Catholicism in Canada: an interview with most Rev. Adam Exner, OMI, Archbishop of Vancouver.

Born in rural Saskatchewan to Austrian parents 73 years ago, Archbishop Adam Exner is a first-generation Canadian who served as Bishop of Kamloops 1974-82, Archbishop of Winnipeg 1982-91, and Archbishop of Vancouver from 1991 until the present day.

C.I.: In case some of our readers are as fuzzy on this score as I am, could you briefly enunciate the differences in duties between a bishop and an archbishop?

Exner: Well, first of all, you need to understand dioceses are organised into ecclesiastical provinces, and each ecclesiastical province has one archdiocese and one archbishop. For example in British Columbia there's the ecclesiastical province of Vancouver and attached to it are four suffragan dioceses -- of Victoria, Nelson, Kamloops and Prince George. Each bishop is responsible for his own diocese. The role of the archbishop is quite limited in a sense. He acts as the chairperson of the meeting of the bishops within that ecclesiastical province. When a person dies or becomes ill, he has to see to it that the consulters of that province elect an administrator, and thirdly he has a kind of supervisory role -- not in the sense that when a problem arises in the diocese, he goes in and fixes it. But when there is a serious problem in the diocese, he refers it to the Nuncio.

C.I.: How would you describe the state of Catholicism in Canada today?

Exner: I was kind of heartened by the recent study by the religious sociologist, Reginald Bibby, which shows that while church attendance in Canada during the 1960s, 70s and 80s was on a decline, in the 1990s that trend has reversed and there has been a significant growth in church attendance, particularly among youth. I believe Bibby said the attendance rise among youth was from 17% to 22%. That I think is a very encouraging sign of the times. And speaking from my perspective here on the west coast, I would say his optimism is justified. Our churches are full, attendance is comparatively high here, and we're also seeing a growing number of people joining the Church and coming back to the Church. We have the RCIA program here. Ten years ago when I came here, for the Rite of Election, which is a service for those who will be baptised at Easter, the Cathedral was half full. Then it filled up and these last few years we've been filling it twice. And just this morning the RCIA consultant told me we'll probably ha ve to go to three sessions next year. That is very encouraging.

C.I.: Assuming that all the pressures and stresses on families are having a negative impact on the domestic inculcation of faith, how can the institutional Church help out?

Exner: There are an enormous number of pressures and influences on families today. When I was a kid, what I learned at home was reinforced at the school, and in the sports organisations I belonged to, and in the social life I experienced, and also at the parish. There was an environment, a faith culture, that sustained everything my parents tried to teach me. That has disappeared. The culture has become very godless and while we still have to go and convert individuals, I think the real task of the Church has become the evangelisation of our culture. And that I don't think is happening. Here in Canada, we're at a point where a lot of people believe that religious views have no place in public life. As soon as you express a view that is motivated by some religious conviction, the automatic assumption is that that view is not valid and is inadmissible in public life. Culture is like water in a fish pond. When that water becomes polluted, the fish get sick, and to keep them alive you have to feed them medicine. But that is not the ultimate solution. The ultimate solution is to change the water in the pond. Changing the culture is a really big challenge--for bishops and priests, of course--but most especially, I think this is a challenge for lay people.

The decree of the Council about the Apostolate of the Laity speaks about their apostolate in the Church, and their apostolate in the world. A group of Bishops in Rome for the Great Jubilee celebration had a discussion on this issue. We noted that one of the finest fruits of the Second Vatican Council was the emergence of the laity in the life of the Church. What came out of our discussion in Rome was an agreement that the laity had largely emerged in doing Church things on the level of involvement in the parish. And that's all well and good, but we do not see the same resurgence of the laity in their apostolate in the world--which, that Council stressed, is actually their primary role, because they are in the world. We have so much evidence in Canada of people being afraid to let their faith be seen in public life, in the world. There's a concerted effort in our culture to privatize religion, to push it out of the public life, to quarantine it. This is what we have to break through.

Somebody asked me about two years ago, "What has to happen before human life will again be respected in our country?" I think Pope John Paul has the answer in Evangelium Vitae, when he says we have to change the death culture into a life culture. And to a large measure, I believe that to be the task of the laity, and I don't think they're quite accustomed to thinking of themselves in those terms.

C.I.: What do you make of the collapse of the Catholic school systems in Newfoundland and Quebec? You've probably heard about the case in Ontario where a young fellow is suing the Durham Catholic school board because it won't allow him to take his boyfriend to the prom. I don't think I'm being too fancifully paranoid to wonder if the future of the Ontario Catholic system could also teeter on just such a case. How can we possibly evangelise the culture, when it's becoming increasingly difficult to evangelise even with Catholic schools?

Exner: (laughs) I'm not saying that evangelizing the culture is going to be easy. But you have to begin somewhere. Something that always gives me hope is to look at the work that the fishermen of Galilee, the Apostles had to evangelize in such a hostile world. They were small in number and uneducated. From a sociological point of view, anyone who had examined that little group would've said, "These people have no chance of making an impact on the world." The prospects were absolutely dismal. And yet those people turned the world upside down. They evangelized and spread the faith to the north and south and east and west. By whose power? By the power of Pentecost -- the Holy Spirit. And that Holy Spirit is still alive in the Church today and is no less powerful than it was 2,000 years ago. For a Christian I don't believe there is ever a justification for becoming discouraged or taking on a defeatist attitude. What we are asked to do may be, humanly speaking, impossible. But the fishermen of Galilee did it and I think we can do it too.

There are two signs of the times that tell us we must become more evangelistic. In North America and Europe, the great majority of people have fallen away from the practice of their faith. God is telling us to reach out to them, to leave the 99 and go in search of the lost one. The second sign is -- as the Holy Father pointed out in his encyclical Redemptoris Missio -- that since the Vatican Council of 1965 until 1990, when he was writing, the number of people in the world who hadn't heard of Christ or do not believe in Him had doubled. For that reason he was calling for a new missionary thrust within the Church. We used to see missionaries as people educated here who carry the Gospel to foreign countries. Today, the foreign countries come here.

The fallen away people are here. We are now living in mission territory.

C.I.: Do you find there to be a vital relationship between the English and French Churches, or is it strictly pro forma?

Exner: Well, that depends on which part of the country you live in. Out here in British Columbia, it's a much more multicultural experience. Many of our parishes have parishioners from as many as 80 different countries. Our parishes are a microcosm of the world with a high percentage of Asians. Here your question doesn't pose itself nearly in the same framework as it does in other parts of Canada. In the whole diocese we have one unilingual French parish, and two bilingual parishes. That's all.

C.I.: Is there anything you want to say about the sex scandal currently rocking the American Church? Or would you rather not touch that one with a barge pole?

Exner: What's happening in the United States right now is a real tragedy. One might ask, "Could it happen here?" Well, I think it has happened here in the late 80s and early 90s when the Mt. Cashel tragedy came to the fore. I was part of a committee commissioned by the Conference of Bishops to work on this topic and we produced two instruments -- one for use in parishes to conscientise people about sexual abuse, and one for use in the dioceses.

The document for the dioceses was called From Pain to Hope and had 50 recommendations -- for bishops, priests and parishes -- for setting up a protocol to deal with these cases in full collaboration with whatever the provincial law requires. (Those laws differ from province to province.) I think that document has helped an enormous amount. I understand in the U.S. they are now setting up more such protocols of their own and I'm confident they'll deal with it responsibly. +

This is the first in a series of interviews with Church leaders, examining the state of the Church in Canada today. Herman Goodden writes from London.