Cardinal Frank Leo has given the archdiocese’s 224 parishes two tasks for the year ahead, running to 2027: establish a pastoral council that actually works, and take a hard look at how they are doing.
This is the opening stage of Filling the Jars to the Brim, a pastoral plan for Canada’s largest English-speaking archdiocese that will run until 2033.
That year, the Church will mark two thousand years since the Passion and Resurrection of Christ with the Jubilee of Redemption.
The plan takes its name from the Wedding Feast at Cana, where the servants fill six stone jars with water ‘to the brim’.
Each jar stands for a pastoral priority, with one receiving particular attention each year from 2027 to 2033: Family Life at All Stages; Social Outreach to the Poor, Sick and Vulnerable; Prayer, Spirituality and Sacramental Life; Catechesis and Formation; Vocations and Charisms: Discernment and Promotion; and Youth and Young Adults.
Before that work begins, Leo has devoted a full year to ‘listening, discernment and assessment through pastoral councils at the archdiocesan and parish levels, in a spirit of authentic synodality’.
Parishes are being asked to take stock before launching anything new.
The groundwork began in 2023. On 25 March, in his installation homily at St Michael’s Cathedral, the Montreal-born archbishop, whose parents are Italian, told the congregation: ‘I will listen to you.’
About 3,450 people responded to a consultation launched that October.
Most were lay Catholics, but priests, permanent deacons, seminarians and members of religious communities also took part.
Thirteen priorities emerged, including Catholic identity, parish participation, prayer and sacramental life, liturgy, hospitality, evangelisation, priestly support, social outreach, young people, catechesis, engagement with culture, family life and vocations.
A further consultation involved 216 priests.
In 2025, an advisory committee of laypeople, consecrated persons, priests and deacons, followed by a smaller working group, condensed those concerns into the six jars.
The result is a more focused plan, but some of the original concerns no longer have a heading of their own. Priestly support is one of them.
The first priority is to get pastoral councils working.
The archdiocese will establish a council of its own, and every parish must have one that functions properly. This goes further than the Code of Canon Law requires as a general rule.
Canon 511 envisages a diocesan pastoral council where pastoral circumstances warrant one; under canon 536, a parish council is established when the bishop considers it appropriate, after consulting the presbyteral council.
Leo has now made that choice for the whole archdiocese. The challenge will be to ensure that the councils do more than exist on paper.
The plan is precise about what these bodies can and cannot do. Pastoral councils are consultative: they have no governing authority, do not run day-to-day operations and must remain separate from finance councils and parish staff meetings.
Members will not be elected. Instead, they will be appointed by the bishop or parish priest following a process of discernment that may involve nominations and consultation.
They must be in full communion with the Church, show sound faith, morals and judgement, and take an active part in sacramental life.
Councils should reflect the ages, cultures and backgrounds of their communities, but members are not there to speak for particular interest groups.
In the document’s words, councils should be representative ‘without becoming a body of representatives’. Pressure groups and lobbying have no place in them.
There will be written statutes, compulsory formation for members and meetings that begin with Scripture and allow time for silence.
The councils will also use the synodal method known as ‘conversation in the Spirit’.
Such attention to procedure is characteristic of a bishop who served as general secretary of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops between 2015 and 2021.
Leo is opening up consultation while leaving the limits of decision-making authority clearly in place.
The approach also invites comparison with the disputes surrounding Germany’s Synodal Path, particularly over the powers of participatory bodies and their relationship with bishops.
The second task is to assess parish life. Each council must consider the six priorities and ask what is already being done, what works, what is missing and which questions remain unanswered.
The exercise will draw on Mass attendance, sacramental statistics, Catholic school enrolment and demographic trends, alongside multilingual questionnaires where possible, small-group listening sessions and conversations with parish priests, headteachers and ministry leaders.
It should also reach those rarely seen in church life: older people, the sick, newcomers and people on the margins. The suggested questions are pointed.
Are difficulties at home affecting young people’s involvement? Is poor adult formation holding back vocational discernment?
At the end, each council must identify two or three pressing needs and publish a written account of its findings. Only then should it start planning.
The point is to judge existing activities by what they achieve, rather than assume they are worthwhile simply because they have always been there.
The figures provide a starting point. According to the 2025 parish statistics, around 1.6 million of the archdiocese’s 6.5 million residents are Catholic.
That year saw 11,384 baptisms, 6,913 funerals and 2,002 marriages, but only three priestly ordinations.
There are 392 diocesan priests, of whom 273 live within the archdiocese, as well as 374 priests belonging to religious institutes.
The archdiocese has 224 parishes and quasi-parishes, 24 missions, 489 Catholic primary schools and 97 secondary schools.
The approach is strikingly similar to the one Pope Leo XIV put forward for the Diocese of Rome. At St John Lateran on 18 September 2026, opening the new pastoral year, he said: ‘I am not delivering a new pastoral programme to you today.’
He called instead for ‘a shared method of listening, discernment, evaluation and conversion’, adding: ‘the art of pastoral evaluation does not ask you to do more: on the contrary, it gives you permission to do less and do it better’.
Toronto is taking much the same approach, but setting it out in a seven-year plan of roughly 100 pages, with detailed expectations for the archdiocese and its parishes, from marriage preparation to university chaplaincy.
There is a tension here: ‘doing less, but better’ now comes with a substantial list of things to do.
Whether the assessment leads parishes to drop work that is no longer useful, or simply adds to their workload, remains to be seen.
One omission stands out. Priestly support, one of the thirteen original priorities, has not survived as a priority in its own right.
Priests feature in the section on vocations, scheduled for 2031–2032, where parishes are encouraged to foster environments in which they are ‘visibly joyful and accessible’, so that others might consider following their example.
Their witness matters, but there is much less about who supports priests through the pressures of ministry: heavy workloads, isolation, continuing formation and personal support.
The need was raised during the consultation, yet it has no dedicated place among the final six priorities.
That is particularly striking in light of what parish priests will be expected to do in the first year: set up or revive councils, oversee statutes, appointments and formation, gather information, organise listening sessions and questionnaires, and report the findings back to parishioners.
The plan warns against overburdening those involved in the assessment, but says far less about the workload of those who will have to lead it.
Pope Leo XIV made precisely this point at St John Lateran: ‘A community in which everything depends on the parish priest is a fragile community’, and ‘presiding does not mean doing everything’.
Pastoral councils will encourage genuine shared responsibility only if they also spread the work. Otherwise, a parish priest may simply find himself running another committee.
The timetable raises another question. Youth and Young Adults will be the focus only in the final year, 2032–2033, although young people were among the concerns raised in 2023.
Someone who was 16 when they took part in that consultation will be 25 by the time the youth year arrives.
The plan stresses that all six priorities will be pursued throughout, even when one takes centre stage. Even so, the order matters: it helps shape where attention, people and resources go.
Putting young people last is a decision whose consequences will need to be examined.
Leo wants parishes to look into their jars, acknowledge frankly where they are empty and share the results.
The exercise will mean something only if it also addresses the questions that have slipped to the edges of the plan.
In 2023, Catholics in Toronto said that priests needed support.
Now those same priests are being asked to carry much of the plan into practice.
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