that’s assuming an email gets sent in the first place. Survivors of clergy misconduct might feel nervous about reaching out to senior clerics for help, especially if they worry that the person they are making a complaint about is popular in the diocese. Never mind the possibility that someone might wish to make a complaint against a bishop or member of diocesan staff! And, of course, all this is assuming a genuine desire to help on the part of all parties involved. If, hypothetically, someone wanted to make redress difficult, it would essentially always be possible to say that a complainant had used the wrong process and that their complaint was thus invalid.

Indeed, there is some public testimony that suggests that my worry that these complicated policies make seeking justice difficult isn’t just a hypothetical one. A former priest of the diocese who has spoken publicly about some of his issues navigating the diocese’s misconduct processes has said that whenever he tried to make a complaint, he was always told that he went about it the wrong way – that the wrong procedure was used, the wrong policy was followed, the complaint was made to the wrong person or in the wrong form. This is, alas, the entirely predictable fruit of a set of contradictory and overlapping policies — and this is why it is so vital that processes be made as simple, clear, and transparent as possible.

…and vest almost all power in the bishop alone.

Then, as to the second issue: it’s worth stepping back a little and looking at all who makes decisions in all the various pathways for redress this system offers. When we do so, the concentration of power in the person of the bishop becomes very clear.

Let me explain. If you are the victim of non-criminal but serious clergy misconduct and want formal redress, you have the following options. You can:

1. Make a complaint of sexual abuse under the auspices of the general Safe Church policy, in which case the bishop decides on the guilt of the accused and any consequences.

2. Make a complaint of (non-sexual) harassment by means of the Safe Church Harassment policy, in which case the bishop once again decides on the guilt of the accused and any consequences.

3. Make a complaint of sexual misconduct via the Safe Church Sexual Misconduct policy, in which case the Canon 34 process is used for an investigation, producing a secret report. The bishop then decides the consequences, such as whether to impose discipline according to Canon 18. You cannot discuss the report.

4. Make a complaint of sexual misconduct via the Safe Church Sexual Abuse policy, in which case the full Canon 34 process is used, which produces at most a confidential report with non-binding recommendations that the bishop and the accused’s superior have complete freedom to adopt or reject.

5. Make a complaint of vexatious behaviour or non-criminal financial or sexual misconduct using the Canon 34 process. The best outcome of this process is (to repeat myself) a secret report with recommendations that the bishop and the accused’s superior decide how or whether to use.

6. Go to the bishop and make an allegation under Canon 25, the disciplinary canon. If the bishop does not choose to take up the allegation or addresses it in a way you find inappropriate, you can try to convince the Executive Council of the diocese to refer it to the diocesan court, but if they demur you have no real redress.

7. Get a total of either 5 clergy or 10 laity to formally endorse your accusation and convene a Diocesan Court under Canon 25, at which point fifteen priests will judge the guilt or innocence of their fellow-cleric. Depending on how strictly the court construes the requirement for two witnesses, it may be impossible to convict the offending cleric anyway if the offense was something that happened when the two of you were alone. This proceeding is official but private. Upon a conviction, the disciplinary consequences are entirely the prerogative of the bishop.

At the risk of stating the obvious, what this means is that in three of the seven pathways I identify for responding to clergy misconduct (1, 2, 6), the bishop alone gets to decide on both the merits of the allegation and any consequences to follow for the accused. An additional three (3, 4, 5) use the Canon 34 process in whole or in part. In this case, a body other than the bishop determines the merits of the allegation and makes recommendations, but does so secretly. The implementation of these recommendations is entirely up to the bishop (and, if relevant, the accused’s superior). There is only one option, the ecclesiastical court (7), in which an official, non-confidential decision about the accuracy of an allegation is made by a party other than the bishop and appeal beyond the diocesan level is possible – and even here the consequences following a conviction are once again chosen entirely by the bishop.⁸ If the bishop decides that a slap on the wrist or a verbal reprimand is sufficient for a convicted cleric, there is nothing stopping a serial bully or harasser from continuing in ministry indefinitely.

This policy might work fine enough if we could guarantee that every person in a supervisory position in the diocese and especially every bishop were incredibly holy, well-trained in trauma-informed care, in possession of inerrant judgment, and utterly lacking in even unconscious bias and favouritism. What if instead, hypothetically, one finds that a bishop (and, if relevant, a supervisor) wishes to protect an errant cleric from accountability or bears a grudge against a complainant? Then it seems to me the very best option that survivors have in the Diocese of Montreal is using an antiquated nineteenth-century canon to convene a clergy-only ecclesiastical court in which their evidence might not even be admissible because two witnesses are needed for a piece of evidence to be used.

I am no expert on misconduct best practices. But I know enough to be quite sure that a good misconduct policy, like a good Christian anthropology, recognizes that people aren’t actually as perfect as the Montreal policies require. There is a reason that in the ecclesiastical and secular worlds alike, we have moved away from giving single individuals so much power to investigate, decide on guilt, and exercise discipline. There are alternative models available. The Episcopal Church’s Title IV process, for example, is hardly perfect, but it is a lot better than this (see footnote 8 for some comparisons). Closer to home, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Montreal has worked very hard to change their own response to clergy misconduct, as the sex abuse scandal demonstrated the danger of vesting so much power in bishops. I can’t really assess their degree of success, but I have heard promising things and I expect we could learn from them.

It is my earnest hope that the recently-stated commitment to look at our diocesan safe church policies will bear real fruit. I hope that we will emerge with procedures that do not demand unrealistic levels of virtue to function well, that distribute power appropriately, that provide clear and simple pathways for seeking justice, and that protect and care for survivors while taking seriously the rights of the accused. I hope the people on the committee charged with this review process avail themselves of expert opinions to help forge this more robust system. And, frankly, I hope that the Anglican Church of Canada as a whole undertakes canonical reform to create a uniform and transparent churchwide process rather than (as at present) allowing dioceses so much freedom to set up whatever processes they like — even processes so unusable and bishop-centered as the Diocese of Montreal’s. We clergy and lay leaders have promised to protect the people under our care. Keeping this promise requires no less. Because right now, the sheep are not being protected from the wolves in the church in which I serve.

With thanks to Arlie Coles for the diagrams illustrating the various processes.

1. If you want to just skip down to my conclusions, feel free to scroll to section III, “Summing up: evaluating the Diocese of Montreal’s misconduct policies.”

2. For accusations against bishops, essentially the same principle applies: it is up to the metropolitan of a province to order church discipline in accordance with the procedures established by the metropolitan synod.

3. In an article in Religion News Service, the Rev. Martha Tatarnic recently warned that this approach means that there is no real recourse when bishops handle abuse poorly. Indeed, this lack of recourse has been confirmed at the highest levels of the church: the Most Rev. Anne Germond, the current acting primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, responded to a letter from an Anglican describing horrific misconduct by various clergy and ensuing cover-ups by saying that as primate she simply cannot become involved in diocesan-level misconduct allegations. Rather, Germond says, such allegations have to be adjudicated at the diocesan level. Of course, this leaves aside the question of whether the archbishop could use her moral if not canonical authority to spur attention to misconduct or call for canonical reform. Instead, the archbishop could not even bring herself to express sorrow for the stories recounted

4. There is also a provision here for proceedings against lay staff or volunteers, which for the sake of time I will not address at length. It essentially gives the incumbent the power in judging in cases against lay people that the bishop has in determining guilt and consequences for complaints against clergy.

5. It is for this reason that the standard for church discipline in the Episcopal Church is no longer “beyond a reasonable doubt” but instead “clear and convincing,” which it defines as “proof sufficient to convince ordinarily prudent people that there is a high probability that what is claimed actually happened. More than a preponderance of the evidence is required but not proof beyond a reasonable doubt” (IV.2).

6. This is presumably the Executive Archdeacon, but it isn’t entirely clear.

7. That is, the procedure laid out in the Safe Church Policies, the procedure laid out in the Safe Church Sexual Misconduct Policy, and the recourse to Canon 34 demanded by the Safe Church Sexual Harassment Policy.

8. A full comparison of the Montreal policy to that of other Anglican churches like the Episcopal Church is beyond the scope of this piece. But consider just a few points of comparison with the Episcopal Church’s Title IV process:

1. In the Title IV process, the bishop is never the sole person investigating or pronouncing judgement upon a formal allegation. This is, I think, particularly important.

2. As far as determining consequences, in the Title IV process, Conference or Hearing Panels can issue Orders which stipulate disciplinary consequences for the accused. Bishops may diminish the seriousness of these consequences, but if they do so must indicate this in writing.

3. Bishops do have fairly broad freedom to enter into what are called Accords with those subject to disciplinary complaints, resolving the disciplinary process with an agreement between the bishop and the accused (some recent accords have been quite controversial). However, the bishop is required to consult with the injured parties as well as other people involved in the disciplinary process before doing so.

My point is not that the Episcopal Church’s disciplinary process is perfect. I don’t think it is, and as I note, the latitude given bishops to enter into accords has been queried. But the difference in the amount of power given to bishops is striking indeed.