The hearttell-tale
At St. Basil’s Catholic Church in downtown Toronto, a jar buried in a wall contains the heart of John Elmsley — once a leading member of the city’s Protestant elite. How it got there is a story of generosity, scandal and a changing city
When John Elmsley died in 1863, his will included a minor renovation project: Please take my heart from my body and place it in the wall of St. Basil’s Church.
There it remains, floating in alcohol, inside a jar, behind a wall. The heart of the man who was involved in one of this city’s biggest religious scandals, the heart of a mercurial but generous guy who changed the fortunes of Catholic Toronto when he made a splashy conversion in 1833.
Heart burial was a mortuary practice once trendy among medieval kings, religious men and European nobility, especially during the Catholic Reformation. The practice never took off in North America, and was not a custom of Indigenous people here. Elmsley’s heart burial in St. Basil’s Church is believed to be the only one in Toronto’s history.
“It is shocking in today’s somewhat bloodless society,” David Mulroney said a few days before retiring from St. Michael’s College, which was built alongside St. Basil’s Church on land donated by Elmsley. Mulroney has been a parishioner at the downtown church east of Queen’s Park for his entire life, and he remembers being fascinated with the heart as a boy.
“I sort of understood that it’s his heart, he must have really loved this place.”
“And when I read about it as an adult I realized he really did love this place.”
At a time when rich, powerful Protestants ran the city, Elmsley was an Anglican ensconced in the upper crust. His father, John Elmsley Sr., had been one of the early chief justices of Upper Canada, one of the few university graduates in the colony, with a somewhat pompous habit of dropping quotes in Latin, as per the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
The Elmsleys had been good friends with John Strachan, who would later become the first Anglican bishop of Toronto, and were a prominent family in Toronto (then called York) before they moved to Quebec, when the elder Elmsley took over the chief justice gig for Lower Canada in 1802. When Elmsley Sr. died in Montreal a few years later, the family decamped to England, where young John Elmsley joined the Royal Navy, before returning to York in the 1820s, the family’s only surviving son.
The younger Elmsley returned to manage the family’s many land holdings, the most prominent being the estate of Clover Hill. The park lot had been acquired by his father in1798 and, after a series of trades with another landowner, generally extended from Queen’s Park to Yonge St., and north from College St., according to the St. Michael’s College archives.
He was a member of the executive council and the legislative council of the Upper Canada government for several stretches, and had his hand in major infrastructure projects including canals and railroads, and was a director of one of the city’s early banks. He was known as Captain John Elmsley for his many postings, military and commercial, on the local waterways — a “skillful and popular lake captain,” one Victorian book recalled.
When he married a Catholic woman named Charlotte Sherwood in 1831, Elmsley was keen to hold on to his beliefs, making sure to have a separate ceremony in each church. But around the time of his marriage, he read a pamphlet that would change his life.
The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation holds that the unleavened wafers and wine of the Catholic communion become the actual body and blood of Christ when the priest consecrates them. The doctrine had long been one that divided Protestants and Catholics, but Elmsley was so convinced by the pamphlet written by the Bishop of Strasbourg that he started to question his faith.
At St. James Church, where the who’s who of Toronto society congregated every Sunday, Elmsley’s attendance became sporadic. In the summer of 1833, Elmsley wrote to the Catholic Bishop of Kingston about his growing interest in the religion (Toronto did not yet have its own diocese), saying he wanted to keep his conversion quiet, “because my older mother, who, in the common course of nature cannot long remain in this world, would be most terribly shocked to learn that I have embraced a religion against which she has ever entertained the most violent prejudices.”
He also sent along a cheque for £10 for his sins, as compensation for all the times he had “defrauded” his neighbour of swine and other animals he shot when they wandered onto his estate. In those days, Toronto was a small commercial city of rural estates and mostly wooden homes, where barnyard animals wandered the streets, along with close to 10,000 inhabitants.
The Catholic bishop, while in Toronto, lived in one of the more stately brick buildings on Jarvis St., not far from the city’s first Catholic church, St. Paul’s. The bishop’s home on Jarvis has changed slightly over the years, but it remains one of the few architectural relics of that time period, now the home of Mystic Muffin restaurant. (“I’ve got to stop there and say, ‘Hello, I’m the successor of the guy who used to live here,’ ” the current archbishop, Cardinal Thomas Collins, says with a laugh.)
Although Elmsley asked the bishop to keep his interest on the down-low, Elmsley himself was not the silent type. That summer he paid to have 5,000 copies of the transubstantiation essay printed and scattered across the province. He boldly sent one to his friend John Strachan, then the Archdeacon of York and the rector of St. James Church, with an ultimatum: if Strachan couldn’t “overthrow” the argument, Elmsley would start to receive Catholic communion.
“Strachan was not someone you wanted to take on lightly,” Mulroney says.
Strachan was mortified “to see the son of two old and valued friends, zealous and enlightened members of the Church of England” forsaking his Protestant faith. He wouldn’t have responded publicly, but Elmlsey had printed 5,000 pamphlets, so Strachan responded with a 54-page argument of his own in 1834, a theological battle royale.
While the Protestant faith was based in Scripture, Strachan wrote, “the system of the Roman Catholic Church is the result of the gradual accumulation of faith and ceremony, under the influence of time and circumstance.”
Anglicans believed in the spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Strachan wrote, but how could Christ’s body come down to “twenty thousand different churches to be divided, chewed, swallowed and digested,” he asked.
“The priest is understood to possess the miraculous power,” to change bread and wine to body and blood with a blessing in Latin, he wrote, and “among Protestants, and I may say among persons of common sense, it is not generally reckoned necessary to oppose the absurdity of Transubstantiation by serious argument.”
Reid Locklin, associate professor of Christianity and culture at the University of Toronto, said that different denominations of Christianity have different interpretations of the Eucharist.
“When I work with students with this, they’ll say it’s just language,” he said, “but it does kind of matter, and it matters on both sides.”
Locklin said that this is one of the reasons Catholics will not throw away a consecrated wafer. “We keep it in a tabernacle and venerate it. The idea is that Christ is actually, personally present in a way that is not merely spiritual.”
In the 1930s, Catholic historian Rev. Brother Alfred Dooner called Strachan’s salvo a “most violent attack” on the Catholic church written with the “intolerance and blindness of extreme bigotry.”
The scandal eventually settled down and Elmsley swapped his Family Compact pewmates for the impoverished Irish immigrants of St. Paul’s. The downtown church had substantial debt, so Elmsley pitched several unpopular revenue-generating ideas: door collections that were mocked as “toll gathering”; and pew-rents, then a common practice throughout the city.
The parishioners stood in the aisles to avoid the cost of sitting down, and called Elmsley “a pompous Tory squire and meddling convert,” historian Murray W. Nicolson writes.
“I feel myself quite unequal to the contest with these ruffians who at a word from the priest would put me in the Lake,” Elmsley wrote to his old friend, the bishop in Kingston.
“He gave up a lot, and he did it because of his conscience,” Cardinal Collins said. “He had studied this thing … and he said this is truth, this is right. Really, I think he probably wrecked his friendship with Strachan.” The Catholic community Elmsley joined was a contentious one. The local priest had just left the priesthood and was attacking the religion because of a fight he had with the bishop, and infighting plagued the parish, Collins said.
“This English aristocrat walks in and starts giving them orders, so I can imagine they didn’t really like him very much at times,” Collins said, noting that Elmsley was a born leader. “I’m sure he got booted out of all his fancy clubs and fancy friendships.”
Elmsley had a reputation for speaking his mind, acting impulsively, and leaving organizations in a huff.
Before Elmsley’s conversion was public, 1833 had already been a fairly scandalous year for the 32-year-old. He had added to his family wealth by buying up land grants from United Empire Loyalists, but when the lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada introduced a measure to stop that kind of speculation, Elmlsey protested, Lt.-Gov. John Colborne demanded an apology, and an indignant Elmsley resigned his seat on the executive council, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography notes.
“What an egregious ass he (Elmsley) has made of himself,” journalist Robert Stanton said. While Elmsley’s Catholic conversion may have affected his personal life, it did not affect his access to power in Upper Canada for long. Elmsley was back on the executive council in 1836, and was one of the few members of government to participate in military duty, helping put down the rebellion of 1837. Elmsley and his men were among those ordered to send the Caroline (a U.S. steamer contracted to rebel forces) over Niagara Falls in 1837. This ship was lit on fire and cut from its moorings in a
sensational attack that became a precedent for pre-emptive acts of self-defence. It also became a diplomatic incident.
The next year, his military service came to a somewhat ignominious end. In 1838, he was asked to take his men to the Grand River to help another captain, but Elmsley refused unless he was given a better military rank. The government said no, Elmsley resigned his command and was dismissed from the executive council. He demanded a court martial to clear his name, which was refused, Dooner writes.
By the 1840s, Elmsley, who had never lost his love of the water, was captaining a commercial steamer on the St. Lawrence and raising his growing family — he had10 children. He was also adding to his fortune by buying land grants in Brockville from veterans of the War of 1812 (“Soldiers, even though militiamen, and sailors are never very provident, and they could be had at a large discount of their real value,” wrote the man who accompanied Elsmley on his mission.) With his growing wealth, he settled into the role that he would be remembered for: generous benefactor to the Catholic community.
The next year, his military service came to a somewhat ignominious end. In 1838, he was asked to take his men to the Grand River to help another captain, but Elmsley refused unless he was given a better military rank. The government said no, Elmsley resigned, demanded a court martial to clear his name, which was refused, and he was later dismissed from the executive council.
He went on fundraising campaigns to help liquidate the parish debt, and he helped build St. Michael’s Cathedral, assuming the project’s debt of $57,600 with another parishioner when Toronto’s first Catholic bishop, Michael Power, died in 1847 of typhus. Around the same time, he began subdividing his Clover Hill property, naming the streets for his favourite saints: St. Alban, St. Mary, St. Clement, St. Joseph, St. Charles.
Cardinal Collins, who grew up in Guelph, learned about Elmsley once he moved to Toronto in 2007.
“I became profoundly aware,” he said, “everywhere you go you meet John Elmsley.”
In 1863, with his own health declining, Elmsley wrote his will, and included the special request for the heart. Elmsley had a deep connection to St. Basil’s Church, spending a few hours of each day there. He also read widely, and would have known the symbolic importance of heart burial in the Catholic
“He gave up a lot, and he did it because of his conscience.” ARCHBISHOP CARDINAL THOMAS COLLINS ON ELMSLEY’S CONVERSION TO CATHOLICISM
faith. Maybe he was inspired by another convert, King Henri IV of France. Henri’s religious back-and-forth reflected the tumult of 16th-century France: born Catholic, raised a Calvinist, he went back to Catholicism after he became king, granting religious liberty to Protestants, and ushering in a short period of relative peace. After his assassination in Paris in 1610, his heart was buried at a Jesuit chapel in the Loire Valley.
Elmsley, who had gone from Protestant to Catholic, from meddler to benefactor, had helped usher in a new era for Toronto’s Catholics, and when he died in May 1863, his body was buried in the vault at St. Michael’s Cathedral, but his heart went to the church.
In the 1880s, a Toronto Telegram reporter wandered inside the stately church to ask about the tablet on the west wall, where a Latin inscription mentioned the heart of John Elmsley.
Church officials told the reporter it had been “hermetically sealed in a jar of al- cohol and deposited in the niche behind the tablet where it now rests.”
And155 years after his death, Elmsley’s heart is still there, the alcohol likely preventing its decomposition, but possibly shrinking the organ itself. The church’s footprint has changed over the years, but the heart has not been disturbed. There is little to indicate it is there, only an engraved tablet with a Latin phrase, tucked behind rows of candles.
“It is not necessary to tell the Catholics of Toronto or the archdiocese who the late Hon. John Elmsley was,” an 1886 book notes. “His many donations of land and money to the cause of charity and education will make his name be forever held in veneration and esteem.”
While Elmsley and his heart are well known to the parish, and a reliable shock for the incoming crop of St. Michael’s College students on the yearly campus tour, Elmsley’s legacy is mostly forgotten outside of these walls. Cardinal Collins doesn’t think Elmsley is as well known as he should be, for all of the excitement of his life, the very public conversion, the generous gifts, his courage. His heart is in the wall, his body rests at the downtown cathedral, but maybe some day, a statue will rise.
“He was a great man,” he said, “heart and head together.”