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Phoenix Project Report Part II – Conclusions and Conversations
Patrick Jamieson, Victoria
Volume 32 Issue 10, 11 & 12 | Posted: December 19, 2018
In the spring of 2017, like many people I was surprised to see the headline in the Prairie Messenger (PM) that it would be closing in a year's time. What may have made a whole lot more sense would have been the announcement of a task force on the future of the PM, to study the question and report in nine months or a years time.
After all, the PM had been a principal ministry of the Benedictine monastery in Muenster, SK for something over a hundred years. How could things have changed so much that it could be cancelled on financial basis without in-depth consultation? Surely there needed to be discussion, The PM was a spiritual journal, how could its fate be decided on so narrow a basis. It seemed to say something about the overall state of the Catholic Church.
In the spring of 2017, like many people I was surprised to see the headline in the Prairie Messenger (PM) that it would be closing in a year's time. What may have made a whole lot more sense would have been the announcement of a task force on the future of the PM, to study the question and report in nine months or a years time.
After all, the PM had been a principal ministry of the Benedictine monastery in Muenster, SK for something over a hundred years. How could things have changed so much that it could be cancelled on financial basis without in-depth consultation? Surely there needed to be discussion, The PM was a spiritual journal, how could its fate be decided on so narrow a basis. It seemed to say something about the overall state of the Catholic Church.
I have been able to spend three periods of discussion in Saskatchewan and Manitoba since the initial announcement. The first go-around, everyone seemed too much in shock and even denial and certainly confusion to have a sensible conversation. However I would like to share the content of rewarding conversations from the most recent visit with a few key players including Father Lawrence Demong, OSB and sociologist John Thompson.
After that we can look at conversations in Toronto and Ottawa, where the Catholic New Times (CNT) originated before its closure in the late 1990s, and then other points east before focusing on a group that was pulled together by Douglas Roche in Edmonton where the Western Catholic Reporter (WCR) had flourished for more than fifty years since 1965, prior to its closure three years ago.
The CNT and the WCR sprang up in the fertile soil of the post-Vatican II church, either in response to a vacuum of information (WCR) or in reaction to a right wing Catholic paper that was not perceived to be promoting the values of Vatican II (CNT). While their closures could be attributed to the perpetuation of an Opus Dei controlled Catholic church, the Prairie Messenger was a different matter.
The PM long preceded Vatican II, anticipated the Council and helped to make it happen. Its disappearance is more like a hearkening back to the 19th century despite the claims that the digital revolution has made it unnecessary. Because of its longevity and commitment to Vatican II, it seemed especially vulnerable. Now it is gone.
Ironically Island Catholic News at its start in the overall national context of 1986 was more like a gadfly operation in comparison to the greater stability of the more established newspapers. It seemed more like an assured act of faith in the face of institutional stability. Now it resembles more the last man standing in a game of religious brinkmanship – ho can be the last to jump off a sinking ship.
The disappearance of these vital organs of adult education represents a serious threat to a church of mature faith. However alarming, due to my history, my reaction to the PM announcement was that the crisis it represents presents us with an opportunity. Thus the Phoenix Project.
As usual with things in the Catholic world view, community plays a key role. Progressive movements within the Catholic church depend upon the lateral support and the grace that springs from that of basic Christian community. Most of the in-depth discussions on the Phoenix project journey were grounded in the subject of persistent community.
For example, in Ottawa there exists ‘the lichen group,’ in Toronto a network of social justice activists, in The Maritimes and Montreal there persists the remnants of a network formerly known as Lateral Support. Island Catholic News persists in linking these historical and ongoing connections. It has also been a community development project on Vancouver Island since its inception in the mid 1980s.
On the Prairies (and nationally) new movements like Roman Catholic Women Priest (RCWP) are persisting and being reinforced. In Edmonton under the animation and leadership of Douglas Roche, founding editor of the Western Catholic Reporter in the mid 1960s, something appears to be emerging.
Saskatchewan and Manitoba can still be expected to formulate a new project in the wake of the ashes of The PM, but it will take time. In British Columbia and Vancouver Island the Vatican II enthusiasts surrounding the work and person of Bishop Remi De Roo continue to meet, discuss, start new initiatives and support old ones. Vancouver has its own resistance network to the Opus Dei traditionalists who prevail.
SASKATOON
Lawrence Demong is a monk of the Abbey at Muenster St. Peter’s, the home of the Prairie Messenger. Any self-conscious Prairie Catholic gives testimony to the influence of the PM in their formation. Lawrence, a national leader in adult faith education, is still in active ministry at age 81. He is the leader for a northern parish. On the day I was able to meet with him, he was doing a funeral for a relative in Saskatoon.
I went to attend the funeral to acquaint myself with the measure of the man who I had heard about but never actually met. It was conveniently near where I was staying at one of my daughters in Nutana in the University area of the city.
He was unusually impressive in the personal tone of the process of the funeral rites, and the forward looking spirituality and up to date theology he brought to the proceedings. We weren't able to sit down together until the afternoon after the graveside aspect.
Lawrence to me embodies the spirit of St. Peter’s but he is concerned about the future of things. He said that he volunteered to take over the mantle of the newspaper but that it was too late, the die had been cast and the closure went ahead.
I had the feeling he liked the idea of my moving back to Muenster to restart the paper, in fact he said so. Such is his wide open prairie spirit. He suggested I sit down with Dr. John Thompson who had worked so long with the much respected and dynamic editor of the PM Andrew Britz before his untimely end. Andrew’s drive and vision would have kept the PM going through this crisis.
When Lawrence Demong joined St. Peter’s, there were 66 members, now he is one of 13. The very future of the Abbey seems at risk. The Abbot was ailing when I was speaking to Lawrence, an undiagnosed condition, clearly exacerbated by the increasing stress.
John Thompson was also recommended by a good friend Jim Penna, a former professor at St. Thomas More College where John had been President. I had met Jim at Morning Mass in the city’s east side where he lives and over coffee he said John would be important to talk to. He was right.
The 90 minutes I spent with John at Broadway Coffee in the west side were illuminating. He had worked very closely with Andrew Britz and the monks at Muenster as a personal friend, Catholic university administrator and more pointedly as a sociologist who ran surveys on the future directions of Catholicism on the prairies.
From my perspective, John easily grasped the problem of contemporary Catholicism from his own history and experience. We seemed in complete accord as to the roots of the current crisis of Catholics; and what is needed in the future in this time of Pope Francis and the arch-reactionary efforts to halt his effort at reestablishing the values and momentum of Vatican II within the church.
John Thompson has an in depth analysis grounded in sociological study. His is the long view. He spoke at length of his mentorship with the great American Catholic sociologist Thomas O’Dea, who had the knack, he said, of stepping outside even sociological methodology for an objective perspective. O’Dea believed there was something in Catholic thinking that allowed a solid grasp on objective truth, but it took a life time of study to discover how it worked.
This echoed what I had heard from Hugh Williams in Debec, New Brunswick earlier in the month. Professor Williams is a student of the work of Bernard Lonergan who also claimed like O’Dea that there is something in Catholic philosophy that enables one to get an objective sense of the truth.
You might call this a subjective faith statement in itself, but in my experience, just the notion itself seems to lend an additional objectivity when needed.
O’Dea told Thompson, that it was by reading Lonergan’s Insight, An Inquiry into Human Understanding, that he gained this key affirmation of the Catholic conviction that the apprehension of truth is possible and regular. Faith in this human ability to really understand and grasp the truth seems more important than ever in these strange nihilistic times when even reason is up for grabs.
Jumping ahead or rather backward in times, much of what these prairie sages suggested echoed my just previous experience in Montreal and New Brunswick. It also echoed the period in the 1970s of Lateral Support, a basic Christian Catholic network of communities which had taken seriously Vatican II and its latent call for more lay responsibility in the church.
All the most active leaders from that period have stayed true to their callings and met for a reunion and public conversation at Concordia University convened by my sister Christine Jamieson in the fall of 2017.
Unfortunately I was ill and unable to attend to my ongoing regret. These valued confreres included Holy Cross Father Richard Renshaw, philosopher Hugh Williams, retired federal civil servant Walter Hughes as well as Christine and her Montreal colleague Brian McDonough.
I was able to spend time with all these people this past summer. Each confirmed in their way a worldview that radically identifies with the perspective of Island Catholic News with a difference of emphasis that lends itself to good conversation.
In Toronto I was able to spend a morning with Len Desroches, prior to our attending the general consultation about The Phoenix Project at St. Basil’s. Len and I had been neighbours on Grant Street in Riverdale in 1975-76 when I was registered at Toronto School of Theology in the Master of Divinity program.
Our houses had been part of a network of Christian Intentional Communities that spread from The Maritimes to Toronto where in those days so many Maritimers had migrated for employment. A kindred spirit, Len had been the lone dissenting voice expressing preference for a print paper rather than the online direction everyone else favoured, or at least considered inevitable.
Len has published two classic studies of prophetic spirituality titled Allow The Water, and Love of Enemy. (see images in the Literary Section) The first explores the connection between nonviolence and sexuality and was endorsed by Elizabeth McAlister, spouse of Philip Berrigan. Love of Enemy is subtitled The Cross and Sword Trial and explores through a concrete law suit the Christian responsibility for Making Peace.
Dave Szollosy was a founding board member of Island Catholic News in 1987 (he did the crucial paperwork that got it established as a federal charity). He was employed at the time as Bishop De Roo’s social justice director for the Diocese of Victoria, but returned to Toronto in the early 1990s to teach at the high school level in the Catholic School system.
A direct action person, Dave had this to say “..organizations that do not go digital risk fading into irrelevancy or obscurity…Yet the physical circulation of hard copies does promote awareness and brand…I am favourable towards a model such as America which has a paper copy edition, but also an online version…I just helped our Catholic Teachers Union move to this kind of model.”
My sister Christine and I had supper with old friend and Holy Cross priest Richard Renshaw at Rumi’s Restaurant in Montreal. Dick, as we called him back then, was the most important influence on myself and close university confreres Walter Hughes, Hugh Williams and Bill Johnson at St. Thomas University beginning in 1969. He was the exemplar professor for social action.
Our Dan Berrigan figure, goatee, beret and outspoken at protest rallies against the Vietnam War and poverty issues and progressive politics generally on the streets of Fredericton.
Dick was part of the basic Christian intentional community network, both in Toronto and The Maritimes. He went on to the same sort of work in Peru and was later with Development and Peace in Montreal. A vital connection for many of us over the years, truly in the avante garde both within the church and society. He too was a student of Bernard Lonergan.
In Ottawa I was able to get a couple of hours with Tony Clarke who had been the staff person at the social affairs office at the Canadian Bishops Conference. Bishop Remi De Roo and he put together a sharp critique of federal economic policy under Trudeau the First, in 1983.
The media picked up on the statement in an unprecedented way and the intense dialogue went on for three years. It proved a prophetic foretelling of the ongoing crisis that has resulted in the era of Donald Trump.
Tony said that prophetic ministry such as Catholic journalism requires the ongoing reflective vehicle of basic intentional Christian community. He has been a member of the Ottawa Lichen Group for more than twenty years and it has provide an ongoing continuity of perspective and support for the work which in his case has resulted in the Polaris Institute and the Action Canada Network. These bodies were influential in spearheading reasoned resistance to the mainstream bias which runs contrary to the Gospel value.
I spent parts of two afternoons with Rick Haughian, former Jesuit and past president of the Catholic Health Association of Canada, where I worked in communications from 1978 to 1981 just before I took the Editor job at the Prairie Messenger. Rick is one of those very dynamic, multi-gifted Jesuits who left to marry and teach at St. Paul’s University, eventually replacing Everett McNeil at the helm of the CHAC.
Father McNeil served as long term general secretary at the Bishops Conference as Tony Clarke’s boss.
Always a progressive thinker, we used Rick Haughian regularly as a speaker in Cape Breton between 1982-86 when I was the executive director of the Diocesan Health Care Council. Our lives ran in parallel lines for many decades both professionally and personally and so in depth sharing about all the aspects of the Phoenix Project was essential on my trip.
Rick is a founder and ongoing key component of an organization in Ottawa that provides permanent stable homes and social support for adults living with mental illness. It is called Ancoura and he now serves as advising past president.
In Edmonton, at Doug Roche’s home, the discussion featured a realistic assessment which illustrated the regional differences of emphasis. Whereas on the Prairies, a more temperate progressive tone is the order of the day, on the west coast a more prophetic utterance seems more characteristic. This means that the two can work together but should probably feature separate vehicles.
Ontario has its own style obviously, with the difference between Ottawa and Toronto quite significant as well, Ottawa reflecting the more measured pace and thinking of progressive career bureaucrats.
Vancouver represents an interesting challenge for ICN to link subscribers and work with the groups throughout the city in one of the historically most traditionalist parts of the Catholic Church in Canada.
There are some 40-50 subscribers so the hunger for progressive journalism has been well demonstrated. I intend to focus on this conversation with presence and animation over the next few years as we further develop our west coast version of the Phoenix Project.
MAJOR CONCLUSIONS FROM PHOENIX PROJECT JOURNEY
1. There is an abiding hunger and need for the actuality and symbolism of a progressive Catholic paper. It corresponds to the spiritual aspirations of the prophetic dimension of the Canadian Catholic Church.
2. To thrive and even survive, such a vehicle needs to be as independent as possible due to the prophetic nature of its work. This requires an enduring network of faith-based resistance communities.
3. These groups and individuals need to be able to meet locally, regionally and nationally with the regularity to support and share ideas and tactics and news developments.
4. There is no need for a national newspaper, rather a small network of regional papers that work together in a cooperative manner. Each region has its own distinct differences and emphasis.
5. Papers would be best based in resistance faith communities. This could assure endurance despite the vicissitudes of fortune.
6. The Prairie region will take some time in emergence from the shock and awe of the collapse and disappearance of the Prairie Messenger after more than a hundred years.
7. One national paper would have a vulnerability that could take up valuable energy quarrelling in the national media with the institutional church or its ultra right-wing exponents.
8. There is still a need for a print paper edition and the idea of an exclusive digital version has already proved vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the genre. The internet will become increasingly vulnerable politically as time goes on and as the lone server vulnerable to reprisals and imposed limitations.
9. Key people and regional leaders have sprung up over the years These include Ted Schmidt, Dave Szollosy, Len Desroche and Father Bob Holmes in Toronto. Tony Clarke, Rick Haughian, Joe Gunn, Walter Hughes and Petra Notier, John Rietschlin of L’Arche Canada and Marlene and Alex Campbells in Ottawa. Sheila Cameron in Arnprior, outside of Ottawa. Dick Renshaw, Christine Jamieson and Brian McDonough in Montreal. Hugh Williams in Debec N.B., Dawn Russell and Bill Johnson of St. Thomas University in New Brunswick. On the Prairies I have identified John Thompson of Saskatoon as well as Lawrence Demong, and Doug Roche and newly elected Bishop Jane Krzyanwoski of Edmonton and Regina.
10. Overall then, in the context of the Canadian Catholic Church, there is an ongoing need for the sort of ginger groups that spur discussion on difficult but critically important issues and movements. Progressive programs in Catholic liberal arts universities and colleges, such as St. Thomas in Fredericton and St. Marks in Vancouver should be kept in mind as resources upon which to build.
11. The West Coast region needs further animation in Vancouver where subscribers include Dignity, Catholic Worker, Thomas Merton Society, St. Mark’s Jesuit community and The Roman Catholic Women Priest group. Paul LeMay is our board member in Vancouver. A week long visit is called for with small group gatherings and individual conversation to discern how to better develop the base particularly in Greater Vancouver where some fifty subscribers have arisen merely by word of mouth.
12. The central need is critical thinking education about church and society and an openness to the multifaith universe that is emerging in our experience.
To give feedback on this report, contact the author at pjjamie@telus.net.
Patrick Jamieson, Victoria