“It appears that at some point, management decided that it was best to fact-check the document by sending it out to these institutions that effectively had been accused of mishandling sexual misconduct allegations,” Townsend said. Someone in the ACC’s General Synod — the staff that operates the national church and convenes its legislative conferences — circulated a draft of the story before it had been approved by survivors, all, to Townsend’s knowledge, without the permission of Anglican Journal staff.
ACCtoo’s open letter, which was drafted with the input of the survivors, says that the circulated draft “was in an unfinished state, and included personal details and email excerpts they had provided as background information that were not for publication.” It also says that information in the draft — together with the list of institutions that received it — “made it possible for the institutions to identify the survivors.”
The Anglican Church of Canada logo. Courtesy image
It had always been a given that the General Synod would be able to review a draft of the story, according to Townsend, thanks to a 2019 decision that made General Synod the Anglican Journal’s publisher and put the ACC director of communications in charge of the journal’s editor.
Proctor said Townsend informed her that the draft could be reviewed by members of the General Synod. “What we didn’t expect was that the draft, without anything back from anybody at all, would be circulated to the bishops in charge of the perpetrators … the legal representation of the dioceses that were involved, the school that was involved,” said Proctor.
Months earlier, a member of the General Synod communications team emailed Tali Folkins, then-acting editor of the Anglican Journal, asking for the names of the dioceses and institutions involved in the story. Later that day, that same communications team member promised Folkins that the article would not be shared outside the General Synod. Redacted versions of these emails were shared with RNS.
According to several sources, members of the Anglican Journal staff felt pressured to share the list of dioceses and institutions with the General Synod, but only did so with the understanding that the story draft would not be shared outside of General Synod.
In early June, both Townsend and Kidd, the author of the story, resigned. “I felt it had become necessary to indicate that I was so concerned about the situation, that as the father of a 2-month-old and with a spouse on maternity leave, I would quit my job,” said Townsend. “So I did.”
At some point, the ACC hired an investigator to review how the draft was shared, but little has been made public about the investigation. While Townsend participated in the investigation and read the final report, he has said he found the report “mostly unsatisfactory.”
Proctor told RNS she was asked to provide input into who was leading the investigation but was never told who was chosen, wasn’t invited to participate and has not seen the final report.
A social media banner for #ACCtoo. Courtesy image
By late summer 2021, Michael Buttrey and Carolyn Mackie, two doctoral candidates at the Toronto School of Theology, had caught wind of what happened, and they founded ACCtoo in response. Their open letter, written with the survivors’ input, was posted on the ACCtoo’s website on Feb. 17. The letter asks that ACC leaders release the investigative report to a representative of the survivors’ choosing, require the resignation of the ACC official responsible for circulating the draft and publish an apology in the Anglican Journal.
The primate and archbishop of the ACC, the Most Rev. Linda Nicholls, responded in a letter on Feb. 18. Nicholls wrote that the “situation” was “primarily a systemic issue” and not the responsibility of any single individual. Nicholls apologized that the “process that unfolded through our actions as an organization did not meet your expectations or the commitment of the reporter.” She offered to meet with survivors to “clarify misrepresentations in the ‘open letter.’”
The primate and the ACC director of communications, Joseph Vecsi, declined to speak with RNS for this story.
