Notes from the breadline . . .

OK, so I'm not on the breadline. Yet. But I wanted to get your attention. I don't stand in line for free bread. I still buy my peasant bread for $12 a loaf from Floran, my Transylvanian baker in Kitsilano. But I ration myself to one slice a day. Things are getting tough. I'm into my sixth month of unemployment. My allotment of UI cheques runs out next month. I'm down to my last 8K in savings. Yesterday, for the first time ever, I bought a lottery ticket. I lost. I wake up every morning at six in a funk. How many days have I got left before the entire superstructure of my life comes crashing down? Okay, that's melodramatic. I'm in a semi-dream state, and in that state, everything is ragged. But the dread of joblessness is beginning to consume me. As Slappy White said: "The trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up in the morning you're on the job."

First, a little bit about myself. I'm 60 and in great health. I'm presentable. I have a resume to die for. Check it out. I have hair, I look okay in a suit, and I know which fork to use at a dinner table. There are a dozen things I can do well, for money (and benefits.) But I'm not doing them. What's that all about? My savings are running out and my credit cards are maxed and that Sour Hour between six and seven in the morning is getting worse. The walls are closing in. I'm getting defensive. (Notice how I emphasized my "great" health after I told you I'm 60.)

Have another look at the picture above. I believe that's Justice in the breadline. Justice is going begging. It's the damned unfairness of it all. I feel myself shrinking. "Unemployment," said Mason Cooley, "diminishes people." I put on my ego in the morning and it doesn't fit anymore. The other day I was helping my son Gabriel mow a neighbor's lawn--he's trying to start a gardening business--and I thought: "Hey, maybe I could do this, for eight bucks an hour." From Visiting Professor to the common vetch (a garden weed) in five years; how the worm has turned.

So I went to Poynter Online, and read Colleen's Help Column. And one of her many pieces of Advice to the Jobless is "Keep a Journal." It's a way of staying in touch with yourself, or reminding yourself that you're moving ahead. Also, it's a way of taking those daily quantum units of job-search frustration, reducing them to a few simple words and then dismissing them as insignificant. To be honest, there's also a bit of petulance at work there: Look, cruel world, what you have reduced me to!

It's also something to do. It's Defoe's Plague Diary. Notes of a Fan. Chronicles of Wasted Time.

So here's my journal. I'll try to keep it simple. No chewing of the furniture, no eruptions of hurt or rage. You'll have to read the sentiment between the lines. And you'll know that when it ends (if it ends?) I'll have found work and my Seldon Crisis will be over. (Seldon Crisis: See Isaac Asimov.)

Thursday, May 21, 2002

Start day by checking email. A woman with information about my proposed documentary (hereafter referred to as PD) has contacted me on Facebook. She wants more detail about my project. I tell her we should communicate by email, because Facebook is "too public." (I've been working on my PD for three months--more about that later.)

I spend five minutes emailing the head of the media department at a local university. Do they have any openings for media trainers, or teachers for that matter? I go through the daily Media Job Search Canada listings. Example: "Senior Network Analyst, CBC Montreal" I do a quick scan of Jeff Gaulin's Jobsite. It's a desert out there. I have breakfast (single slice of peasant bread, buttered) and read about a journalist who wrote a book, made some money, and decided to travel the US with a pool hustler for a year, looking for action.

Yesterday, on the advice of a newspaper buddy, I wrote a short note to a high-profile PR company, telling them a bit about me, and asking about media training jobs. I'll be happy to get so much as an acknowledgement of receipt. You have to understand that I've been doing this daily, for months, and only one in 12 prospective employers even go to the effort of telling you they're received your application. (Here you'll have to read between the lines to sample my emotion.)

Monday, May 25

While bottom-feeding, came across an online men's magazine called JimberJaw that's looking for hip, edgy, sexy articles on such soul-catching subjects as Where to Pick up Girls, Where to Find a Great Cigar, and New Gadgets the New Male Can't Do Without. (JimberJaw is a caveman who's brought to life after being frozen for 50,000 years, and the publication admires his "simple thinking"--all he apparently wants is a Bud, a broad and a gadget) I enquire about such things as payment, kill fee, expenses, etc. The answer comes quickly "$25 per article--300 words. No kill fee. Payment only for articles accepted." I'm surprised they don't offer payment in the form of flints, or a jawbone . . . Gardening is sounding like more of an option every day.

Also inquired about a British-based website that specializes in "wind power and other alternative energy" stories, and is looking for somebody, anywhere, a self-starter, to work for 2 days a week. They promise "competitive" wages. I sent them my CV and my day rate. Haha.

Sunday, June 14

Maybe I should just roll with it. John Patrick Shanley, speaking at a commencement ceremony, says that you just need to tell everybody that you're a poet. Copy Walt Whitman. "Whitman never worked a day in his life." Instead of sweating in the unemployment line, sit under a tree and compose a verse. Presto: You are living gainfully. You are adding to the fluency and harmony of the cosmos. As someone else said, reality is only a matter of how you language it.

Saturday, August 1

Month and a half since the last posting, and little change. No movement on the documentary, no interest in Alkali Lake (unless you count $75 from The Tyee as interest), and little progress in the Sydney Banks retrospective. His "stakeholders" want a budget for a legacy video, but I'm getting silence from Bill. Driving me up the wall. Meanwhile, I wait for the Mary Aikins at Readers Digest to respond to a pitch on three stories: Jade (a pickup from BC Business), Alkali and Banks. But it's like glaciers moving. Nobody responds to anything. My rage is building. Magi thinks I'm falling apart--her theory is I'm looking for "no parking." I have to open up and allow success to come in! Meanwhile, the vault is almost empty. And I've emailed The Chelsea tenants to sound them out on buying the condo . . .

Just another "bad" Indian?

Christopher Pauchay, the Saskatchewan man who left his two young children to freeze to death on a native reserve in 2008, begins a three-year penitentiary term this month. That makes him a “criminal” under Canadian law, subject to all the sanctions that come with this label. But to a small group of people close to him, and to a growing number of Canadians who believe in restorative justice, Pauchay is less a criminal than a victim—a man in need of healing, not hard time.

Prison, they believe, may only criminalize Pauchay further. And a prison term won’t do anything to repair the physical and emotional scars that his homicidal carelessness left on the Yellow Quill First Nation. That healing work will have to wait at least until Pauchay is released. "How,” asked elder Howard Walker, “can we begin a community healing if we are apart from one another – if he's not here with us?"

A select group of two dozen neighbors—in a sense, a jury of Pauchay’s peers—believed in their hearts that they had a a better, more remedial alternative to prison. They were turned away because, some critics say, our justice system is myopic when it comes to aboriginal culture. We are fixated on punishment rather than restoring.

This is not an easy position to advance. What Pauchay did on the weekend of Jan. 27, 2008, was repugnant on so many levels. After an evening of heavy drinking, Pauchay, the only parent at home, carried his two young children—Kaydance, 3, and Santana, 1—outside in freezing winter weather. We still don’t know why. The children were dressed only in shirts and diapers.

Pauchay says he remembers nothing else. He was found incoherent and nearly frozen to death on a neighbor’s doorstep. Early afternoon the next day, from his hospital bed, he asked about his daughters. A few hours later, searchers found Santana’s body in the snow. They found Kaydance 16 hours later, also frozen.

Pauchay is an alcoholic. He has 51 prior criminal convictions. Before sentencing him, Provincial Court Judge Robin Morgan said the accused lacked “insight” into the reasons for his anti-social behavior. He is clearly not a model citizen. And he’s not wise to the ways of the non-aboriginal world. He told the judge that even though he was in a drunken stupor when he lost his children in the -50C degree night, their death was an “accident.” And he compounded the mistake by telling the judge that “jail isn’t the place for me.”

These statements may not be “insightful,” to a judge’s ear, but they are very likely true. Nobody doubted that Pauchay loved his kids and that he had absolutely no intention of harming them. And prison probably won’t cure his addictions. (Addiction programs in prison are voluntary.) But under our justice system, Pauchay’s kind of truth-telling didn’t help his cause. Judges and juries would rather hear remorse and some earnest self-recrimination. We like to believe that even addicts make free choices between right and wrong, for which they must be held accountable. But Pauchay didn't buy into that, and it cost him.

In the end, with everything stacked against him, and facing a malevolent white population, Pauchay considered himself lucky to get three years. He could have gotten seven.

Some say he shouldn’t have gotten a day.

Simon Fraser University Criminologist Liz Elliott told me the three-year sentence was counter-productive and short-sighted, catering to a “macho politics of longer, tougher stiffer sentences.” (Disclosure: Neither Elliott or I attended Pauchay’s trial, or the sentencing.)

In a kinder, more compassionate universe, Pauchay would have been handed over to his neighbors, as they requested. He would have undergone treatment under their care, and been required to work with tribal elders to counsel young natives tempted by drugs and alcohol.

That was the recommendation of a Yellow Quill sentencing circle—a form of restorative justice in which friends, family and tribal elders come together to help “heal” one of their own. After all, Pauchay was a product of a seriously troubled community, riven by unemployment, alcoholism, and a host of other problems.

So the people of Yellow Quill suggested a life sentence of healing and counselling, under their watchful eyes. Pauchay, they said, had already been punished enough. In the words of Yellow Quill Chief Larry Cashene: “The moment Christopher woke up (after his children’s death) was the moment he started his sentence.”

They spoke of forgiveness, rather than punishment. The judge thanked them. And he sent Pauchay to prison anyway.

“It was a slap in the face,” George Peequaquat, one of Christopher’s neighbors, said of the three-year sentence. “They said, we’re going to let you go through the motions, but we’ve already made our decision.”

The Yellow Quill natives, and Pauchay’s lawyer, Ron Piche, have to choose their words carefully. Judges in Canada don’t take kindly to criticism. But the general feeling is that Pauchay was condemned as much by the force of popular feeling among the non-aboriginal community, as by his negligence.

Even before the trial started, Provincial Justice Minister Don Morgan told the Saskatchewan legislature that it would be “highly troubling” if someone with Pauchay’s record received anything less than a prison term.

With that kind of political interjection, it’s hardly surprising that the feeling among Saskatchewan’s non-aboriginal community took on a vigilante tone. The CBC website received more than 800 comments about the story of his sentencing, many of them of the “throw-away-the-key” variety. Some of the comments were borderline lynch-mob.
(http://www.cbc.ca/canada/saskatchewan/story/2009/03/06/sk-pauchay-sentence.html)
Canadians, it seems, are fiercely wedded to their concepts of retributive justice. “No more chances,” was one typical remark. “Protect the rest of us from him.”

But some commentators watching the news from a distance took a different line. In Carcross, Yukon, Harold Gatensby, a long-time proponent of aboriginal justice, labelled the judge’s decision an act of “interference.”

“The struggles going on in the native community that were generated by the Queen’s Law, will not be fixed by it,” he told me. “The community will (fix the struggles.) These are our children, not the government’s.”

In an email, the criminologist Liz Elliott said a prison sentence may provide immediate public gratification. But what happens down the road? “When Christopher Pauchay is released from prison," she said, " with all of the new problems he will have to contend with, it is highly unlikely that anyone from the court will be there to help him and the Yellow Quill community with his reintegration, or with the obvious meaningful changes that need to occur for that community to become healthy.”

She said the annual cost of $80,000 to keep Pauchay behind bars would be much better spent on alleviating the conditions in native communities like Yellow Quill, a hamlet of 120 families who live in conditions that you find in some Third World countries.

THE GET-TOUGH FALLACY

Critics of our existing justice system say that the people demanding longer, harsher sentences are ignoring an important fact: Tough justice doesn’t make for safer communities. Even a two-time Commissioner of Correctional Services, Ole Ingstrup. admitted that the deterrent value of more and longer prison sentences was almost non-existent. Ingstrup retired in 2000, criticized for his “liberal” views regarding incarceration and his embrace of the idea of restorative justice.

Nevertheless, we as a society remain locked in the belief that the answer to reducing crime is to throw more people behind bars for longer periods. In Saskatchewan, natives make up a tenth of the general population, but more than two-thirds of the prison population. That’s a shocking statistic—it says as much about the failure of “white” justice as it does about aboriginal criminality. And more than half of those inmates go back into prison within four years of their release. We are creating an entire criminalized culture.

In his book American Furies, journalist Sasha Abramsky focuses on the US penal system, but some of his most damning conclusions apply equally well to Canada. “Can a country’s democratic institutions survive,” he asks, “when the primary emotion underlying so much of its social policy . . . is revenge?”

Other critics of the justice system say that by advocating tougher sentences, we are worshipping at the “church of payback” with little concern about how the conditions in our institutions affect inmates.

The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, author of Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, said the state needs prisons because it’s the best way “to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body.” Prisons are places where the “civil servants of moral orthopedics” can better perform “experiments” on men and women. Their inability to rehabilitate doesn’t matter. The prisons are monuments to the state’s monopoly on power, warehouses of human failure, and even though they don’t “help” inmates, they help us, the grateful voters, to sleep a little easier, at least for a while. Says Liz Elliott: “Punishment is for everybody else.”

THE HISTORY OF CIRCLES

Sentencing circles aren’t that new. In fact, they’ve been a part of Canadian law since 1996. That’s when the government began funding the circles as part of an Aboriginal Justice Strategy. And that’s when the Supreme Court of Canada spoke positively about the “notions of community-based sanction and restorative justice.”

Other voices echoed that sentiment. The Law Commission of Canada, for one, took aboriginal culture into consideration when it acknowledged in 1999 that under the existing Criminal Code “crime is objectified and abstracted from the social context in which it took place.” In other words, crime is of the community, and may be dealt with in and by the community.

Indeed, preferential sentencing is in the Criminal Code. Section 718.2(e) says that "all available sanctions other than imprisonment that are reasonable in the circumstances should be considered for all offenders, with particular attention to the circumstances of aboriginal offenders."

And Judge Barry Stuart, a vocal proponent of aboriginal-sensitive justice who has conducted hundreds of sentencing circles, said that circle sentencing and other community justice processes “do spectacularly better than formal justice agencies.”

So why, then, are native Canadians like Pauchay, so needing of restorative help, still thrown into prison? Because judges still have the final word of punishment, because paternalism is still entrenched in law, as it is in most of the institutions that touch on aboriginal life.

Rupert Ross is an Ontario prosecutor who has made a life study of the aboriginal way of justice. In his highly-regarded book Returning to the Teachings, Ross says we do an injustice to law-breakers, native or otherwise, when he deal with them strictly as “offenders.”

Ross argues from the perspective of 21 years of court duty in the remote First Nations of northwestern Ontario. There he found social traumatization that was so severe, and so pervasive, that he came to believe that the criminal justice system as we know it may actually be an obstacle to community healing. He blames the legacy of the residential schools and other forms of colonization for the alcoholism, violence and sexual abuse in native communities. He won't comment on the Pauchay case, but he believes that the corrosive effect of colonization is transmitted through generations. (Or as Murray Ironchild expressed it: "We didn't commit a sin, but it was passed through us . . . by the priests and the Indian agents.")

“I don’t know how to lock up and torture only the ‘offender-parts’ of people,” Ross writes, “while comforting the hurt parts, teaching the curious parts, nourishing the starved parts, unearthing the hidden parts, emboldening the cautious parts, and inspiring the dreaming parts.

“I worry that whatever I do to the offender-part will make it harder still to touch and encourage all the others, much less restore balances between them.”

Balancing all the parts of Christopher Pauchay, the damaged parts and those still intact, will require a mix of compassion, firmness, continuity, trust and love.

Those are things he won’t find in the nation’s prisons. But he may find them in his community. As a nation, we’ve already taken the first tentative steps towards a system of justice that meets aboriginal needs, a system that’s humane enough to see that Pauchay is a victim, as much as wrong-doer. Why undermine those strategies now?

The Frontline Doctor and the Unknown Soldier

Cpl. Kevin Megeney, a 25-year-old reservist from Stellarton, Nova Scotia, died two years ago, of a gunshot wound in the chest, in a medical tent at Kandahar Airport, in Afghanistan. More than 60 other Canadian servicemen have died in combat since then, but we still don’t know the full circumstances of Cpl. Megeney’s death.

We don’t know why he died. But we know how, in a description of graphic, hair-raising, heart-stopping detail that evokes the fiction of Dalton Trumbo, or medical reports from US Civil War battlefields. We know that his lungs bulged out of the chest incision, “inflating and deflating,” and we know that liters of blood poured out of his chest wound in a “gelatinous heap.” We know that Megeney had red hair and blue eyes and that he looked “cheerful even in death.”

The Canadian surgeon who tried to save him called the Megeney shooting “another blue-on-blue”—military jargon for “friendly fire” which is itself a distasteful jargon for the aberration of one soldier killing a comrade-in-arms, reasons unknown. (A court-martial is scheduled for this June.)

These observations into Cpl. Megeney’s death appeared near the end of a 2007 article in the San Francisco-based magazine Mother Jones, an article written by Dr. Kevin Patterson of Saltspring Island, entitled Talk to Me Like My Father: Frontline Medicine in Afghanistan.

The Canadian Forces make no apology for the fact that, two years after the corporal’s death, we still don’t know what prompted the shooting. Investigations into “friendly fire” incidents, it seems, unfold in extreme slow-motion, at a pace that seems designed to flatten adverse publicity. By comparison, the military inquiry into Dr. Patterson’s act of non-fiction was nearly instantaneous. Before the end of October, 2007, a so-called Summary Investigation found that Patterson had committed a “breach of patient confidentiality.” A copy went to the BC College of Physicians and Surgeons, Patterson’s professional regulating body.

And the College itself took more than a year before ruling that Patterson had indeed broken the doctor’s code by naming the dead soldier. He was reprimanded, fined, and told to brush up on medical ethics. As part of the deal, Patterson apologized to the Megeney family, and confessed to having made a “bad decision.”

Patterson was also put on a kind of creative probation: In any future writing, journalism or otherwise, he would not include the names of patients, or use information that that could identify patients. (Interestingly, the deal says nothing about Patterson’s freedom to divulge names, or details, with a patient’s approval.)

Patterson gets litle sympathy from fellow doctors, or from the arbitrers of professional ethics. They all fall back on Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who said, “All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession . . . I will keep secret and will never reveal.” I talked to several doctors and ethicists, and they all agreed that Patterson should not have used Megeney’s name, or details that could have revealed his identity.
Dr. Gabor Mate, a well-known commentator on social issues, said flatly that without doctor-patient confidentiality “there is no basis for a healing relationship.” And bio-ethicist Dr. Margaret Somerville of McGill University had no time for the argument that the horrors of war need greater exposure. “The problem is, that’s the argument that should have been put to the Megeney family (to get their permission) before the article was printed,” Dr. Somerville said. “It’s a valid argument but it definitely doesn’t take precedence here.”

Stephen Ward, a professor of journalism ethics at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, is not so sure. He said that telling the story of the death of Cpl. Megeney, in all its gore, may serve a “greater good”— giving citizens needed insight into the “nitty-gritty” of the soldier’s experience in wartime. “If the writing has anything to do with the pressures placed on the soldier,” Ward said, “then it’s good to know. We are too often accused of sanitizing war.”

The “we” in Ward’s quote, of course, are journalists, and Kevin Patterson is not a journalist. He is a civilian doctor who, in effect, keeps a journal, and shares this journal with his readers. (He is also an accomplished author of fiction and non-fiction.) Should he not, then, get a special dispensation from Hippocrates’ inflexible rule of “Never tell?”

Patterson put forward this argument himself shortly after his article was published in 2007, as the controversy began to build. “It is necessary,” he wrote, “to face with open eyes the grotesque nature of war trauma. The recent disengagement and fatigue of the public with these matters is itself grotesque.” Who better to chronicle the “grotesque trauma” than the nurses and doctors who have to treat the wounded, often under extreme conditions? The military, sensitive to any news that may hurt recruiting, certainly won’t tell these stories. And embedded journalists with the Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan are well aware of the price of breaking military rules about disclosure: you’re on the next flight home.

Leaving Cpl. Megeney’s name out of the Mother Jones article, of course, would not have protected his anonymity, since Canadian newspaper readers had already knew the soldier’s name, and knew that he died from friendly fire. All that Patterson added to the story, were the medical details of his final minutes of life.

Tom Maddix, an ethicist with Providence Health, said using Megeney’s name was unnecessary. “Stories have great power,” he said. “and the exact name of the person is not the issue.” Professor Ward disagreed. He said using the name gave the story credibility and authority.

It’s instructive that it was the Canadian Forces, and not Megeney’s family, that provoked the investigation into Patterson’s conduct. Mother Jones magazine contacted the soldier’s family in Nova Scotia before the magazine hit the streets, to alert them to what was coming.

Clara Jeffery, the Mother Jones editor, says she spoke with Karen Megeney, the soldier’s mother, by phone. As she wrote in the magazine’s blog: “She assured me that the family would like to see the article, and that she was a nurse and would read it before any other members of her family; she said it would help to have closure to know more about what happened. We heard from other members of the family who also wanted to read it, and some whom after they did expressed the desire to write to Dr. Patterson ‘to express my appreciation to him for exhausting every effort to save [him]’."

It was only later, after the Canadian Forces completed their investigation, and the College of Physicians weighed in, that the Megeneys went public with their displeasure.

The Canadian military took a uncompromising zero-tolerance approach to Dr. Patterson, even though he was a civilian volunteer a war zone. “The issue here is entirely about medical ethics, not military law or discipline,” a Canadian Forces spokesman told me. Did the Megeney family bring an official complaint to the military about the Mother Jones article? “The family was not happy,” is all the CF spokesman would say.

All arguments about the need for patient confidentiality aside, should the Canadian Forces be the sole judge of what information can and should be released about how soldiers live and die in foreign lands? Is there not a case to be made for the claim that the stories of the war dead belong to all of us, since we have a moral, physical and spiritual investment in their sacrifice? Is it not arguable that in some cases, their names, and their violent stories, should transcend our norms of “privacy?”

Is a policy of official silence not at least as grotesque as the stories of how soldiers die?

POSTSCRIPT: On July 30, 2009, a military jury found Cpl. Matthew Wilcox guilty of criminal negligence causing death. Wilcox shared a tent with Megeney at Kandahar Airport. Testimony at the hearing showed that the two men were playing a game of "quick draw" when Wilcox's pistol discharged on March 6, 2007. Wilcox argued that he fired in self-defence. Military analyst Michelle Drapeau said the ruling matched the crime and that the charges are among the harshest that a soldier can face.

"The fact that this was done (by) his hand, in a camp where ammunition should not have been available and should not have been loaded into a weapon to begin with, all that would have come to the fore and taken into account when the panel fundamentally decided he was guilty of two of the three charges," Drapeau said.

Wilcox faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

If you would like to follow the discussion of this article, please go to The Tyee.

The Bonehead Bishop

Late last year, while most of us were obsessing about Barack Obama and the collapsing housing market, tens of thousands of traditional Catholics around the world were spending hours at prayer. Over the course of a month, in fact, they tallied up 1.7 million “rosaries”—those 55 little glass beads on a string, each of which represent a “Hail Mary” or an “Our Father.”

It was a tsunami of supplication--a lobbying effort to shake up the Vatican in Rome. What these old-school Catholics wanted was for Pope Benedict XVI to lift, after 20 years, the excommunication order on a group of slightly wacky fundamentalist bishops who call themselves the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX)

Somebody Up There must have been listening because, earlier this year, the Pope did exactly that: moved by prayer, or politics, or perversity, Benedict lifted the yoke of excommunication from the breakaway clergymen, the first important step in welcoming them back into the Roman Catholic Church.

Now normally this wouldn’t be a big deal. Schisms come and schisms go, and the quarrels of bishops don’t count for too much in the modern world. But there was a wild card in this story, and his name was Richard Williamson, and his loose tongue set off an international storm that seriously scuffed the image of the 1.1 billion-member Catholic Church.

Before I go on, a disclosure. I’m a (lapsed) Catholic, and this story has its roots in my hometown of Sherbrooke, Quebec. There, as a youngster, I was an altar boy, and I could recite the service of the Mass in the perfectly-enunciated Latin. Like my mother and sister, and a billion other Catholics, I obediently worshipped in a language that I couldn’t understand, but that was okay. It was ritual, it was holy, it was our version of talking in tongues.

Then, in the mid-60s, Vatican II came along and changed everything. That church council launched a whole series of reforms; most notably, the Mass would henceforth be said not in Latin, but in the language of the faithful. What that ushered in, then, was an English Mass, a French Mass, a Spanish Mass, and so on. It was a break with two millennia of tradition. (The Council also got rid of fish Fridays—the silliest tradition of them all.)

No big deal, you’d think. God understands all languages. But wrong. It was a very big deal for the traditionalists. They said No. They saw a vernacular Mass as the ugly face of modernity. It took the “mystery” out of the Mass and out of the priesthood: “Dominus vobiscum” carries a lot more holy bang that “The Lord be with you.” So the holdouts for traditional organized themselves into groups like the SSPX, and they continued to celebrate the mass in Latin. Over time the Vatican grew vexed at this challenge to its authority, and excommunicated them. (Excommunication means exclusion from the sacraments of the church. It’s a kind of exile, a holy blacklist.)

A year later, on April 5, 1989, the story really heated up. That’s when one of the excommunicated bishops, Richard Williamson-- dour, humorless, a Brit who wears his arrogance like a badge--visited the local SSPX church in Sherbrooke. Williamson was on an Eastern Canada tour to beat the drum of traditional values. There was a small congregation in attendance at Our Lady of Lourdes Church, maybe 20 or 30 people. They were there expecting the usual polemic against modernism. Instead, Williamson dropped a bombshell.

“There was not one Jew killed in a gas chamber,” the bishop declared. “It is all lies, lies, lies.”

“The Jews created the Holocaust so we would prostrate ourselves on our knees before them and approve of their new state of Israel.”

A local reporter in the audience, Rossana Coriandoli, was stunned. She’d heard that Williamson was going to say something controversial, but this was over the top. “It was very creepy,” she recollected recently, 20 years later. She didn't remember much else, except that when she looked around at the congregation “no one seemed outraged.”

Sherbrooke has a tiny Jewish population, but when one of them, Dr. Alan Fein, read Williamson’s comments in the paper the next day, he was furious. He felt the bishop was promoting anti-Semitic hate, and should have been deported. “So I called the RCMP and the anti-defamation league,” he told the local newspaper at the time.

The RCMP looked into it, but decided there was not enough evidence to prosecute Williamson for hate propaganda. They couldn’t find a tape recording of his remarks.

The next day the bishop moved on to Montreal where he decried rock and roll music, drugs, nuns “behaving like dancing girls,” and other evils of modernity. Probably aware of Montreal’s sizeable and influential Jewish community, however, Williamson had nothing further to say about the Nazi death camps.

Fast forward 20 years. It’s January, 2009, and Pope Benedict decides the time is right to invite the traditionalists of the SSPX back into the fold. So in the name of Church unity, the Vatican “re-communicates” four SSPX bishops, including Richard Williamson. But the Vatican, incredibly, fails to do a routine background check. (Or else, it doesn’t care.)

The result is a head-on collision with the Internet Age. An Israeli news agency Googles the words “Bishop Richard Williamson” and up pop the quotes from his “lies, lies, lies” Sherbooke sermon in 1989. There’s also an interview with Swedish TV last November in which he repeats his no-gas-chamber nonsense, and says that only 300,000 Jews were killed, not six million. There are headlines of outrage all over the world: What was the Church thinking when it invited this Neanderthal back in from the cold?

Relations between the Vatican and Jews have never been very good. This made things much worse. Vatican officials pleaded that they were unaware of Williamson’s Holocaust heresy. The bishop is told to recant his most outrageous remarks--to wear the figurative hair shirt--or risk spending the rest of his life in that wilderness occupied by defrocked and disgraced clergymen. (Meanwhile, the notorious Swedish interview already has more than 100,000 hits on YouTube, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6C9BuXe2RM)

Is the Williamson affair a blip, an honest oversight by the Vatican, or is there a discernible pattern here? You be the judge: Two weeks ago, Pope Benedict promoted an Austrian bishop, Gerhard Maria Wagner, who believes that homosexuality is curable, and that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God to clean out the “spiritual pollution” of New Orleans. Anyone who’s visited the poor black neighborhoods that were submerged by Katrina knows how offensive this comment is. On Feb. 15, after another firestorm of controversy, Wagner had the good sense to resign.

Although I no longer practice the faith, I’ve never lost my fascination with the way the world’s oldest institution manages its affairs. One of its tactics, in moments of stress, is Earnest Denial. I contacted the Catholic archdiocese in Sherbrooke to get their take on the Williamson scandal. Sorry, they said, nobody remembered a thing about the bishop's 1989 visit. I called the local chapter of the SSPX and they mumbled “no comment.” They directed me to the order’s Superior-General in Ontario, but he was “unavailable due to travel.” It’s almost as if everybody was hoping this little incident would fall between the cracks of history.

Here in BC, the SSPX has only a few hundred followers, with churches in Langley and in Nanaimo. When I asked the regional prior, Fr. Loren Gerspacher, about the Williamson affair, his voice dropped to a whisper, he said the bishop was a “very respected” member of the society, but he was not at liberty to say anything more.

I had other questions, like, why would the Roman Catholic Church invite a bigoted Holocaust-denying misogynist back into the fold, and excommunicate people like the American Catholic activist, Father Roy Bourgeois, who advocates for the ordination of women into the priesthood? The answer, I fear, is obvious: Williamson’s thinking is more aligned to the mindset of the old boys in Rome with the funny hats, than is the thinking of an activist priest who believes in the equality of women. A strain of anti-Semitism, prompted by the false conviction that the Jews killed Jesus, has never been far from the heart of traditional right-wing Catholic orthodoxy.

It is so, and always has been thus. The Williamson affair was triggered by simple-minded historical revisionism, but it’s really about the age-old struggle within Christianity of yesterday versus today, pope-ocracy versus democracy, the mediaeval versus the modern. And to the discredit of the Catholic Church, the medieval rarely goes without a fight.

Postscript: Following the controversy, Williamson was sacked from the directorship of the Le Reja seminary in Argentina by the head of the Latin American chapter of the SSPX. Days later, the Argentinian government ordered him to leave the country, or face expulsion. The suggestion was that he had not been forthright about his “true motives” for being in the country.