Dear Bishop McGrattan:
I am writing further to the email that I originally sent you September 19, 2019 about the pastor's liturgical abuse at St Mary’s as well as abuse in the RCIA program there.
A few months back I came across an edifying news story: Toronto cardinal rebukes Catholic school board members for barring Catechism reading. The lead line reads:
Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto has rebuked members of the local Catholic school board for refusing to allow a passage of the Catechism of the Catholic Church pertaining to ministry to people with same-sex attraction to be read during a recent meeting.
In an open letter to the board chair, dated November 17, 2020, Cardinal Collins wrote:
At a recent meeting of the Toronto Catholic District a member of a delegation attempted to quote from the section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church which concerns the teaching and the pastoral practice of the Church in caring for our brothers and sisters who experience same sex attractions. Shortly after he had begun reading the quotation, he was interrupted, and it was suggested that to continue reading from the Catechism was to be treading in dangerous waters, and would be putting down a marginalized and vulnerable community, and that the language of the Catechism is not proper.
That a Catholic should be criticized, and effectively be prevented by Catholic Trustees from reading from the Catholic Catechism at a meeting of a Catholic School Board is simply reprehensible. I highly commend Trustee Crawford for pointing out the significance of this act.
Catholic faith must guide all who are engaged in Catholic education…
If those engaged in Catholic education ... have bought into the fundamentally anti-Catholic narrative... (etc.)
I'd like you to compare this event, including Cardinal Collins’s response, to what happened to me at St Mary’s in Cochrane at the hands of the pastor and a fellow parishioner, the head of the RCIA team.
I had been observing, enduring, and pondering the pastor's ostensible abuses of the mass at St Mary’s for about a year, when in September of 2019, preparatory to raising some issues with the pastor himself, I raised the issue with and sought advice about proceeding from the more seasoned parishioners on the RCIA team, of which I was a new member. It seemed fitting, indeed a prompting of the Holy Spirit, to do so, following the RCIA meeting we had just had, at which we discussed the story of the golden calf and I had pointed out the liturgical relevance of the golden calf story, as Cardinal Ratzinger described it in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy. In response to my raising the issue of the pastor's liturgical abuse at St Mary’s, the head of the RCIA team rudely and summarily dismissed me from what she evidently regarded as ‘her’ RCIA team and the pastor seconded her decision. He even assured me that it was my part, in his words, to just “take the slap,” to accept the abuse I had received from her (and from the half of the RCIA team which concurred with her, and evidently from the pastor himself) in the spirit of Christ before Pilate (sic).
We see, however, that when Christ was slapped for speaking the truth before the high priest (the corrupt clergy of his day), he did not merely take it in silence. As St Thomas Aquinas points out in his commentary on Romans 12:19, Jesus did not just “take the slap”:
Even the Lord himself commanded, Mt 5:39: “if someone strikes you on one cheek, offer him also the other.” But, as Augustine says in the book Against Lying, those things which are done in the New Testament by the holy ones serve as examples for understanding the Scriptures, what is contained in its precepts. But the Lord himself, when he was struck by a slap, did not say: “Here is the other cheek”; but rather, “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong; but if well, why do you strike me?” Whereby he shows that the readiness of the other cheek is to be accomplished in the heart.
Rather than addressing my concerns about his abuses, of the liturgy and thus of us his parishioners (many of whom, admittedly, enjoy and applaud this kind of abuse), in conversation the pastor disappointingly just changed the subject, accusing me of being ‘divisive’ (“some people say you’re divisive,” he said) and asked rudely insinuating questions about my past, completely dismissing the legitimacy of my concerns. He had nothing to say in point of explanation of the actual significance of the gossip he had been participating in about my being ‘divisive,’ which obviously Our Lord also was (“do not suppose I have come to bring peace to the earth,” etc.), and seems to amount only to the thoroughly banal observation that he and I, and in general people in the parish (and out of the parish!), disagree with one another. He refused to address the question of what is the truth of the matter, or what is right and just and to be done, instead insisting that we should just “agree to disagree.” And while claiming to have a vision of an ‘inclusive’ Church, he suggested that my family and I go find a different parish, since evidently his inclusiveness falls short of including people who dare seek, in a spirit of open, honest, well-informed dialogue, to promote the authentic faith and practise of the Catholic Church in their local parish.
For your part, you (in person and via your administrative assistant) and your vicar Fr Wilbert Chin Jon have kindly assured me on several occasions that you would address the issue. But until now, almost a year and a half later, so far as I have been informed, it seems you have, rather like the second son in our Lord’s parable (Mt 21:28), in fact done nothing and said nothing. But tacere est consentire. And as you know, if you say nothing to the wicked man under your charge, he will not only be condemned himself, his guilt will fall also on you. See, e.g., Ez 33: it is the bishop (episkopos), if anyone, who is in the position of sentry (skopos) which Ezekiel describes and to whom he gives fair warning. For my part, I know that my redeemer liveth, I know that “what is veiled will all be revealed, what is hidden will all be known” and that for every idle word that a man speaks he will be held to account on the day of judgement. But in the meantime I am left discouraged and disillusioned, asking “Where is the faithful and wise steward, whom his master can entrust with the care of the household”?
To return, finally, to the comparison to Cardinal Collins, I will note that some fifteen years ago my wife and I went through a marriage prep course in Edmonton where Collins was archbishop at the time. There were some serious errors in the teaching presented in the course and when we brought these to the archbishop’s attention, he showed real concern and promptly arranged a meeting to discuss our experience, and actively worked to make the program faithful to Catholic teaching. Sadly, however, it is hard to escape the impression that most bishops will only address abuses occurring under the aegis of their authority if there is likely to be a public scandal arising from not addressing it, which is only the case if the issue is something that the media cares about. But the media will of course never care about faithful Catholic marriage prep any more than it will care about faithful Catholic liturgy and catechesis. At any rate, I am grateful for the experience of episcopal integrity we had with Collins. I hope that the current situation has been a matter of oversight, not policy, and that we can eventually find a similar experience of episcopal integrity with you.
Respectfully yours in Christ,
David McPike
