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Phoenix Project Prairie Trip 2020 Report
Volume 34 Issue 7, 8 & 9 | Posted: October 6, 2020
I was able to get away Monday July 20 staying overnight in a Kamloops motel. Normally I tend to stay with friends on these regular Prairie sojourns but with Covid 19 protocols in place I thought better of it. Besides I was overdue to make this trip as I had to call it off the previous October when I hit a deer at Sicamous, just beyond Salmon Arm and had to turn back and cancel the whole expedition due to vehicle damages.
I was able to get away Monday July 20 staying overnight in a Kamloops motel. Normally I tend to stay with friends on these regular Prairie sojourns but with Covid 19 protocols in place I thought better of it. Besides I was overdue to make this trip as I had to call it off the previous October when I hit a deer at Sicamous, just beyond Salmon Arm and had to turn back and cancel the whole expedition due to vehicle damages.
Edmonton was the next overnight stop where I was able to stay in Joe Gubbel’s vacated house as he was in Victoria visiting family. I had a brief meeting consisting of a two-hour discussion with Doug Roche. Gerry Archibald who I was keen to see, lives in the same building. Unfortunately he was in Winnipeg when I was in Edmonton, and in Edmonton when I was in Winnipeg. I had hoped to see him as he has been a great boon to the paper, both writing a regular well-researched column and encouraging very successfully new subscribers and supporters over the last few years.
Interestingly Doug and I spent the whole two hours discussing our variations on what should be considered the most significant contributions of Bishop Remi De Roo during his 37 years as bishop in Victoria. Doug feels it is his total commitment to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) where the bishop served at all four sessions. It was through this collective ongoing experience that Doug and the bishop became fast friends and collaborators, writing three books together in the process.
My own research has lead me down a different track, a more political angle. It is the bishop’s prophetic Catholicism that I stress. My biography of him maintains the thesis that he was an unwitting architect of the current ongoing crisis which the Catholic Church has been trying to resolve since 1978, rooted even earlier in the controversial birth control encyclical of 1968, Humanae Vitae.
We went back and forth, clarifying our positions. Mine is laid out in my biography of the bishop titled In the Avant Garde, The Prophetic Catholicism of Remi De Roo, the title of which just about gives away the whole plot line.
Doug has a copy of the book, which I located on his jam-packed shelves of an impressive personal library. My thesis tends to be convoluted and even over elaborated, so I left him to sort it out himself midst his busy current writing schedule, given the isolation of the pandemic. Doug was ninety-one on his last birthday and is pumping out new volumes at an impressive rate.
SASKATCHEWAN
From Edmonton I wanted to get to Saskatoon where my daughter Martha hosted me for five nights and I enjoyed the company of her children Poppy and Raine in their new home near St. Ann’s parish in Lawson Heights. She introduced me to her friend Jerome Chomos, a fellow wine connoisseur and a St. Ann’s parishioner. Later on the trip I incidentally met the pastor at The House of Prayer, Fort Qu’Appelle.
In terms of Phoenix Project work, I was able to meet with the extraordinary Father Lawrence Demong, OSB of St. Peter’s Abbey where the Prairie Messenger was housed for more than a hundred years before being closed three years ago.
This announcement precipitated the Phoenix Project for ICN as we wish to explore the possibilities of promoting prophetic Catholicism with its progressive spiritual, theological and political agenda.
After three years, the dust is settling from the shock of that development and I wanted to focus on Saskatchewan and Manitoba, the region the paper primarily served. A few years before the Prairie Messenger closing, The Western Catholic Reporter in Alberta met the same fate. That had been the progressive Catholic weekly started by Doug Roche shortly after Vatican II (1962-65).
After the Council, there had been a great outpouring of Catholic communications in Canada including the social justice newspaper out of Toronto Catholic New Times, begun in the mid 1970s. It folded after a twenty five year run, an early acknowledgement of the rightward turn of the church under Pope John Paul II. (1978-2005).
The Prairie Messenger was seen as more of a permanent fixture, so when it closed, the significance seemed to go even deeper than the first two papers. I had served for one year as the editor of the PM in 1981-2 and had been part of the discussion when the New Times was initiated in 1975.
My own reaction to the announcement of the PM may have been rooted in the opportunism nascent in my years of community development philosophy, where every crisis reveals a further opportunity.
Even though ICN, started in 1986, was clearly the runt of the litter of progressive newspapers in Canada, I sensed this was a call to action rather than resignation to the fates. Thus the Phoenix Project which has resulted in a development strategy and an optimistic attitude toward this ongoing crisis; and the wider crisis alluded to in the Doug Roche discussion.
SASKATOON
I met with Lawrence Demong in 2018 following the closure of the Prairie Messenger. We have been on the same page about the need for a serious exploration of what is possible going forward. He is a key resource person in terms of any St. Thomas More College future dialogue event.
We met at a Catholic retirement complex in the city and had a full conversation sitting outside in the Saskatchewan sunshine. He shared Saskatoon berries which were just in season. He does weekend pastoral duties at three rural parishes and was just heading back to Muenster through the city.
I was also very keen to meet with professor Chris Hrynko of St. Thomas More College in Saskatoon but we had to hold our discussion over the phone. A colleague of his was being tested for the virus, so he had been advised to self-isolate until the results were determined.
Chris identified half a dozen faculty at the college who have expressed interest in this ongoing exploration so the hope is that once the pandemic precautions lighten up, a gathering at the college on the topic of the future of socially progressive Catholic communications can be held perhaps in 2021.
This possibility holds promise. I first met Chris Hrynko through my sister Christine when she drew to my attention his biography project of the late Father Bob Ogle MP for Saskatoon East between 1979 and '84. We met in Vancouver to do an interview at a Catholic Historical Society meeting in 2017. Chris is a dynamic younger professor, Jesuit educated, with a young family of sons. His Father Bob Ogle project told me he is a scholar of progressive Catholic social action.
I found our telephone conversation very significant in terms of a further fermentation of thought on the future of progressive Catholic communication in the region, and nationally. Obviously followup is the key. But knowing Father Bob, I feel I can sense him smiling enigmatically at the prospect.
After our year at the Prairie Messenger in Muenster, we relocated as a family nearby to Saskatoon where the three daughters were raised. Slowly they have migrated to other cities on the Prairies. My second eldest daughter Hannah was in Saskatoon at this time but she has relocated to Regina so I visited her at her new little house for lunch en route to Winnipeg July 27. I wanted to meet with Father Glen Zimmer, OMI an hour out of Regina at Fort Qu’Appelle’s House of Prayer but would see him on the way back after a couple of weeks in Winnipeg.
MANITOBA
In Winnipeg I wanted to meet with Brother Thomas Novack, OMI. I have a brother and sister who reside in Winnipeg. Rita works for a First Nations nursing home in the city. Thomas serves as the chaplain at the home and he and Rita work very amicably together arranging his visits and the services. The last time I had seen Brother Novack would have been fifteen years earlier at a book launch for the Bishop De Roo biography. We had lost contact over the years but I heard about him from Dignity members in Vancouver. He had served as the chaplain to the Winnipeg chapter of Dignity but was now doing strictly First Nations pastoral ministry in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation recommendations.
He is very busy with the work he has undertaken so it took a while to be able to connect which we finally were able to do at St. Vital Park at a picnic table. I stayed two weeks in Winnipeg, exploring my favourite larger Canadian city over that time.
The Forks Market is where Rita had a dance studio for twenty years before she gave up dance to get into nursing home management work. It is at the fork of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers where First Nations people have traditionally summered for some estimated six thousand years. It is where the currently controversial Human Rights Museum is situated and was the centre of the railway yards and the main train station across from the Fort Garry Hotel on the site of the original Fort Garry.
It is immediately adjacent to St. Boniface, the centre of Franco-Manitoba culture in the province, so the atmosphere is replete with history, ancestry and contemporary developments including recently erected statues of Louis Riel.
It took a while to get up to speed with Thomas. What the project was about. The evolution of the newspaper from a diocesan monthly to more of a spiritual journal from the progressive Catholic perspective. He wanted to know what I felt he could do. I wanted to pick his brain about further progressive contacts in Manitoba.
I briefed him on some history of the current bishop of Winnipeg Richard Gagnon who served five years in Victoria until eight years ago. Bishop Gagnon got caught up in a situation at Holy Cross Parish of his own making, where he ordered the pastor to fire a gay administrator just for being gay and the priest refused and it went public.
The historically progressive parish actually called the bishop on the carpet at a public meeting with hundreds of individual parishioners publicly challenging him on the ethics and spirituality of the decision. I don't think the former vicar general of the Archdiocese of Vancouver had ever experienced anything like this before.
My analysis was that he was surrounded and embarrassed by the same group of right-wing Catholics that framed Bishop De Roo after he retired from office at age 75, I think Gagnon learned something from that situation which I felt Thomas Novack might find interesting given his history as a chaplain to gay Catholics, which was something he had been picked on by Church Militant, a traditionalist Catholic website.
I looked at their attack. Ironically the wording if we had praised him for his work might not have been too different but the connotation would have been radically opposite. To me this underlines the state of the Catholic church worldwide with the insistent attacks of Pope Francis.
What we admire him for, the reactionaries despise in his record. The divisiveness of the church and the world now brings to mind Dan Berrigan’s words about the beautiful polarizations that serve to clarify the differences.
I feel we need to be realistic about the global political situation, within and without the church. The other side will not be converted by sweetness and light of education, rather we need to be resolved and clear in our presentation of values, not back down or flinch but stand our ground.
Prophetic Catholicism stands on a longstanding tradition which included the gospel, church history and social teaching and most recently and significantly the reforms of Vatican II.
HOUSE OF PRAYER, FORT QU’APPELLE
From Winnipeg I went to Fort Qu’Appele to stay overnight at the House of Prayer, now marking its 25th year. It forms a set of cabins and a main house and office trailers with dining room, all for the purpose of quiet prayer and meditation. A centre of Contemplation such as Thomas Merton always said was central to the life of the church and particularly for activists, to avoid burnout and despair.
Glen Zimmer, an Oblate priest, has lead the process of developing such a place of renewal. He has been a supporter of what ICN is trying to do so I have wanted to speak with him for a number of years. We were often just missing each other due to holiday schedules and travel so it all seemed overdue.
We spoke about Father Bob Ogle and the Chris Hrynko book. He was full of great Bob Ogle stories with his Irish humour and political ken, including wry observations on the formation of seminarians.
The liturgy in the evening was a rich experience combining meditation, in-depth prayer and celebratory observations of volunteers who has passed after making important contributions to the centre. It’s that kind of a place, built on love. An example from my experience is the main house where I stayed. It had been the home of Art and Marlene Strudwick who worked closely with Father Glen to build a retreat place using it as the axis.
Art and Marlene had been part of our Roman Catholic Women Priest Community in Victoria which served as a link to Bishop Jane Krzyanowski who resides in Regina. Jane succeeded Marie Bouclin of Sudbury as the national Bishop of RCWP in 2018.
Jane and her husband Felix were instrumental in developing The House of prayer as a member of the community. Glen announced as I was departing that Jane was coming on a retreat in the following hours.
I found The House of Prayer to be an extraordinary experience, reminding me of the time I have spent at Madonna House in Combermere. It is a sort of still point in the turning world. It is holistic and integrative in its spirituality, well grounded in Catholicism but open to the world and its multilayer faiths and adherents, in attitude. A sort of post-Vatican II Catholic idealism, manifested and promoted by Pope Francis.
As we proceed with the resurrection of progressive Catholic communications in the region, it is not hard to visualize The House of Prayer inspiring the pursuit and development of this goal and emergence of the spirit in this way.