Daniel Gawthrop, Vancouver  (Review essay)

The last time most Canadians heard from Remi De Roo, it was in a carefully worded letter of apology vetted by his lawyer. In June 2000, the year after his retirement as bishop of Victoria, De Roo was publicly lambasted for having approved a loan to an Arabian show horse farm and then the purchase of a parcel of land in Washington State – investments that were bleeding the diocese dry. In his public mea culpa, he said he had approved certain transactions having “mistakenly believed that there was no significant risk to Diocese assets and that there was substantial equity” in the ill-fated “Lacey land deal,” as it was known. With this admission, De Roo took the fall, “like any responsible captain of a ship,” as he later put it, regardless of his actual culpability.

The last time most Canadians heard from Remi De Roo, it was in a carefully worded letter of apology vetted by his lawyer. In June 2000, the year after his retirement as bishop of Victoria, De Roo was publicly lambasted for having approved a loan to an Arabian show horse farm and then the purchase of a parcel of land in Washington State – investments that were bleeding the diocese dry. In his public mea culpa, he said he had approved certain transactions having “mistakenly believed that there was no significant risk to Diocese assets and that there was substantial equity” in the ill-fated “Lacey land deal,” as it was known. With this admission, De Roo took the fall, “like any responsible captain of a ship,” as he later put it, regardless of his actual culpability.
      Subsequent revelations, a court judgment, and a Globe and Mail investigation in 2005 would ultimately exonerate De Roo and redistribute the blame. But the damage was done. To the delight of reactionary right-wingers in the diocese, who had always resented the outspoken bishop’s advocacy of Vatican II causes, one of the most celebrated progressive voices of Roman Catholicism in this country was unceremoniously booted off his pedestal.
      De Roo spent the first five years of his retirement being trashed in the media as a bumbling leftist incompetent; a fiscal know-nothing who, in keeping with popular neo-con mythology, could no better balance a cheque book than an NDP government could balance a budget.
      When De Roo retreated from the headlines after the official apology and said nothing more of the scandal, many assumed that his silence was self-imposed. Those enjoying a bit of schadenfreude at his expense imagined he was hiding in shame, licking his wounds in solitude, perhaps even praying that God would forgive his fiscal sins and allow him a merciful exit from this life.
       In fact, De Roo was only ‘buttoning his lip’ on his lawyer’s advice which he had taken with some ambivalence. Far from withering away, he was rebuilding his life in Nanaimo. Today, the eighty-nine-year-old is recovering from a broken hip after a bad fall. But until this recent accident, he continued to lead local prayer groups when he wasn’t travelling the world to promote Vatican II. In Chronicles of a Vatican II Bishop, he looks back on his life and urges a fresh re-reading of the Council. He also breaks his silence on “Laceygate.”
      For an atheist, it is no easy task to argue for the continuing relevance of the Roman Catholic Church. But as a lapsed Catholic, I also know that a case can be made in the work of someone like Remi De Roo, a religious figure whose mission was to relate the Gospels to the world we live in and build community by reaching out, rather than dividing people.
      Best known as a leading spokesperson for the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, the author of books like Cries of Victims, Voice of God, and first chair of British Columbia’s Human Rights Commission, De Roo devoted his episcopate to the now heretical idea that the Church belongs to all of its members not just the hierarchy and that lay people deserve a prominent voice in it.
      His capacity for connecting with other faiths, as well as the non-believing secular world, was unique in the Catholic hierarchy. For all his abhorrence of conflict, he was a frequent source of controversy because of his support for female ordination, married priests, and a more empowered laity.
      All of this was a by-product of his experience at Vatican II, a career-defining event that crystallized his theology at a young age, formed the basis of his ecumenical outlook and provided a moral compass for what turned out to be a thirty-six-year episcopate. During this period, his record in the public sphere was that of a net contributor; someone whose engagement with civic discourse and antennae for the zeitgeist sees few, if any, parallels in today's Catholic bishopric in this country.

*****

      Full disclosure: De Roo happens to be the same bishop who presided over my own confirmation ceremony thirty-six years ago. Not surprisingly, my most enduring memory of him is from that Sunday morning in the late spring of 1976, when he confirmed my two sisters and me as Roman Catholics in our hometown parish of St. Peter’s, Nanaimo. For a twelve-year-old boy in the cultural backwater that was Nanaimo in the mid-1970s, De Roo was a “celebrity” in a way that prominent politicians and entertainment figures were celebrities. Our parents spoke of him with an admiration bordering on reverence, and his influence touched all of our lives. So there were butterflies in my stomach that day, as my sisters and I made our way up the centre aisle at St. Peter’s, to be met at the altar by Bishop Remi in his brilliant white chasuble with a mitre towering above his head, his vestments gleaming as he stood before a packed congregation. He seemed almost God-like in his eminence.
      As I grew older, De Roo would become more human, less God-like. Thanks to lived experience and gradual disillusionment with the Church under Pope John Paul II, my bishop’s return to earth coincided with the withering away of my own belief in God. And yet, while faith and the Church lost all of their sparkling gravitas, De Roo never lost his. Over the years, when I encountered him as an adult, the qualities I had observed growing up – the quiet grace and humility, the formidable intellect, the earnest commitment to human rights, the reluctance to judge others were still there. These qualities shine through in Chronicles, which retains a sense of wonder about the human condition while being generous to a fault with its author’s many critics and theological opponents.
      De Roo’s account of Vatican II begins with a recollection of his first exposure to the Council in Rome. As a freshly minted bishop (then the youngest in the world, at thirty-eight), he was awestruck on entering St. Peter’s Basilica for the first time and joining the rest of the planet’s bishops for what was to become one of the most important gatherings in Roman Catholic history:
      With my youthful impressions that a bishop was the equivalent of a prince, I was literally overwhelmed by the Catholic Episcopate in its entirety…. In their Episcopal regalia, with the brilliant lighting flooding the immense Basilica, they looked like a gathering of the saints in the antechamber to heaven.
      Of all the consular documents, he says, Gaudium et Spes (“Joys and Hopes”), the track on the Church in the modern world, had the biggest impact. “Vatican II concerned itself with the full spectrum of Catholic life and simultaneously reached out to the entire world. Hence I see doctrine as embracing the totality of the human,” he writes. Gaudium et Spes “presents Jesus Christ as the model or prototype of the New Human. This is broader and more substantial than doctrinal precision. Our hearts and bodies are included, as well as our minds. Vatican II offered us invaluable guidance to prepare us for the new millennium we have just entered.”
      As a participant at Vatican II, De Roo worked hard to live up to his billing as the “Benjamin of Canadian bishops” (Pope John XXIII’s affectionate reference to the young Manitoban, likening him to the youngest of Jacob’s twelve sons in the Old Testament, from the Hebrew translation of “Benjamin” as “Favourite Son”). At the Council, De Roo made four major oral interventions (on the laity, conjugal love, clergy, and the Church in the modern world) and 15 written intercessions before the Council adjourned. For the conjugal love submission (included in Chronicles as an appendix), he didn’t just rely on scriptural or theological texts for source material; he also spent several months consulting with married couples. By including their comments in the submission, the young bishop showed he was serious about treating lay Catholics as “partners in mission.”

*****

      In devoting nearly a third of this brief memoir to a moment in Church history that lasted only three years during the 1960s, De Roo might be dismissed by some as a Vatican II nostalgist. But that would be a mistake. Sixties nostalgia tends to be steeped in pop cultural ephemera, a longing for simpler times, or devotion to particular ideas long since abandoned by the baby boomers who inspired them. The problem with painting Vatican II in this light is that there’s nothing concrete to be “nostalgic” about: what the high-minded ideals of the conciliar documents really amount to is a set of principles that have yet to see the light of day. Apart from dispensing with the Latin mass (even that was back on the table under Pope Benedict), introducing the folk music liturgy, and bringing in several other housekeeping changes, the Church did very little to bring Vatican II into effect.
      For example, it left unanswered the essential question the Council raised: how should Roman Catholicism adapt to the modern world? This question was ultimately abandoned by Popes Paul VI (who lacked the courage to confront women’s reproductive health), John Paul II (a traditionalist worshipper of the Virgin Mary), and Benedict XVI (for whom the modern world itself was the problem).
      It remains to be seen whether Pope Francis has the vision to address the issue. Had the bishops defied Rome and applied Vatican II to their respective dioceses over the decades, there may have been a different Roman Catholic evolution on issues like birth control, abortion, homosexuality, and married or female priests and different results regarding clerical child sex abuse and the Church’s response to it.
      De Roo makes no reference to the abuse scandals in Chronicles. Given the odds of seeing another memoir from him, it is a disappointing omission. Regardless of his own record on the issue (there have been no substantial complaints brought forward about his handling of tainted priests on the Island), the book might have benefitted from his thoughts on mandatory celibacy, or the extent to which married priests, female ordination, and a more engaged laity from the mid-1960s onward might have prevented some of the worst excesses. But this memoir is clearly focused on the best impulses of the faithful, not on the dark side. Its author was unlikely to go there.
      As for those “best impulses,” De Roo can be rightfully proud of his work in the Victoria diocese over the years. His impressive track record of Vatican II-like progress had social impact outside the Church, going well beyond the internal, “faith-building” mandate of his ecclesial assignment as a Catholic prelate. Diocesan initiatives whose influence spread beyond the Island included:
      Initiation of the Social Justice Office and Commission, and Development and Peace, a Global South aid organization begun by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops in response to Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Populorum Progressio;

• Refugee sponsorship enabled by a master agreement with the Federal government and the CCCB;
• Establishment of the Laren House Society, a non-profit organization working with the criminal justice system to help convicted criminals make a successful transition to a responsible life in the community;
• Project North, a national ecumenical aboriginal support program inspired by the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Moratorium hearings in the 70s;
• Support of the L’Arche Movement, inspired by the work of Jean Vanier, which involves living with and for the severely mentally handicapped (as well as sister organizations Faith and Sharing, a retreat movement for the disabled and their caregivers, and Faith and Light, a support network for families of the disabled);
• A revised mandate for St. Vincent de Paul Society, which shifted some of its focus to support for the increasing numbers of street kids;
• The Provincial Council for the Family and Capital Family Services, both promoted by the diocese, resulting from ecumenical efforts by De Roo and other local church leaders in consultation with NDP Premier Dave Barrett; and
• Diocesan support for the local Persons With AIDS Society and its clients.

To be continued in the December issue. The next installment will look at the attempt to discredit Bishop De Roo post-retirement on the basis of his social justice work in the 1970s.