The more things rearrange, the more they stay the same.The amalgamation of the former Catholic dioceses of Halifax and Yarmouth appears to have been a seamless, uneventful transition.
“Nothing whatsoever” has changed since the reunification of the dioceses in December, says Victor LeBlanc, a longtime parishioner of St. Bernard’s Church in the District of Clare in the southwestern part of the province.
“The people don’t seem to mind it,” says LeBlanc, who has lived “forever” in Belliveaus Cove.
LeBlanc’s parish was part of the former Yarmouth diocese, carved out of the Halifax archdiocese in 1953 at a time when regional and linguistic diversities were more pronounced in the province and in the Catholic Church.
In the 1950s, Halifax Archbishop John T. McNally vigorously championed the cause of transforming Saint Mary’s College into a respected university.
Deacon Bob Britton, chancellor of the archdiocese since 1999, says the record essentially shows that McNally “mortgaged most of the assets of the diocese” on the university dream.
“The only way he could pay it was to put a levy on all the parishes. The francophone parishes down in southwest Nova, they really wanted to get (Universite) Sainte-Anne off the ground. They were kind of frustrated that they were being forced to pay for Saint Mary’s.”
The university issue was the catalyst behind a movement for seceding from the Halifax archdiocese.
“It gathered momentum and Rome concluded it was the best thing to do,” Britton said. “The world has changed a lot since then.”
The world of the early 1950s created a Yarmouth diocese encompassing the counties of Yarmouth, Digby, Annapolis, Shelburne, Kings and the District of Clare.
A teenager at the time, LeBlanc remembers a lot of talk about the new diocese.
“People were really pleased that there was a bishop down here in Yarmouth,” he said.
But the writing has been on the cathedral wall for the diocese of Yarmouth since 2001, when its last bishop, James Wingle, departed to assume similar duties in the diocese of St. Catharines, Ont.
“Even then, the intention was to put the two dioceses together,” Britton said.
Yet the Yarmouth diocese lingered throughout the 2000s, albeit an entity pastorally administered by the Halifax archdiocese. Claude Champagne, an auxiliary bishop to the Halifax archdiocese, resided in Yarmouth until 2009.
“That kind of conveyed an image that Yarmouth had their own bishop,” Britton said. “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s got to be a duck. It’s the perception of people. That probably confused things.”
With the arrival of Archbishop Anthony Mancini to Halifax in 2007 and the subsequent departure of Bishop Champagne, the archdiocese soon had its amalgamation ducks in a row.
“The major reason (for amalgamation) was around the pastoral kinds of issues,” Britton said. “The pastoral issues would be that the economy of southwest Nova has changed with a significant out-migration, so attendance at parishes was declining. Their ability to provide all the pastoral services of a diocese was becoming more and more limited. And when the diocese of Yarmouth was set up, travel was a bit of an issue. Travel is no longer an issue. You can get to Yarmouth (from Halifax) in three hours. With the pattern of shifting population and different pastoral needs, (amalgamation) is what made practical sense.”
Britton points out that the union of dioceses is ecclesial, not civic.
“The union of the two dioceses is a church reality, in terms of how we define ourselves internally within the church. The archdiocese of Halifax, because it lives in the real world and has to pay people and is bound by certain civil laws and building codes, et cetera, because you have to buy insurance and all those things, not much different than any business, you set up a civil corporation to do the business part. What we’re doing right now is we’re running two (separate) business parts but one church for pastoral, theological, canonical, liturgical reasons. There is one bishop and the bishop is head of two civil corporations.”
While the archdiocese determines what to do business-wise in the future, dual corporations means no money flows from one former diocese to the other.
Conversely, the ecclesial reality of a united diocese has pastors transferring to different regions of the province. This summer marked the first pastoral appointments of the amalgamated archdiocese.
“Some former Yarmouth priests came to Halifax and some former Halifax priests went to Yarmouth, and we actually have one priest who has a parish in the former Halifax and a parish in the former Yarmouth diocese, Liverpool and Shelburne. That’s the new reality.”
The reality is that the transition back to one archdiocese has been fairly smooth.
“I would say yes, but it’s not finished,” Britton said. “It’s in the process. In the process, we’re learning a whole lot.”
Throughout the process, there have been few visible changes.
“Probably nothing,” Britton said of any changes discernible from the pews. “The parishioners tend to relate primarily within their own parishes. For their faith, that’s where the rubber hits the road. Their concrete expression of their faith is in that particular community, so in terms of the next level up, it impacts only slightly.”
Britton said there is a concerted effort to recognize the two major linguistic groups that make up the archdiocese.
“There were some concerns from the francophone community about what impact it would have on their identity. We’ve tried to do everything that we possibly can to not lose that element within the archdiocese. The times that we found ourselves in a situation where we forgot, we’ve been reminded and I’m grateful for that. It’s the reality of who we are.”
Despite joining a diocese that encompasses the counties of Halifax, Hants, Colchester, Cumberland, Queens and Lunenburg, LeBlanc doesn’t see absorption into a larger English conglomeration as a concern for most Catholics in his end of the province.
The declining number of priests and the empty pews are more disquieting.
Seeing his pastor serving four different churches, LeBlanc echoes a lament familiar to most denominations.
“The younger people just don’t go to church.”