Northern priest trades in Anglican faith for Catholic calling

Last Updated: Tuesday, January 16, 2007 | 10:13 AM CT

CBC News

After 29 years as an Anglican priest, Don Flumerfelt will lead a Catholic church in the Sahtu region of the Northwest Territories.

When he is ordained in February, he will become the territory's first Catholic priest who is married with children.

Flumerfelt said he made the decision after taking a break from his Anglican ministry to deal with family issues, including his daughter's illness and mother's death.

During the difficult time, Flumerfelt said he received a lot of support from the Catholic church and began to feel a strong connection to the faith.

"Clearly I had some choices of conscience to make," Flumerfelt told CBC News this week. "I had some choices of what do I do with my ministry for the future, and I didn't know how that would rebuild after I came back to Yellowknife."

N.W.T. Bishop Denis Croteau took Flumerfelt under his wing, taking his case all the way to Rome, where permission was given for the ordination of the married man.

"I pushed so hard because Don felt he was called," Croteau said. "It's a vocation. It's a call. And if you have the call, you don't want to drop it in mid-course."

In Canada, there are a few dozen married priests who have been ordained by the Catholic church, said Timothy Scott, a Catholic priest and president of Saint Joseph's College in Edmonton.

"This has become a little bit more common in the past 20 years, particularly because of the Anglican church," Scott said in an interview.

"There were significant struggles within the Anglican communion over issues of the ordination of women to the priesthood, and also some issues around sexual ethics, so some Anglican priests have not been able to accept these changes and have asked to enter the Roman Catholic church and indeed to be ordained."

Internationally, hundreds of married priests from other Christian faiths have been ordained by the Catholics in recent years, he said.