NEWS STORY: Canada’s Anglican primate seeking way to save church in wake of lawsuits

c. 1999 Religion News Service VANCOUVER, British Columbia _ Canadian Primate Michael Peers will devote a four-month sabbatical to studying how to save his 800,000-member Anglican church and restructure it in light of a flood of financially devastating lawsuits from native Indians who attended church-run residential schools. The Anglican church leader is also reassuring worried […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

VANCOUVER, British Columbia _ Canadian Primate Michael Peers will devote a four-month sabbatical to studying how to save his 800,000-member Anglican church and restructure it in light of a flood of financially devastating lawsuits from native Indians who attended church-run residential schools.

The Anglican church leader is also reassuring worried parishioners across the country that money dropped into collection plates on Sundays won’t go to settle lawsuits.


The national church _ which has revealed it will go $1 million in debt this year because of the residential school lawsuits _ is telling parishioners that lawsuit costs for the time being will be covered through a special $1.9 million mission reserve fund.

The church’s first goal, Peers said in a Nov. 24 statement, is to compensate victims and continue “healing and reconciliation” with Canada’s native Indians, many of whom attended the country’s now-defunct church-run schools.

But the second goal, he added, is to make sure the national church body is not completely destroyed and can be restructured to continue to serve members, build bridges with other faiths, push for other justice causes and help the disenfranchised. The church has only $9 million worth of buildings and other assets to cover the abuse lawsuits.

A British of Columbia Supreme Court judge recently found the Anglican church liable for sex abuse at St. George’s residential school in Lytton, B.C. That decision has forced Peers, who was going to take a four-month sabbatical to explore theology, to change the focus of his leave. He now will wrestle with how the Anglican church can remake itself in light of “the absolutely inevitable prospect of major change in the church.”

In Vancouver, Bishop Michael Ingham said his parishioners want abused natives to be compensated, but they also want to make sure money church members donate to alleviate poverty in the Third World or in downtown Vancouver doesn’t get diverted to settle lawsuits.

“Church members want to make sure the money they put on the collection plate goes to the purpose for which they gave it,” Ingham said.

“There’s a question about supporting law firms, about the huge fees law firms eat up.”


The Anglican Church of Canada, the country’s third-largest denomination, has made moves on a number of fronts after being rocked by the precedent-setting decision in September by Supreme Court Judge Janice Dillon. She ruled the national Anglican church and the Cariboo diocese are 60 per cent responsible for sex abuse that St. George’s dormitory supervisor Derek Clarke inflicted in the 1960s on Floyd Mowatt.

The approximately $200,000 damage award to Mowatt was the first in Canada made by a judge to a former student of a church-run residential school, although a small number of other native lawsuits have been settled out of court.

The daunting prospect for Canada’s major Christian institutions is that more than 200 similar native Indian lawsuits remain outstanding against the Anglican church, as well as another 1,600 against the United Church of Canada and the Roman Catholic Church, which also ran residential schools up until the 1970s.

Archbishop David Crawley of British Columbia has said his Cariboo diocese may eventually have to declare bankruptcy, or at least sell many of its church buildings, to settle scores of native lawsuits related to the abuse by Clarke while he worked at St. Georges. Clarke was not a priest.

The Anglican church’s national Web site has officially announced the church will appeal Dillon’s decision the church is 60 per cent responsible for the abuse at St. George’s, and the federal government, which set up and financed residential schools, is only 40 per cent responsible.

The Anglican church has already paid Mowatt its portion of the damage award and believes he has the right to it.


But if the Anglican church wins its appeal and the federal government has to pay a greater share, then the church expects to be reimbursed by Ottawa. Vancouver lawyer George Cadman is representing the church.

An editorial in the December edition of The Anglican Journal, the church’s independent national newspaper, stated that Judge Dillon made several mistakes in her landmark decision, including her conclusion that the national Anglican church, and not just the local Cariboo diocese, was responsible for the abuse.

The editorial, at the same time, blamed church officials for “fumbling” the case.

Meanwhile, a native Indian Anglican woman who has just been ordained a deacon will move this week to Lytton to serve the part-native, part-Caucasian parish in which St. George’s residential school once operated.

The Rev. Catherine Morrison, a 28-year-old Cree native, and the youngest ordained aboriginal woman in North America, has been working on aboriginal justice issues for the national church, Peers said.

“I hope her appointment will help bring healing,” Peers said. “She has the kind of background that I pray will stand her in good stead in Lytton.”

DEA END TODD

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