Bold priest took on the drug trade
‘Modern prophet’ was happiest on the streets, helping the downtrodden
While he was training to be a priest in the 1960s, Jean-claude Proulx bristled at the monastic life. It was too quiet, too rule-bound, too confining. He was a non-conformist who wanted to shake things up.
And so, a few years after leaving the Major Seminary in Ottawa, he took on the drug trade of Vanier, standing in steely defiance against the dealers who were defiling the community. He was determined to be a saviour of the many young addicts, pulling them off the streets to dry them out, help them find work or return to school.
This put the young priest’s life in constant jeopardy.
Late one Christmas Eve, Proulx heard a knock at his door. He recognized a couple of “shady guys” from a local gang.
“They kidnapped him,” says longtime friend Andre Vinette.
Proulx feared a local drug syndicate was finally going to make good on threats to end his life. He was shoved in a car and taken to their clubhouse. They didn’t want to do him harm. Instead, they wanted him to perform mass and take confession. The gang even had the sacramental bread so Proulx could give communion.
“You’d assume these guys weren’t into Christianity. But he talked with them all night,” relates Vinette. The next morning the gang members brought Proulx home.
The priest, who died on Jan. 10 at age 72, was happiest on the streets, helping the disadvantaged and downtrodden. Father Andre Brossard, who entered the priesthood with Proulx, said his longtime friend was “a disturber.”
“Some called him a modern prophet, because he’d ask questions about difficult topics and force people to be more caring, more spiritual and to look after the underprivileged and those who are cast away.”
Proulx was the eldest of a sprawling francophone family that grew to number eight boys and two girls. His mother, Aurore, had been a “very bright student” who quit school at 16 to raise a family of nine after her mother died. Then, after having 10 children, her husband died and she raised them alone. She stressed the importance of education to all of her children.
The children spoke impeccable French and excellent English. And when Italian immigrants arrived, they learned Italian to communicate with the newcomers. This would serve Proulx well years later, when he went to study at the Vatican in Rome.
The surest way to get an education if you were from a large francophone family, particularly without a patriarch, was to enter the seminary. Proulx studied at the St. Alphonse Seminary in Sainte-anne de Beaupre, near Quebec City.
Then, from 1960 to 1964, Proulx studied at the Major Seminary. Afterward, he was assigned to be the vicar at St. Charles Parish in Vanier for two years. Then, for six years, he served as a vicar at Notre Dame Cathedral.
In 1967, the Ottawa Archdiocese appointed Proulx to be the chaplain for the francophone Scouts of Ottawa. For the next 40 years, he devoted his free time, not just to serving mass and leading jamborees, but to establishing the organization. Proulx met with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Finance Minister Marc Lalonde to secure funding so francophone Scouts could have their own federation. Proulx became the provincial president and then the national president of L’association Des Scouts Du Canada.
“He was an amazing storyteller,” says Suzanne Legault, acting director general for Les Scouts de l’est de l’ontario, and a longtime friend. “He had a way of capturing kids’ attention. No one fidgeted when he said mass.”
In 1986, the Ottawa branch of Les Scouts wrote to the archdiocese to ask them to honour Proulx by making him a monsignor. His supporters said he had married Scouts, baptized their children and helped them discover God in nature.
He was also “the only priest in the world,” says Legault, to earn the top title of Leader and Trainer and be granted all four leather beads that are part of the prestigious Wood Badge, which Proulx wore around his neck. Instead of being named a monsignor, Proulx received the Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, or Cross of Honour, the pope’s top award for service to the church.
Proulx would also be honoured by the pope for his work combating drug addiction. Fellow priest Andre Brossard says Proulx was drawn to help the derelicts, drunks and drug addicts who populated Ottawa’s Byward Market, and increasingly Vanier, in the early 1970s.
“He told me this story about a man and a woman, both addicts.
“They were sick as dogs, and he stayed with them so they wouldn’t die,” recalls Vinette, a former school principal who now teaches at the University of Ottawa. Proulx rescued the couple, who got married. He baptized their first child.
But the gangs that ran the drug trade took offence at his efforts.
“The criminal syndicate didn’t like that because he was taking way their customers,” Vinette says. “He had a few threats against his life. He was being followed, and he was under the protection of the RCMP.”
To save his life, Proulx left for Haiti. During his two years there, working among the poor, he learned Creole. Upon his return, he once again took up his work among the francophone parishes of Ottawa.
Eventually Proulx went to Rome to study at the Vatican. After his return, he taught sociology at Saint Paul University.
In the final few years of his life, he developed Alzheimer’s disease. His decline was quick.
During his life, he learned to speak seven languages, including Italian, Creole and even some Vietnamese. He, too, spoke the language of drugs, addiction and rehabilitation before almost anyone else in the city. He could also tie a bowline, clove hitch, square and slip knot.