A final goodbye
Amalgamating Catholic congregation bids farewell to St. Angela Merici.
It’s been a community touchstone for more than half a century, the site of hundreds of baptisms, marriages and funerals that marked the lives of a pilgrim people.
St. Angela Merici Catholic parish will hold one final service Sunday, a farewell mass for the Catholics who settled in or sprang from the nearby northwest Edmonton streets.
“It’s very much a church that was built for the neighbourhood,” said Rev. Patrick Baska, priest at the 200-family church located at 13210 133A Ave., for the past three years. “A vast majority of the people who are connected to the parish live in the area. They know each other and others even beyond the parish.”
A well-documented shortage of priests, compounded by a greying congregation and scarce resources, led the Catholic Archdiocese of Edmonton to decide in late 2011 to amalgamate the church with St. Edmund’s parish. A similar fate befell St. Pius X parish, another small north Edmonton parish pastored halftime by Baska, which merged with Westmount’s St. Andrew’s Roman Catholic church in 2012. In 2010, the archdiocese shuttered Holy Spirit church following 44 years in west Edmonton. Its congregants shuffled to nearby St. John the Evangelist.
The announcements might come as shocks to members, but they were recommended in a 1998 pastoral plan.
Baska explains it in terms of a changing city. Much like schools and stores that once punctuated neighbourhoods every few blocks, local churches are ceding ground to larger, more efficiently scaled facilities tailored for bursting suburbs. The smaller churches that remain face a battle of attrition, age and rising upkeep costs.
It wasn’t always that way, explained Emile Lema, 83, one of many founding members at St. Angela’s since its 1961 inception. The church was built across the street from a school of the same name, new amenities for the then-burgeoning subdivisions of Athlone and Wellington Park that opened in 1958.
“They were going to change the name for a while from Wellington Park to Fertility Park,” remembered Lema. “It was a very nice community to live in. And it still is.”
Fronted by yellow, green and blue stained glass, the sturdy brick structure was expanded six years later. And in the decades that followed, it became the site of most of the baptisms and marriages of Lema’s 10 children.
The building has been sold to Queen of Martyrs Catholic parish, a Vietnamese congregation currently worshipping in a structurally troubled building on 96th Street, a stretch in the McCauley neighbourhood known as Church Street.
Lema is pleased the church will remain available for those who want to have their funerals there.
As one group celebrates a new church home, another grieves what they’ll leave behind. St. Angela’s congregants weren’t given a concrete timeline to shutter their doors; Baska had enough on his plate with the St. Pius closure. Fewer people have been showing up, he admits, and the decision to move on picked up steam last summer, when he was appointed priest at St. Edmund’s, 16 blocks east at 13120 116th St. He’ll combine two flocks into one.
At first, the closure weighed on Amy Roy Gratton, who grew up at St. Angela’s and still attends with her parents, her sister Gisele and their children. The final week coincided with her eighth wedding anniversary, the day she and Gisele walked together toward a pair of cousins standing by the altar.
“Not our own cousins, of course,” Roy Gratton said with a laugh. “I remember walking up that aisle to everybody’s surprise because we didn’t tell everybody it was a double wedding.”
Roy Gratton said she’ll miss the church’s intimate feel. Her three-year-old daughter Violet roams the sanctuary during the passing of the peace, when members greet each other during each service. A similar peace pervaded a final supper held June 19 at the Italian Cultural Centre, Roy Gratton said, as longtime members vowed to remain part of St. Angela’s, even if the parish no longer exists.
Through the years, the church has experienced moments of excruciating grief. On Tuesday, Baska presided over an emotional double funeral for a family with ties to the church since the beginning. Don Kohlman, 46, and his five-year-old daughter Jacquie were killed on Father’s Day in an apartment fire in an eighth-floor suite at 11635 102nd Ave.
In October 1976, more than 700 people packed the church for the funeral of Rev. Leslie Scriven, a 49-year-old Edmonton-raised priest who left St. Angela’s after five years. He was found stabbed to death a month later in Ottawa, where he had gone for a sabbatical. The murder remains unsolved. Years later, a church psychiatrist agreed it was “highly likely” a former parishioner had been sexually abused by Scriven for two years when she was 10.
Lema’s family has experienced tragedy as well. On April 7, 1995, his 58-year-old wife, Alexia, was killed when an out-of-control cab sped through a north-side intersection and slammed into her car. Moments earlier, cab driver Trevor O’Dell had been fatally shot in the head in a botched robbery.
Like a big family, Lema said church members helped him cope with the searing loss. Two-and-a-half years later, he found consolation by marrying Bernice, another founding member who had also lost her spouse that same year.
Saying goodbye to something linked so tightly with faith and family history is difficult, but Baska has spent the past year preparing the way.
“Memories are very much attached to a place, especially very sacred sacramental moments,” Baska said. “This is a normal force of grief or sorrow, I appreciate that, but we have to have a faith that helps us move beyond just a parish entity or building. We’re on a journey of faith.”