FAITH, HOPE & CHARITY
Over almost 175 years, St. Stephen’s Church has survived fires and floods, riots and relocations. Now, like so many other churches in a city once known for its steeples, it has reached the end of the line. And that means the Open Door day shelter it once
Irish settlers infected with typhus. Windows smashed by rioters. A fire that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Those were the early parish years in Griffintown. Then repeated flood waters spurred an exodus to higher ground — to a location in lower Westmount that St. Stephen’s has occupied since 1898. Now, its doors are closing forever, and with it a chunk of history. And the Open Door day shelter, which has found refuge there for 30 years, will need to adapt in a new location. Marian Scott reports.
Your eyes take a few seconds to adjust to the dim lighting in St. Stephen’s Church in lower Westmount. Men and women are stretched out on the carved wooden pews, fast asleep. Others are helping themselves to a hot lunch of stew, rice and vegetables, or gazing at computers set up along the side wall. Nero, a 6-year-old pit bull-pug mix, snoozes on a pew as his owner, Greg Jones, manages the front desk. “This was the only shelter that did not have a policy on dogs,” says Jones, 52, who spends most nights catching 40 winks at downtown coffee shops to avoid having to leave Nero tied up outside. Welcome to the Open Door. For 30 years, the day centre in the red brick Anglican church at the corner of Dorchester Blvd. and Atwater Ave. has provided a haven for the city’s unwanted. That will change on Monday, when it moves to a new location, in the basement of Notre-Dame-de-la-Salette Catholic Church on Parc Ave. Its departure marks the end of the line for St. Stephen’s, founded 174 years ago in the Griffintown district. Two years ago, the 115-year old church building was deconsecrated and sold for $2.4 million to developer Stanford Properties Group, which has also acquired Trinity Memorial Church in Notre Dame de Grâce. The church and adjacent rectory, which are protected by Westmount’s heritage bylaws, will be renovated and transformed into a rental-apartment complex, says owner Angelo Pasto. Pasto let the Open Door stay on while it searched for a new location, says David Chapman, director of the Open Door. “Four out of five churches were not even interested to have a conversation about a homeless place,” he says. “I see what we’re doing as something the church has always aspired to do, which is look after people in the real and challenging situations they find themselves in.” Unlike most other shelters, the Open Door accepts clients even if they are intoxicated or acting erratically. Forty per cent of those who use it are Inuit and frequent the area near St. Stephen’s, around Cabot Square on Ste-Catherine St. W. A former Anglican priest who worked in northern Saskatchewan, Chapman, 44, is sharply critical of how organized religions have treated First Nations people, particularly their involvement in residential schools. “I don’t tell people I worked as a priest. It just brings back memories of trauma,” he says. Over almost 175 years, St. Stephen’s Church has survived fires and floods, riots and relocations. Now, like so many others in a city once renowned for its proliferation of steeples, it has reached the final chapter. “This is the first time I was ever in a city where you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window. Yet I was told that you were going to build one more. I said the scheme is good, but where are you going to find room?” — Mark Twain, on a visit to Montreal in 1881 How do you mark the death of a church? Do you recall the baptisms, weddings and funerals? The Christmas bazaars, the Scout troops that met in the basement, the fundraisers for a new roof? The quavering voices singing old, familiar hymns, the empty pews? As executive archdeacon of the Anglican Diocese of Montreal, Robert Camara faces hard choices on dwindling congregations and crumbling buildings. “Every church is teetering,” he says, pointing to the recent closings of Trinity Church and the Church of the Advent on de Maisonneuve Blvd. W. at Wood Ave. While a handful of churches remain vibrant, like St. Thomas’s on Somerled Ave. in N.D.G., partly by attracting congregants from parishes that have closed, the overwhelming majority are in decline, he says. The Montreal diocese, stretching from the Eastern Townships to Ontario and from the Laurentians to the U.S. border, dropped from 96,000 members in 1960 to 8,205 members in 2016, the last year for which statistics are available from the diocese. From 2015 to 2016 alone, it decreased by 7.1 per cent. The loss of membership and revenues come as many of Montreal’s historic Anglican churches are in an advanced state of deterioration, Camara says. It’s a problem afflicting every denomination, he notes. In October, Mountainside United Church on The Boulevard in Westmount, formerly the Dominion-Douglas, announced it had been sold to a developer for $4 million. “These are heritage buildings. They are architecturally beautiful, but the upkeep is outrageous,” Camara says. Quebec’s Conseil du patrimoine religieux will spend $15 million this year to help preserve religious heritage buildings across the province. But that is just “a drop in the bucket” compared to the needs, he says. “The cost of maintaining and restoring these historic buildings is incredibly expensive,” Camara says, noting the high cost of hiring restoration specialists. Meanwhile, the debate over same-sex unions and the ordination of LGBT clergy has torn Anglicans apart. In 2009, 80 per cent of St. Stephen’s congregation broke away over the issue. It was not the first split in a congregation that has been no stranger to controversy. “‘The city below the hill’ … is the dwelling place of the masses. … (It) is the home of the craftsman, of the manual wage-earner, of the mechanic and the clerk, and three-quarters of its population belong to this, the real industrial class.” — Herbert Brown Ames, The City Below the Hill, 1897 Now dotted by condo towers, Griffintown was a working-class suburb on the outskirts of Montreal in 1834, when the Anglican Church began holding religious services in a rented building on Wellington St. The district’s Irish inhabitants were a rowdy lot. In 1844, they disrupted a ceremony where the governor general, Sir Charles Metcalfe, was to lay the cornerstone for a permanent Anglican church on Dalhousie St., just south of Ottawa St. Tempers flared over a floral arch decorated with orange lilies — an Irish Protestant symbol. The attackers broke benches and knocked the cornerstone out of its harness, forcing organizers to postpone the event. Three years later, St. Ann’s Chapel, as the church was initially known, was at the epicentre of a humanitarian disaster — the arrival of thousands of Irish immigrants fleeing famine and infected with typhus. “I saw them dying by the dozen, by the score. While I bent over to take a last message, they died. While I held their hands, they died,” later recalled Rev. Jacob Ellegood, who became rector in 1848. He later officiated at the dedication of the Black Rock near the Victoria Bridge honouring the city’s 6,000 typhus victims. Ellegood was an adherent of “muscular Christianity,” a movement originating in England that preached the virtues of healthy living and outdoor sports. A vegetarian for many years, the cheerful parson visited his parishioners regularly, stopping at every corner while making his rounds to take several deep breaths. One of the first golf players in North America, he was presented with a new set of golf clubs for his 80th birthday. In 1849, an angry English-speaking mob burned down the parliament building in Montreal to protest a bill compensating people who had lost property during the 1837-38 Rebellions. As a result, Montreal lost the status as capital of Canada it had held since 1844. Support for the rioters ran high in the church, a stronghold of the Orange Order. “The congregation of St. Ann’s Church included many irascible people who sympathized with the lawless class of that period,” a parishioner recalled in 1890. They appointed a delegation to ask Ellegood to omit the usual prayer for the governor general, Lord Elgin, who had incurred the mob’s fury by sanctioning the Rebellion Losses Bill. Ellegood diplomatically said that if Elgin had erred, it was all the more reason to pray for him, and anyway, it was his duty to do so. The delegation conceded the pastor was right, but said they hoped “you will excuse us if we don’t say Amen.” “A fearful fire devastated a large portion of Griffintown, a suburb of this city, on Saturday afternoon last, at which the helplessness of man to arrest a conflagration, when it gathers strength, was terribly illustrated.” — Montreal Witness, June 17, 1850
On June 15, 1850, fire swept through Griffintown, destroying 207 buildings, including St. Ann’s Church. Burning shingles from its wooden spire spread the blaze. But for the church, the disaster turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The insurance money paid off its heavy debt, and donations for a new church poured in from Montreal, the rest of Canada and Britain. Meanwhile, construction began on a Roman Catholic church to serve the area. The new church, also called St. Ann’s, opened in 1854. To avoid confusion, the Anglican one changed its name to St. Stephen’s. On June 11, 1853, a mob broke the windows of St. Stephen’s Church during the Gavazzi riots. Two days earlier, rioters had attacked another Protestant church in Montreal where Italian patriot Father Alessandro Gavazzi, a renegade monk who had converted to Protestantism, was speaking. As the congregation fled, troops fired on the retreating crowd, killing 10 people, a tragedy many blamed on the mayor, Charles Wilson. One evening in 1861, Ellegood was preaching when an assistant whispered that flood waters were rising around the church. The parson told the congregation to remain calm. Accompanied by his curate, he waded into the icy water, coming up to his neck in places, to reach the home of the mayor, Charles-Séraphin Rodier. Ellegood asked Rodier to order out police to rescue the congregation. He delivered the mayor’s order to the police station before going home to jump into a hot bath. By the next day, Ellegood was back in his flooded parish, delivering bread to stranded residents. Griffintown repeatedly experienced flooding during the 19th century, caused by ice jams in the river. In the 20th century, port improvements, and later icebreakers, solved the problem. In 1864, Ellegood became the founding rector of St. James the Apostle Church on Ste-Catherine St. W. at Bishop St. British officers who played cricket in the fields that then surrounded the church dubbed it St. Cricket’s in the Fields. He remained rector of St. James and physically active until his death in 1911 at age 87. “On the 21st inst. the funeral took place, the cortège, one of the largest ever seen in Montreal, leaving the residence of the family on Wellington street at half past two, and proceeding to St. Stephen’s Church … The Archdeacon … made suitable reference to the career of Mr. McCulloch as a good fireman, a good Christian and an exemplary citizen.” — article on the funeral of Francis McCulloch, assistant fire chief of Montreal, in The Dominion Illustrated, May 31, 1890 In 1884, St. Stephen’s moved into a magnificent new church on Inspector St. near the Haymarket (now a police station across from the Lowney condo building), a couple of blocks north of its original location. The Gothic-style church included a Sunday school, library, YMCA meeting rooms and parochial school classrooms. But as the district became increasingly industrialized, residents were moving away. Severe flooding in 1886 and 1887 spurred an exodus of parishioners to higher ground in the west end. In 1898, the rector, Archdeacon Lewis Evans, urged a move to lower Westmount. Later that year, most of the congregation moved to a new chapel (later used as a church hall) on its current site. The present church was built in 1903. But part of the congregation resisted, asserting its right to stay in the Griffintown church, renamed St. Edward’s. Pressured to sell and turn over the proceeds, St. Edwards sued, claiming its right to the building. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled in St. Edward’s favour in 1912. It remained open until 1950. “At a time when many churches are reading their own eulogies, a local congregation that almost closed 20 years ago is now almost bursting at the seams with young people.” — Montreal Gazette, March 30, 1995 By the late 1960s, St. Stephen’s Church was in steep decline. In 1974, it was sold it to a developer. But local residents rallied to save it. In 1975, the new Anglican bishop, Reginald Hollis, cancelled the sale and brought in Robin Guinness, a 37-year-old evangelical pastor, to turn things around. “It just took off,” says Heather Doucet, 63, who started attending St. Stephen’s along with her future husband, Terry, in 1976. “The next thing you knew, people just started coming. It was a place where people were really trying to live out their faith. We started a school for the ministry. We had speakers on Saturday. We had a soup and bread lunch, and fellowship groups,” she recalls. “Out of that came the Open Door,” Doucet says. St. Stephen’s became a poster child for church renewal, with a drum-playing curate, Nick Brotherwood, and lively services that drew university students and young professionals. But while attendance surged, the building was crumbling. In 2002, the parish hall — which had become so structurally unsound, the Open Door had moved into the main sanctuary — was torn down. Meanwhile, cracks were emerging between the evangelical congregation and Anglican leaders over same-sex unions and LGBT ordination. “When the Anglican Church came out and took a stand on homosexuality, we decided we had to make a decision, either to stay or leave the Anglican Church,” Doucet says. “I had kept my head in the sand. I never thought the congregation would split over that topic. We did split. Eighty per cent of the congregation left. I decided to stay,” she says. The group that left founded Emmaus Church in N.D.G., affiliated with the Anglican Network in Canada, which rejects the mainstream Anglican Church’s liberal stances. The 20 or so congregation members who remained hung on for seven years, coping with fires, urgent repairs and infestations of bedbugs at the Open Door. “It was actually the bedbugs that tipped the scale in the end,” Doucet says. “We said, ‘We need to realize we tried to make a go of it but it just doesn’t seem to be viable.’ “It still is very painful for me, very sad. I keep going over it in my mind.” Despite the split, she has remained friends with many in Emmaus Church, which is still responsible for the Open Door. “I think we all still feel sad about how it played out and wished it could have gone another way,” she says. In January 2017, St. Stephen’s Parish was merged with St. James the Apostle (now called St. Jax), the distant parish Canon Ellegood had founded in 1863. With a Styrofoam plate of food in his hands and two pairs of slacks tucked under his arm, Chapman heads out to Atwater métro station, where Elisapee, a regular at the Open Door, is sleeping next to a wall. He wakes her to show her what he’s brought. She opens her eyes for a few seconds but closes them again without speaking. At the top of an escalator in the métro exit, a young woman is having a meltdown. “F--k you! F--k you! F--k you!” she screams. “Maria, it’s great to see you!” says an unfazed Chapman, giving her a hug. She buries her head in his shoulder, dissolving in tears. “It is so easy to judge, but when you get to know the people here, you learn it has not been an easy story. You would not want to trade places,” he says on the way back to the church. “I love serving the people here. You get to meet some of the most beautiful people. The beauty is in their spirit. It’s in their resilience and it’s in their courage,” he says. St. Stephen’s might not be officially classified as a church anymore, Chapman notes. “However in practice, it’s broadly serving the human good more than it ever has,” he says. “People look at us and say, ‘That’s exactly what churches should be doing.’”
These are heritage buildings. They are architecturally beautiful, but the upkeep is outrageous.