May 28th: The Rector’s Vacation
St. Matthias’ was officially founded as a mission of St. George’s, Place du Canada, in 1873, which means our community is 150 this year! For the next 12 months, we’ll be diving into the archives to shine the spotlight on particularly interesting parts of our history.
A note from G. Morrie, a member of the parish advisory board responsible for overseeing a collection for the Rector’s vacation in 1949
In July of 1949, then-rector Rev. Gilbert Oliver set out for England to take a well-deserved vacation, and, while he was there, to see about recruiting a young curate to become his assistant. The recruitment was ultimately unsuccessful, but the vacation, the first that we have on record, was part of a larger move through the 1940s to see our clergy as needing more than just their stipends. An appeal to the advisory board raised $623 (a little over $8,000 in today’s dollars) for Rev. Oliver’s vacation, but St. Matthias’ wardens and treasurers already knew that single appeals were not sustainable
1949 was a landmark year for clergy benefits at St. Matthias’: that year, Vestry approved the work of a 1948 committee to establish a retirement fund for the rector, which began its life with $1148 (almost $15,000 today). For over a decade, it had become increasingly obvious that the work of being St. Matthias’ rector was too much for any one person to handle, even if they had Rev. Oliver’s energy, and with that awareness of the rector’s human limitations came others. Rev. Oliver’s predecessor, Rev. Edward Bushell, had retired only a handful of years before he passed away, but the wardens had every reason to believe that Rev. Oliver and his successors would carry on living for quite a while.
This series of realisations, which prompted the purchase of a car in 1951 and 1956 and the purchase of a rectory in 1945, was perhaps not entirely due to internal realisations or even Rev. Oliver’s frank discussion of his own needs. The 1940s in Canada were a time of heightened labour union activity, including a landmark strike at the Windsor Ford plant in 1945 that was key to the first vacation legislation in Canada. While St. Matthias’ had never been a working-class parish, certainly the members would have been aware of these larger forces, which may have played into their decisions in the second half of the decade to begin offering benefits. Canon law only entitles clergy to housing, and the Church Temporalities Act, which governs our governance, is entirely silent even on the subject of clergy remuneration.
When it comes to remuneration, the Diocese does provide a stipend scale, part of which is written into canon law and part of which is subject to change based on inflation. Our archives indicate that we have interpreted the stipendiary scale very generously: in 1901-2, Rev. Bushell earned $1650 with a $500 housing allowance ($43,000 and $13,000 respectively); Rev. Oliver earned $4000 with a $1000 housing allowance ($68,000 and $17,000) in 1930 and split $6085 ($103,000) with visiting clergy in 1947. By the time Rev. Jack Doidge was rector in 1971, his stipend was $16,772 with a $2100 housing allowance and $3000 automobile allowance ($127,000, $16,000, and $23,000). In 1971, we were also paying $1080 (a little over $8,000) a year to our retired clergy, covering all of the current clergy’s and office staff’s insurance, and had about $14,500 ($110,000) in our retirement fund.
It's important to note that these figures are stipends, legally, and not salaries. Nowhere in canon law or in the Church Temporalities Act are clergy understood to be employees, and, indeed, in a case involving a Roman Catholic priest in 2015, a Quebec tribunal ruled that clergy are not employed: they have vocations. They are thus not afforded the protections of labour law and are not entitled to hazard pay, medical compensation, or even vacations.
It is significant that even in the days when labour law was still coming into being, the wardens and advisory board of St. Matthias’ thought that our clergy deserved to be able to retire, to have their medical expenses covered, and to take time to rest. Certainly, the clergy of St. Matthias’ have always worked hard, whether incumbents, students, honorary assistants, curates, or interims, and as summer approaches, we can look forward to our current hard-working rector taking vacation without us having to raise special funds for it!