Anglican Diocese of Qu'Appelle

Diocese of Qu'Appelle
Location
Ecclesiastical province	Rupert's Land
Information
Rite	Anglican
Cathedral	St. Paul's Cathedral, Regina
Current leadership
Bishop	The Right Rev. Gregory Kerr-Wilson
Website
diocse.sasktelwebsite.net

The Diocese of Qu’Appelle in the Anglican Church of Canada lies in the southern third of the civil province of Saskatchewan and contains within its geographical boundaries some 50% of the province's population of one million.

History

Bishops Court and Anglican church, Indian Head, after 1905

The diocese was established by the Synod of the Ecclesiastical Province of Rupert's Land in 1884 at the beginning of European settlement on the Canadian prairies beyond the vicinity of Winnipeg; it geographically corresponds to the former District of Assiniboia in the then North-West Territories [sic]: indeed, until the 1970s it precisely so-corresponded, and included a strip of territory lying over the Alberta provincial boundary. This was ceded to the Diocese of Calgary.

Today approximately one-half of the civil Province of Saskatchewan’s one million residents live within the diocesan boundaries of Qu’Appelle. However, only some 10,000 of these 500,000-odd people identify as Anglican. Immigration patterns at the outset of settlement determined that the majority of Southern Saskatchewan’s people would be German Catholics and Lutherans, Scottish Presbyterians and Catholics, English and American Methodists, Ukrainian Orthodox and Catholic, to name only some of the denominations and ethnicities that constitute the vast non-Anglican majority.

St Peter's Pro-Cathedral, Qu'Appelle, interior, circa 1900

At the beginning of settlement it was unclear where the District headquarters and territorial capital would be; the diocese selected the then-burgeoning village of Qu’Appelle (then Troy), some 30 miles east of present-day Regina as the cathedral city (with the original Bishop's Court subsequently relocated to nearby Indian Head): it is in a verdant rolling parkland immediately adjacent to the Qu’Appelle Valley, amply treed with aspen and birch groves, with spring-fed creeks in lush coulees and plentiful local supplies of water.^[1] Owing to some fairly astonishing corruption by latter day standards, another site was chosen instead. The Lieutenant-Governor of the Northwest Territories, Edgar Dewdney, had purchased substantial landholdings adjacent to the future route of the Canadian Pacific Railway at what he then designated to be the site of the Territorial headquarters: what became the town of Regina, on a particularly disobliging tract of land, featureless, treeless and waterless. However, the minority English settlers at Qu'Appelle had in any case somewhat alienated the native Canadians among whom they had settled and it was perhaps sensible for the Anglican Church to make a new start in Regina.

Relations between the English immigrants of the Anglican pro-cathedral parish in Qu'Appelle and the native-Canadian Presbyterian, Methodist and Roman Catholic settlers from Ontario and Quebec were at times frosty and the Anglican Church was long referred to in some disparagement as "the English Church" by eastern Canadian settlers who perhaps regarded themselves as more authentically Canadian. Growth of the diocese was hindered in early years by a number of factors:

[E]astern Canadian dioceses did not respond in a liberal manner to the numerous appeals for financial support and volunteers. As a result, the western Canadian dioceses relied on money and manpower from the Church of England and its missionary societies. Heavy dependency on overseas help in turn created problems for the Church on the frontier: inadequate funding by far-removed committees, party divisions, the “Englishness” of the Church, a laity not used to voluntary giving, and the failure of the clergy to adjust to frontier conditions all hurt the Anglican cause.^[2]

St Chad's College building, originally the theological seminary for the Diocese of Qu'Appelle, later the premises for the Qu'Appelle Diocesan School, renamed St Chad's School in 1962 and closed in 1970

The first pro-cathedral was St Peter’s, in the village of Qu’Appelle, which in the 20th century subsided into insignificance. It became apparent very early that Qu’Appelle was not going to be an important urban centre and the diocese acquired a substantial property in Regina on College Avenue east of Broad Street.

St Chad's chapel interior. When St Chad's School closed in 1970 the bishop, whose residence was at the adjacent Bishop's Court, and the diocesan staff continued to use the chapel privately.

Meanwhile, the St Paul's, Regina was designated the pro-cathedral in 1944. By 1973 it was clear that the diocese would never be self-supporting — it had been a mission field of the English diocese of Lichfield but this had long since become unrealistic — other than by alienating its only substantial real estate, whose acquisition had been substantially underwritten by the original missioning diocese.

The former St Chad's College and boarded-up and abandoned Qu'Appelle Diocesan Synod Office, Regina, January 2010.

The diocesan property was then sold to the provincial government in the 1980s. The diocesan offices, the former St Chad's Qu'Appelle Diocesan School, the former bishop’s palace, an old people's home and other diocesan structures remained, for a time leased back from the provincial crown; the government has now itself sold the former diocesan property for residential and commercial development. (Of special interest on the property is the intended cathedral site laid out at the corner of Broad Street and College Avenue, outlined in caragana hedges.) St Paul's was upgraded to cathedral status in 1973 and a satisfactory 2-manual Casavant Frères pipe organ built in it in 1974.

The diocese has historically had a somewhat high church ethos (note photographs of interiors of the original pro-cathedral in the town of Qu'Appelle and St Chad's Chapel on the former diocesan property in Regina), with significant early input by religious orders including the Sisters of St John the Divine who operated the St Chad’s Qu’Appelle Diocesan School until it closed in 1970. The diocese was an early leader in liturgical revision, first publishing The Qu'Appelle Liturgy for local use in 1969.

Bishops of Qu'Appelle

Bishop Burn's grave, Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan

1. Adelbert John Robert Anson 1884 - 1892
2. John Burn 1893 - 1896
3. John Grisdale 1896 - 1911
4. Malcolm Taylor McAdam Harding 1911 - 1934
5. Edwin Hubert Knowles 1935 - 1950
6. Michael Edward Coleman 1950 - 1960
7. George Clarence Fredric Jackson 1960 - 1977
8. Michael Geoffrey Peers 1977 - 1986
9. Eric Bays 1986 - 1998
10. Duncan Douglas Wallace 1998 - 2005
11. Gregory Kerr-Wilson 2006 - (incumbent)

The Diocese today

Parishes

St Paul's, Regina, circa 1895

The diocese consists of 44 parishes and 109 congregations with 50 full-time, part-time, non-stipendiary and retired clergy. Urban parishes average about 300 members; rural parishes, about 150 members with two to six congregations.

Women

Women have always played a significant role in ministry and leadership; when the Anglican Church of Canada finally began ordaining women to the priesthood in 1974 there were already many women deacons occupying the role of parish minister—particularly in aboriginal parishes—although unable to celebrate Holy Communion and perform various other functions reserved to priests, and these women were immediately ordained and became the priests of their parishes. Women have held the posts of archdeacon, regional dean and honorary Canon of the Cathedral.

"The English church"

In the past the Anglican Church on the prairies had a profile, for better or worse and with greater or lesser legitimacy, of being somewhat exclusive. This was never wholly accurate, though it certainly had ample documentation: At one point Bishop Harding, the Church of England Bishop, was quoted at a meeting — when he was imprudently unaware that local Canadians were hearing his remarks — as observing that English Anglican migrants might be more attractive settlers than Presbyterian and Methodist Canadians, occasioning considerable adverse notice and animosity against the English in the general community.^[3]

In any case, nowadays parishes in the diocese of Qu’Appelle engage in substantial co-operation with Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada and United Church of Canada congregations to maintain a significant Christian presence in the community and there are numerous joint endeavours.

Aboriginal Anglicans

The diocese is approximately 15% aboriginal, a somewhat higher figure than in the population at large: the Anglican Church has always had a substantial role in ministry to aboriginal people.

The diocese was very nearly forced into bankruptcy in the 1990s by litigation on behalf of former students at aboriginal residential schools operated by the church who had credibly brought claims of abuse against them. The claims were ultimately settled nationally — Roman Catholic religious orders and dioceses were also defendants together with the federal crown, on whose behalf churches had managed such schools — and the Diocese of Qu'Appelle remains a distinctly inclusivist institution.

Prominent Qu'Appelle Anglicans

Michael Peers, a former dean, bishop and archbishop of Qu'Appelle, was Anglican Primate of Canada from 1986 to 2004.

See also

Anglicanism portal

• Anglican Church of Canada
• Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan (original see city)
• Indian Head (second location of bishop's palace)

Notes

1. ^ Qu'Appelle Historical Society (1980), Qu'Appelle : footprints to progress: a history of Qu'Appelle and district, republished online University of Calgary, Université Laval: Our Roots Nos Racines, p. 27, http://www.ourroots.ca/e/toc.aspx?id=4403 
2. ^ Trevor Powell, "Anglican Church of Canada," Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan. Retrieved 17 January 2010.
3. ^ Qu'Appelle: footprints to progress: a history of Qu'Appelle and district Retrieved 15 March 2009.

External links

• Trevor Powell, "Anglican Church of Canada" in Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan.
• Diocese of Qu'Appelle
• Anglicans Online
• Anglican Church of Canada
• University of Saskatchewan postcard views of Qu'Appelle and Indian Head inter alia (including early Anglican buildings), turn of the 20th century