Michael Higgins, Toronto

I was not one of Remi De Roo’s intimates. I was not privy to his innermost thoughts; I was not a trusted confidant; I was not a close work associate. But we were friends. We collaborated on some things, and shared a common ecclesiological vision. And we respected each other, the necessary foundation for any nurturing and creative undertaking.

When St. Jerome’s University founded Grail: an Ecumenical Journal we asked De Roo to sit on the Board and he readily agreed; Douglas R. Letson and I did a biographical profile of him in our book, Portraits of Canadian Catholicism; he was an interviewee for my CBC Ideas series, Catholics, and on more than one occasion he spoke at the St. Jerome’s Centre for Catholic Experience, the university’s continuing and public education forum.

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But my very first encounter with him was as a high school student poised to enter the seminary of the Scarboro Fathers in Toronto when I read an article about him in the U.S. Passionist monthly, The Sign, about his messy contretemps with a fiery nun and her menagerie that garnered global headlines, generated the annoyance of Rome, and proved to be none too good publicity for the recently installed Bishop of Victoria. More of that later.

Perhaps the best known Canadian bishop in U.S, Catholic progressive circles, his American analogues being Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle, Bishop Kenneth Untener of Saginaw, and Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit, De Roo was a favourite of liberal Catholic publications and organizations including Call to Action and the National Center for the Laity. But the biggest waves of controversy were generated in his own country as his name became identified both in Ottawa and in Rome with causes and positions that were contentious, divisive, and insufficiently deferential to established authority.

Like it or not, and I suspect he actually liked it, De Roo became the media golden boy of Catholic leadership. He was the one who did not shy away from the press, the one, in fact, who courted a media audience, the one who dared to think aloud in public. He became Canada’s celebrity bishop, the go-to hierarch who seemed beyond intimidation or even prudential discretion.

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Mother Cecilia Mary Dodd had a formidable pedigree. The great-great-niece of Florence Nightingale, was an Anglican nun working with children and the poor in Birmingham, England until a concatenation of circumstances familial, economic and ecclesiastical resulted in her moving to Canada charged with the task of establishing a new Benedictine-inspired religious order, which she did in 1922 with the Society of the Love of Jesus. By 1937, however, she and most of her Anglican nuns had converted to Roman Catholicism. What ensued were a series of astute land purchases, shifting vocational priorities, and some senior leadership changes all resulting in the end with Mother Cecilia Mary electing the care of abandoned and neglected animals as her preferred ministry. Rome thought otherwise. She was told to give up her Good Shepherd Shelter for animals and to return to her earlier foundation of St. Mary’s Priory which had evolved into a rest home and hospital for the elderly.

She would do no such thing.

De Roo was caught in the middle and the international media attention pitting the benign, animal-loving “Real Estate Nun” against the phalanx of church powers — Roman and local — proved a major test for the new Bishop of Victoria. In the Manichean world of media casting he represented the villain fighting the heroine. She was unbending, the Shelter received numerous donations and survived the kerfuffle operating up to her death in 1989 at the age of 99. At one point she re-converted to her original Anglicanism although there is some evidence that in conversation with De Roo near the end of her life she reverted Romeward. Neither conventional nor stationary, her colourful character and tempestuous approach to ecclesiastical authorities posed a big challenge to a novice bishop.

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As Co-chair of the Theological Commission of the Canadian Catholic Conference (the forerunner of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops) in 1968, De Roo was on the hot seat following the release of Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae affirming the church’s traditional opposition to all modes of artificial birth regulation. Many in the Catholic world had been led to believe, following the unofficial release of the Final Report of the Pontifical Commission on Population, Family and Birth that had been charged with the responsibility of making a recommendation to the pontiff concerning current teaching banning all means of artificial contraception, that change was on the horizon.

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In Carter’s recollection, De Roo barely merits a mention. Carter, at the time Bishop of London and a decade later Archbishop of Toronto followed by his creation as a cardinal shortly after, remained Re Roo’s Bête noir throughout their respective episcopacies.

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The contest between the two prelates was bitter. De Roo paid a heavy price — being excoriated by Black, being replaced as Chair of the Social Affairs Commission, taking a drubbing by laissez faire economists in public — but Carter too suffered a diminution of respect in many Catholic circles for his easy alliance with the political and economic potentates with whom he consorted and for his willingness, indeed compulsiveness, in electing to side with his business friends over his episcopal peers. This was especially true when it came to defending the T. Eaton Company from what he considered an ignorant and calumnious misjudgment of monumental consequence. The CCCB document, “Definding Workers’ Rights — A New Frontier”, had referred specifically to the iconic retail company during a time of strained labour relations. It became unofficially known as the “Eaton’s Statement.” Carter wrote to De Roo privately about the position taken by the Social Affairs Commission scolding him for his misplaced zeal and for not appreciating the simple truth that:

taking up a strong position almost necessarily and inevitably involves exaggerations and the slanting of views. Certainly the truth seldom lies in the extremes in which it is presented. For instance, no one in his right mind would pretend that in the past few decades no single labour union has been guilty of excess. In the human condition a totally unbiased neutrality is impossible. This is true. But when any group is either mandated or sets itself up as a judge, it must make every effort to be as neutral as possible

… My statement was and is that the Commission made a judgement, found certain parties guilty and yet never heard the defense … A single phone call to the proprietors of the T. Eaton Company would have brought you the information which would have anchored your statement. This omission remains to me incomprehensible.(Letters from Cardinal Carter to Bishop De Roo, May 7 and August 6, 1987, as quoted in the official biography of the cardinal.)

De Roo remained resolute. The need for the Canadian bishops to take a public role in the political and economic issues of the country, that contributed in any way to rectifying inequities, to constructively inserting justice priorities into the market place, was a moral imperative that should not be compromised. Secure in his knowledge of papal social teaching and the long record of justice positions taken by the CCCB in the past, De Roo pushed ahead as best he could.

But if De Roo thought his retirement would bring some sort of surcease, the essential resolution of the Lacey Lands saga achieved (the diocese financially recovered due in great measure to the generosity of the people whose money was unwisely invested in the first place) and relations with his successor somewhat improved, and that in addition he would no longer be subject to media predation and therefore free to become a kind of wandering bishop free to give talks unhindered by institutional protocols, he was wrong, dead wrong.