From policing to the pulpit: getting to know Patrice Gregoire
Patrice “la police” Gregoire said that he dreamed of being a police officer from the time he was a young child. “I was six years old when my sister married a provincial policeman,” Gregoire said, describing the 6’3” officer as a towering presence in his secluded childhood home near Victoriaville. “I knew right off that that I wanted to be a cop, and I managed to do it too.”
Now months retired from a career in police work that spanned nearly four decades and saw him serve on police forces at the municipal, provincial, and national level, Gregoire looks back positively on his experiences, even if he says the work let him see the darkest parts of humanity.
“It’s almost 38 years altogether,” he reflected. “Nine months a city cop, six years a Mountie, and the rest SQ. I wouldn’t do anything different.”
Those who know him, however, are already aware that the former policeman’s retirement has him serving in a role many would see as being quite different; that of a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church.
“I chose the two main scapegoat professions in Quebec,” he said with a laugh, adding, “I’m not in politics yet, but I’ll try eventually if I want a third.”
Confronting the differences between his two paths head-on, Gregoire argued that being a police officer and then a Deacon is not as dramatic a change as people might think.
“It sounds pretty different, but it’s still helping people.”
Like the road that took him to police work, Gregoire traced the story of his desire to serve the church back to childhood.
To begin with, He was raised by parents so devoutly Catholic that his seven siblings have almost all turned away from the church completely. Joining that background to two very positive experiences in immersive Catholic schools, the young Gregoire formed a strong relationship of his own with the church.
“I was like a sponge,” he said, explaining that in his second year of college he was approached by a member of the brotherhood of monks running his school about the idea of taking vows. “He approached me and said that it didn’t seem like I was feeling the call,” Gregoire recalled. “What I explained to him right then and there was, I’m sorry, but when I was six years old I got the police call. They saw spiritual roots in me or something, but I put that aside.”
Although he credits that experience with leaving “a religious imprint” on him, the aspiring police officer instead left to follow his dream, first in Sherbrooke and then, when a shortage of jobs proved it necessary, as a volunteer support to the police force in Disraeli.
“It was four cops including the chief,” Gregoire said, explaining that he took on all the most undesirable roles in the name of getting experience for an application to the RCMP.
He was nine months in that role before being picked up by the Mounties, a hire he credited in large part to the fact
that the RCMP was looking to build its bilingualism at the time. Having not a word of English when he was taken on, the new recruit had to do intensive English courses in Saskatchewan in addition to his police academy training before he was eventually assigned to a detachment in Richmond, B.C.
Although one might think that finally having a job where he was paid to do the work he had wanted to do all his life would be a dream come true, particularly after months of doing it for free, Gregoire said that being a Quebec francophone in a B.C. RCMP detachment led to a lot of discrimination.
“As a Frenchman, you were hated without them knowing you,” he said, explaining that on paper the ‘bilingualism” made them a more desirable candidate for promotion than unilingual counterparts, even if it mostly ended up being useful for making presentations in French immersion schools. “To many English Mounties out west, you were seen as competition to eliminate.”
Eventually the pressure saw him transferred to a small detachment in New Brunswick, which he left not long later for what would prove to be the majority of his career with the Sûreté du Québec.
With the SQ he served across the province, including time spent in Gaspé, Weedon, Huntingdon, Montreal and Memphremagog in roles that varied from public relations to the Police force’s Liaison Officer to the Akwesasne Mohawk community in the years around the Oka Crisis.
While pursuing his police career, Gregoire said that he continued to be a practicing Catholic except in English communities where, “the words were different,” preventing him from making a meaningful connection with the mass.
It was during his time serving in the Memphremagog detachment in the latter years of his career that the church found its way back into his life in a significant way.
Through his work in community relations, Gregoire said that he often found himself going to make presentations on different aspects of police work.
“I was going to see people who were happy to see me,” he said, pointing out that the attitude shift marked a pleasant departure from the negative way police are often seen in the province. “People see the repressive role far more than saving lives.”
It was at the end of a presentation in the basement of a church in Eastman that things changed.
“I go, I do my presentation for an hour and a half or two, at the end the Curé (the parish priest) presented the deacon and his wife to me,” Gregoire said, adding that even with his background in the church it took some explanation for him to grasp the idea of the leadership role which allows people to remain married and have a family.
“Right away I thought, hey, that’s my way to serve,” he said, sharing that save for a conversation with his wife about the idea, the preparation work began shortly after. “To her it as a shock, but within a week I was knocking a the door to begin the process.”
That process ended up taking eight years, but in the end Gregoire was ordained a Deacon in 2017 and now serves the Sherbrooke Archdiocese with a specific mandate to provide spiritual care to people who are currently or have served in uniform in the past. He also works with La Vigile, a non-profit organization based in Beauport that strives to help uniformed workers and their families to deal with issues of addiction and mental health, including Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.
“My main role is to go visit jail wardens, peace officers, firemen, military, you name it, and explain what La Vigile can do for them,” he said, clarifying that although he is not a therapist, he does see his role as one of listening and helping those in need.
Gregoire is also the local chaplain for the Legion and Army, Navy and Air force Veterans groups, and prior to the passage of Quebec’s secularism law, Bill 21, was in line to become the chaplain for the entire SQ.
“We’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” he said of that piece of legislation, arguing that Quebec is so afraid and ashamed of its religious past that it is doing away with a valuable internal resource for its provincial police force in the name of state neutrality.
“No signs on the uniforms is totally different from having an internal resource,” he added. “Outside of Quebec, the Mounties have eight chaplains for 1000 cops.”
“La Police” no longer, Gregoire said now it’s easiest to find him at the Sherbrooke Cathedral. He’s usually there for 5 p.m. mass on Sundays.