National church in jeopardy, says Peers
WINNIPEG, MB - The head of the Anglican Church of Canada, Archbishop Michael Peers, has done the arithmetic and the numbers don't balance: the national body is faced with about $2 billion in damages from residential school lawsuits, and only has $10 million to its name.
"What is facing us is that [the residential school system] was not a good system that had a few bad people, but a fundamentally flawed system with a few good people in it," Peers said in a May 27 interview in Winnipeg, where he was attending a regional meeting.
The church has to take its share of responsibility for the physical, sexual and cultural abuse that took place in residential schools, Peers admits. "We do not wish to evade our obligations. It's just that we will soon come to the end of our resources."
The general synod, the legal entity that runs the church, might have to declare bankruptcy within the next year. That means that all the programs that are run at a national level–including overseas partnerships, special interest departments and the Anglican Journal–could well be cut.
"All of those things are in jeopardy," Peers said
Because the national body exists to help dioceses and parishes to do things jointly which would be difficult to do separately, "there is a very high level of concern throughout the church for those employees who enable that to happen," Peers says. "At the employee level there's a great sense of insecurity."
Some are unaware
The parish level is a different story. Some Anglicans are not aware of what is going on in the national church, Peers says. So on May 28 the primate distributed a pastoral letter to be read in every parish across the country.
"The purpose of the letter is simply to say something about where we are at the moment, and something about where I see God's hand leading us in the time ahead," he says.
The letter explains that there are more than 1,600 claims of varying kinds against the church, and that litigation would quickly wipe out the church's resources.
But Peers also wants Anglicans to know that only the financial assets are at risk, not the church's "ability to be in relationship, to support and care for each other…"
"Nothing at the heart of our faith–our desire for wholeness and healing in ourselves, in our relationships, in our country and in our world– is at risk," he writes. "We have these abundant and enduring assets that will help us continue to do justice and work for healing."
The church has presented its case to the federal government, says Peers, not to ask for a bailout but to let the government know there simply are not enough funds to cover litigation. "In the meantime," he says, "we do what I think is the responsible way to follow our Lord, which is one step at a time and one day at a time."
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