Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Babych began his career as a broadcast journalist. He started out at a radio station in Weyburn, Sask., and went on to work at radio and television stations in Calgary, Edmonton, Regina and Saskatoon.

Later in his career, he switched to print media, first writing for The Prairie Messenger, a Benedictine Catholic newspaper in Muenster, Sask. In 1992, he became the first Parliament Hill correspondent for the Canadian Catholic News, a news-sharing co-operative run by seven large Catholic newspapers in Canada. He was the first religion reporter to be accredited by the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery.

Before his retirement in 2015, he was the editor of Crosstalk for 10 years, working with Bishop Peter Coffin and Bishop John Chapman as publishers during those years. During that time, he won numerous awards as a writer, editor and photographer from the Canadian Church Press as well as the Associated Church Press in the U.S. He also helped the Anglican Journal cover several General Synods.

An excellent photographer, Babych continued to pursue photography as a freelancer, and his family wrote in a memorial that it was his passion.

The current Crosstalk editor is grateful for his kind advice and generousity sharing his excellent photos with the newspaper in recent years.

He is mourned by his wife Marilyn, son Darren, daughter Crystal (Greg Lilbourne), and stepson Michael Emond (Hanady Rahme & Gabe), as well as his grandson and many nieces and nephews.

A former journalist himself, Bishop Bruce Myers of the Anglican Diocese of Quebec shared this memory and prayer: “Before Art and I crossed paths in churchland as diocesan editors, we’d already worked alongside each other as parliamentary correspondents in Ottawa in the mid 90s, grinding out copy each day a few desks from each other in what was known as the Hot Room in the Centre Block on Parliament Hill. He was a great colleague and gifted journalist in both contexts. Rest eternal grant unto him, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon him.”

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The Rev. Julian Campbell has been appointed Rector of Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Wichita, in the Diocese of Kansas, effective Jan. 13, 2025.

The Rev. Stephanie McWatt has been appointed full-time Assistant Curate at the Parish of St Helen’s Orleans for the term Nov. 27, 2024 to July 31, 2025.

Staff news

Amy Elliot has been hired as the administrative assistant for the diocesan Property and Asset Management department. She has a background in providing high-level administrative support and years of experience in the Ottawa non-profit community.

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The Rev. Karen McBride will be ordained on Nov. 30, in the Church of Julian of Norwich, and Bishop Shane Parker has announced his intention to appoint her as Incumbent of the Parish of Julian of Norwich, effective Dec. 1, 2024.

Shauna Young has been appointed as the executive director of Belong Ottawa, effective Sept. 9, 2024. Shauna has a background in nursing, mediation, direct service, and organization development. Her years of experience have focused on the areas of mental health, community service, and program development. Shauna will be succeeding Rachel Robinson, who will continue to serve as outgoing executive director until her retirement on Sept. 30.

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The Rev. Mark Lewis has been appointed Regional Dean of East Ontario, effective Mar. 1.

Karen McBride has been recognized as a postulant for ordination in our diocese, effective Feb. 8, 2024.

The Rev. Victoria Scott has been appointed Regional Dean of Central Ottawa, effective Mar. 1.

The Rev. Margo Whittaker has been appointed Priest-in-Charge (part-time) of All Saints Church, Greely, effective April 7, 2024.

Marcela Hurtado has been appointed as diocesan Donor Relations and Development Officer.

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The Rev. Dr. Anne Quick is retiring (for the second time), effective April 15, 2024.

Staff News

Staff from Ascension House visited and helped out at Centre 105 in Cornwall, Ont. in late January. 

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Reem Abu Afieh has been appointed case manager for the Refugee Ministry office. Reem has extensive experience assisting refugees working as a volunteer with the Kanata Muslim Association (KMA), St. John’s Anglican Church and Kanata Stitsville Refugee Sponsorship Group (KSRSG) and assisting government sponsored refugees. In 2016, she was named Citizen of the Year for Kanata North. “Helping my fellow humans is my passion,” she told Crosstalk. “It is an honor to work with the Diocese and the Refugee Ministry Office, which gives life, hope, and future to refugees.”

Reem succeeds Safiyah Rochelle who left her position as case manager in July to accept a position as Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies at York University.

Regina Silva has been appointed as digital communications co-ordinator for the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa. Regina has a diploma in public relations from Algonquin College. Prior to joining the diocese, she was a communications officer with the Royal Mental Health Foundation, an experience that introduced her to the “power of collaboration and the importance of good digital initiatives in the non-profit sector.” She told Crosstalk she was drawn to this opportunity with the diocese by its strong sense of community and the opportunity to make a meaningful difference.

Heather Fawcett was appointed as the Executive Director of the Ottawa Pastoral Counselling Centre, effective May 15, 2023. (See full story in the issue.)

Paul Lex was appointed director of human resources for the diocese in May. After graduating with a law degree from the University of London in the U.K., he moved to China where he began working in human resources. Work with a company that imported food from Europe and North America took him back to his home country of Germany, then to Hong Kong, and then to Canada during the pandemic. Aside from the professional aspects of his new position, Paul said one of the things that drew him to working with the diocese was that working for a church felt familiar. “My mom works at the parish office back home, so I’ve been kind of around the church side of things for all my life,” he explained. In fact, the house where they lived in Munich was owned by that Catholic parish, so “I was literally growing up on church grounds.” He and his wife have adapted to Canadian life and enjoy outdoor activities such as skiing and hiking that living in Ottawa offers.

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Hamway has extensive experience in marketing and communications across both non-profit and business organizations. She was the founder and chief marketing officer of her Ottawa-based integrated marketing and communications firm Infuse Five and has also directed communications for national associations.

 She kindly answered a few questions from Crosstalk to help us introduce her to readers:

Q  What drew you to this opportunity at the Diocese?

I believe that effective communication is key to the success of any organization, and I am passionate about bringing my skills and experience to help our diocese achieve its goals.

One of the main reasons I was drawn to this role is that the values of this organization align closely with my own personal values. Spirituality and community can be powerful influences in bringing people together.

Q What experience do you feel best prepared you for your new role? 

My successful track record of over 20 years in communications, marketing, and development, both in the corporate and not-for-profit sectors, has equipped me with both insight and a fresh perspective. Organizations have valued my depth and breadth of experience along with my professional and business focused approach. My curiosities fuel my interests in building meaningful relationships and finding better ways to reach goals.

Q What are you excited about or looking forward to?

I am particularly excited about the opportunity to reshape the communications and development department and to create a strategy that aligns with the diocese’s new strategic plan. I believe with the right plan in place we can greatly increase the reach and impact of this organization and make a real difference in people’s lives and across our diocese. 

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“Sharron has been a key person in the process that has brought the three Anglican Day Programs of Ottawa under one management board and one executive director, which will bode extremely well for the future of these programs,” the Rev. Canon Dr. PJ Hobbs, director general of the Community Ministries, told Crosstalk. “She has managed the change with remarkable calm, critical questioning and an undying commitment to the work of the ministries.”

It was Hobbs who first asked Hamilton to apply to join the management board of The Well in 2015 when he heard she had retired. “Sharron was a parishioner at Christ Church Bells Corners, where I served as Incumbent for 12 years… It was very evident that Sharron had great leadership ability but also had the respect of so many people in the parish, and I think that has come to be true in the Community Ministries and the Day Programs,” he said. “When I came into this office and we needed members for the management board for The Well, I immediately thought of Sharron because I knew what a difference she could make.”

At that time, The Well was planning some strategic planning, “Strategic planning was one of the things I did at work as well as project planning, so having just retired I was looking for volunteer work,” she said. “It was such a good fit.”

Then in 2017, the chair of management board of The Well stepped down and Hamilton became the new chair. 

Not long after, however, the executive director of St. Luke’s Table left. The Well’s executive director Rachel Robinson was asked to be an interim director for St. Luke’s while the Community Ministries Committee set up a task force to determine whether they should hire a new director or merge the two agencies under one executive director and management board. When the board decided in favour of the merger, Robinson stayed on as executive director of both The Well and St. Luke’s Table.

At the time, Canon Monica Patten chaired the management board for St. Luke’s Table, so she and Hamilton worked together to merge the two management boards. “We had two separate strategic plans and different priorities, so we had to work together and determine a way forward that still met the needs of The Well and St. Luke’s Table,” says Hamilton. When Patten stepped down at the end of that year, Hamilton became the de facto chair for both “The Well and St. Luke’s Table.”

It was only about a year after that when the executive director for Centre 454 left to take another position, and the committee had to decide between hiring anew or merging Centre 454 with the other two agencies. “We had proved that merging two day programs worked really well,” Hamilton said. The committee decided to merge all three day programs. For a time, Hamilton co-chaired with Centre 454 chair the Rev. Rhonda Waters until Waters too stepped down, making Hamilton the chair for all three agencies.

And then there was the pandemic to contend with. Hamilton points out that typically when organizations merge, time is needed for  planning, prioritizing and organizational development, but there was no time for any of that because when the pandemic hit, Robinson and the staff suddenly had to figure out how to care for participants and provide food outdoors.  Hamilton has high praise for Hobbs, Robinson and all of the staff. “They rented a van and went out and delivered the food to our participants on the street and in their homes, still serving those most vulnerable in our city,”

When asked what she has enjoyed most in her roles, Hamilton says it is the opportunities to see the ministries in action first-hand. “When I was working on the board at The Well… I loved to go in, especially at Christmas time, and serve lunch to the participants, …talk with them, be of service and have a meal with them…. learning more about what each of the day programs offer to each of the participants and how much it is needed and how much it is appreciated.”

Hamilton said this is a good time for her to step down. “The board is in a really good place. They have a really good plan to move forward, so I feel good knowing that I did my part and it is in good hands.”

Hamilton continues to volunteer at Christ Church Bells Corners, her parish for almost four decades, and she has agreed to be assistant lay director for the Cursillo Movement.

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 “I’ve been mixed up in this work for decades, and to my surprise, I have quite a bit of the corporate memory,” he told Crosstalk. 

Bishop Lackey first recruited MacKay to be a vice-Chancellor at an outdoor meeting when the Chancellor and vice-chancellor at the time were not present. “The bishop asked me how long I had been a lawyer, and I had just passed the 10-year anniversary, which is the minimum requirement to be a chancellor or vice-chancellor, so I was appointed on the spot as vice-chancellor and remained so until the other vice-chancellors resigned or died,” he explained.

Bishop Shane Parker paid tribute to MacKay describing him as, “a humble, faithful, and highly intelligent man, who readily shared his extensive legal knowledge with our diocese for over four decades. His deliberate choice to become a general practitioner early in his career made him perfectly suited to advising on the surprisingly wide range of legal matters we face as a diverse, active diocese. From relatively simple property matters to complex and difficult issues, Robin invariably speaks from the experience he gained as a lawyer who served people from all walks of life.”

MacKay also retired from his law firm in December due to some health issues.

The bishop went on to add, “Robin moves easily from attentive listening to astute advising, and his sense of humour is never far beneath the always-respectful surface of his personality. I will always be grateful for the many times I worked with Robin over the years, and for all I learned from him.”

MacKay said he was first drawn to law as a career because he saw it as a helping profession. For the most part, it fulfilled that aim, he said. “But my practice has been unconventional. It was mainly driven by whoever came in the door. My only specialty has been non-profit housing. I have quite a few clients who are housing co-ops or non-profit housing providers.”

He was on the founding board of Cornerstone Housing for Women. “That was when we incorporated. We formed a corporation to own the new building. It is pretty unusual to have that kind of ministry operated directly by the Diocese,” MacKay really wanted Cornerstone to incorporate because “the liabilities were scary,” he said. “Initially, there was a lot of resistance to that idea….The advantage of corporation is that it comes with a ready-made legal structure that donors and lenders recognize….You have two separate entities, if one gets in trouble it doesn’t drag the other one down with it.” His idea prevailed and had served both organizations well. MacKay added that it was “a real treat to work with [Canon] Sue Garvey.

As chancellor, MacKay worked closely with Bishop John Chapman, who said people in the church might only see the chancellor answering the occasional procedural question at Synod, but that is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The church, “both budgetary wise and structurally is a huge institution. There’s so much activity happening under the surface and it’s the kind of activity that more often than not requires legal expertise. That’s the work nobody ever gets to see… regarding employment or institutional change or institutional structures, and so the hours and hours that he has given to that work is beyond description really…. His devotion to the life and vitality of this diocese is unparalleled.”

MacKay helped guide the Diocese during the difficult times when some parishes left the church over the issue of blessing same-sex marriages and the related issue of church properties. Both he and Bishop Chapman were sued personally. 

“We formed a committee and we decided what principles are we trying to defend,” MacKay recalled. “One of them was that we wanted Centre 454 to be permitted to return to St. Albans. St. George’s really wanted their building. They had money so we set a price, and they purchased it from the Diocese. So, in a way, it seemed to satisfy everyone.”  MacKay said helping the Diocese resolve that problem without going to court is one the parts of his work of which he is most proud.  

MacKay grew up in the Presbyterian Church, but his wife, the Rev. Canon Rhondda MacKay (retired), introduced him to the Anglican Church when they were in university. “I loved the Anglican liturgy, the seasons, the formal prayers,” he said. Another highlight of his time serving the church was when he was appointed as a lay canon. “Rhondda is a canon, and we were able to sit beside each other in these special seats in the cathedral,” he said.

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