BISHOP RICHARD GAGNON’S SPIN ON LACEY LAND FIASCO: ‘UNFORTUNATE BUSINESS DEAL: whole process happened over a decade’

+++  The present Bishop of Victoria, Richard Gagnon, has characterized the Lacey land fiasco, initiated by now retired Bishop Remi De Roo, and made worse by Bishop Gagnon himself and by Bishop De Roo’s successor Bishop Raymond Roussin, as ‘an unfortunate business deal that was entered into, that should not have happened.  We all learned by these unfortunate circumstances.  It was not something that was intended to cause so much damage, but this was a whole process that happened over a decade,’ according to an article by Louise Dickson in the daily Victoria Times Colonist newspaper, reprinted in the April number of Island Catholic News. ++  It is not clear what, if anything concrete, the bishop has learned, nor is it clear whether the bishop was referring, in this strange revisionistic compounding of the sad tale, to the initial mistakes made by De Roo, or to those of Roussin and Gagnon himself when he referred to a ‘process that happened over a decade.’  Dickson wrote that ‘between 1988 and 1992, Bishop Remi De Roo of the Victoria Diocese invested about $2 million in the Arabian horse deal with [Joseph] Finley.’  ++  In a front page article by Victoria Catholic writer Steve Weatherbe in the April 21 edition of the B. C. Catholic newsweekly entitled ‘Vancouver I. diocese clear of legal tangle: Washington Supreme Court ends Victoria land saga after 11 years,’ Bishop Gagnon is quoted as saying: ‘we are very delighted at this favourable conclusion of 10 years of litigation.’  The disparity between the number in the subhead and the number mentioned by the bishop is typical of the cavalier disregard for the strict facts that has characterized the behaviour of all three of these bishops with respect to this nightmare.  ++  It is strangely familiar but repugnant, this sporting triumphalistic language of victory for something very worldly and irrelevant to the propagation of the Gospel in this Diocese, something shameful that happened in a foreign secular court.  We have heard this type of chest-thumping before from this bishop.  Oddly, the end of Weatherbe’s article has the bishop giving a caveat: “We have learned not to predict what Mr. Finley will do.”  I wonder where the victory is found when there is always a nagging doubt that one’s enemy will strike again, and what all this has to do with the Gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ?  +++