Remi De Roo

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 the purchase of Arabian show horses and then 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 chequebook 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 traveling 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.” 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. 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. With my youthful impressions that a bishop was the