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We met with our Bishop, Douglas Crosby in March of 2019 to explain how the constant revelations about clergy sexual abuse were affecting us. We assumed we could not be alone in this: that other ordinary Catholics must be feeling the same way. We proposed to him that we conduct a series of pilot conversations in selected parishes to test our assumption and to gain a fuller understanding of the impact of the crisis on people in the pews. This would give us information for planning how to move forward. We wanted to model a way of engaging the issue that was both truthful and pastoral. The Bishop agreed with our proposal and asked us to return with a report on our findings. Three parish conversations were held in 2019. The response in all three parishes was overwhelmingly positive. We collated all the notes and evaluations from the sessions and attached them to our report which included recommendations based on what we learned. We presented it to the bishop in September 2020, a meeting that was delayed about six months due to COVID. Copy of the report here
Although we did not receive 100% support for all our recommendations, we were encouraged by our Bishop’s response. We felt that he agreed to enough of what we recommended to allow us to move forward with the conversation and make progress. We believe lasting change is made from the bottom up as well as the top down. So our strategy is not focused solely on the Bishop. We have been working to spread the word to other church leaders, to lay people in parishes and to Catholic professionals about how important it is to bring lay people into the conversation about how we need to move forward as a church.
We are fortunate in Canada that the Canadian Bishops published an excellent document in 2018:
Protecting minors from Sexual Abuse: A Call to the Catholic Faithful in Canada for Healing, Reconciliation and Transformation. In it, the Bishops call for new, more collaborative forms of ministry and for the complete conversion of clerical culture.
Encouraged by the Canadian bishops and by the words of the Holy Father Pope Francis, CLC undertook to create this website where lay people’s voices -in all their diversity- can be heard. And where lay people can find resources and tools to help them participate in the life and healing of the church.
It is impossible to think of a conversion of our activity as a Church that does not include the active participation of all the members of God’s people…whenever we have tried to replace, or silence, or ignore, or reduce the people of God to small elites, we end up creating communities, projects, theological approaches, spiritualities and structures without roots, without memory, without faces, without bodies and ultimately, without lives.
(Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis to the People of God - 20 August 2018)
