Religion and Community Life

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Roman Catholic Church – its sacraments, associations, leaders, and institutions – provided the bonding agent for regionally scattered and diverse communities of Irish Catholics. For most Irish Catholics in Canada, the Church offered the principal source of group identity in a society that was overwhelmingly Protestant. Its clerical and lay leaders were voices for the Irish Catholic community, the church itself served as a focus for community life and political activism, and Catholic rituals and sacraments presented a universe of meaning for Irish Catholics as they went about their daily lives.

In Newfoundland, despite the sting of the penal laws and their often vigorous application until the late 1770s, Irish Catholics increased in number to become one of the largest ethnic groups on the island. Even in Conception Bay and St John’s, where persecution was systematic, the Irish Catholic population grew from 2,683 to 6,653 between 1753 and 1768. At this point, the Church in Newfoundland fell under the jurisdiction of the vicar apostolic of London. However, in 1784 the Franciscan priest James Louis O’Donel, a native of Waterford, Ireland, was selected as the first prefect apostolic of Newfoundland, an appointment that effectively brought ecclesiastical home rule to the island’s Irish Catholics. Twelve years later, O’Donel was elevated to the episcopacy and Newfoundland became an vicariate apostolic, in essence the first Roman Catholic episcopal jurisdiction in British North America outside Quebec.

For Irish Catholics elsewhere in British North America, the development of local episcopal control was impeded by entrenched ecclesiastical interests in Quebec and the presence of large non-Irish Catholic populations. Eventually, distance between the see of Quebec and its expanding hinterland, as well as the growing size and heterogeneity of the Catholic communities, necessitated the creation of separate ecclesiastical jurisdictions for colonies outside Lower Canada. In several instances, these new episcopal structures facilitated the rise of Irish Catholic clerics to leadership positions. Prior to 1817, Maritime Catholics of all backgrounds depended on the help of itinerant priests, who were increasingly stretched to the limit as the Catholic population exploded shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars; in 1816 missionary priest Edmund Burke reported to Rome that there were 8,500 Catholics in Nova Scotia and at least 7,000 on Cape Breton Island.

In 1817 Rome created the Vicariate Apostolic of Nova Scotia and made Burke, a native of County Kildare, its first bishop. One year later Catholics acquired an episcopal district (a vicariate apostolic, subordinant to the See of Quebec) under Bishop Alexander Macdonell, the acknowledged leader of the colony’s Scottish Catholics; that was followed in 1826 with the creation of the Diocese of Kingston, embracing all of Upper Canada and again under Bishop Macdonell. In 1819 the Vicariate Apostolic of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island was created, with the Scot Angus B. MacEachern as its bishop; MacEachern was still in that post a decade later when his jurisdiction was transformed into the Diocese of Charlottetown (1829). The redrawing of the ecclesiastical map did not necessarily result in “home rule” for Irish Catholics, but it did provide a strong foundation for the extension of Irish Catholic administrative power within the Church in eastern Canada. After all, Burke’s see was located in Halifax, Nova Scotia’s Irish Catholic bastion.

The growth of the Irish Catholic population after 1815 and the increasing tension between the Irish and other Catholics forced continuing changes to the Church’s institutional framework. Ethnic tension between the Scottish Catholics of eastern Nova Scotia and the Irish enclave in Halifax contributed to the creation of two distinct dioceses in Nova Scotia: Arichat (1844), later Antigonish, in the Scots’ heartland, and Halifax (1842) in Irish Catholic territory. Similarly, frequent disputes between the Irish Catholics of New Brunswick and their Scottish episcopal leadership based in Charlottetown led, in 1842, to the creation of a separate, Irish-controlled diocese in New Brunswick, the Scots remaining in control of the Diocese of Charlottetown. The first bishop of Fredericton (the see was later moved to Saint John) was William Dollard, a native of Bathkyram, Ireland. With the accession of Dollard, and in 1860 of Donegal native James Rogers as the first bishop of Chatham in the Miramichi region, Irish Catholics effectively took control of four of six dioceses in Atlantic Canada.

In Upper Canada, the Irish migrations before and after the famine severely tested and eventually overwhelmed the Highland Catholic leadership of the Church. In 1841 Rome divided Upper Canada into two dioceses, Toronto and Kingston. The former was put in the hands of Halifax-native Michael Power, and the latter, with the exception of a short period of administration by Rémi Gaulin, was in the hands of Kilkenny native Patrick Phelan. As the province was subdivided further and several French appointments withdrew from their sees, the Irish Catholic majority gained considerable episcopal power in all dioceses. With the notable exception of Ottawa, where French Canadians remained the dominant Catholic community, bishops of Irish birth or descent held all of the principal sees in Ontario in the late Victorian period.

Much the same was true of Canada as a whole. Of the fifteen Catholic episcopal sees located between Manitoba and Newfoundland, excluding Quebec, the Irish controlled eleven by 1900; together, these eleven dioceses encompassed in excess of one-half million Catholics, or almost one-quarter of Canada’s Catholic population. After 1900 Irish Catholics and their descendants extended their eastern Canadian base of ecclesiastical power to the mission territory in the Canadian west. Even though English-speaking Catholics constituted a small minority of the Catholics on the prairies, the clergy and episcopate recognized the importance of evangelizing the west if their dream of an English-speaking and Catholic Canada, outside Quebec, was to be fulfilled.

As the Catholic population in the west increased, naturally and through migration, from eastern Canada, the United States, and central and eastern Europe, English- and French-speaking Catholics went head-to-head for control of the western episcopal sees. In 1911 the anglophone bishops were defeated in their attempt to place their own candidate in Regina, where the Irish Catholic population was smaller than both the French-and German-Catholic communities. Catholics of primarily Irish descent constituted only 4,211 in southern Saskatchewan, or less than 10 percent of the total Catholic population. In 1913, however, John T. McNally, a native of P.E.I., was elected bishop of Calgary, a move that was followed, two years later, by the election of Alfred Sinnott, another P.E.I. native, to the newly created archiepiscopal see of Winnipeg. Thereafter, the ecclesiastical power of French Canadians in the region continued to erode while that of the Irish grew significantly. By World War II, prelates of Irish birth or descent had gained control of most of the major sees west of Toronto, including Sault Ste Marie, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina, Calgary, Edmonton, Nelson, Kamloops, Vancouver, and Victoria.

The establishment of episcopal sees provided an essential element in the formation of a religious and social infrastructure for British North America’s Irish Catholics. Bishops administering Irish Catholic populations helped to establish a variety of social and spiritual institutions integral to the development of Irish Catholic community life. In cooperation with the laity and religious orders, Irish Catholic bishops presided over the building of parish churches and missions, and, when permitted by law, particularly in Ontario and to a lesser degree in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, they oversaw the founding of Catholic parochial schools.

Perhaps the most significant development in the institutional life of the Canadian Church was the arrival of Irish and other European religious orders. In the early nineteenth century, newly elected bishops, unable to serve adequately their growing flock with the resources at their disposal, encouraged a variety of religious orders to begin work in British North America. The men and women of these orders provided priests for an expanding network of parishes, teachers for Catholic parochial schools, and social-service workers for Catholic hospitals, orphanages, women’s shelters, and refuges for the poor and destitute. The services and institutions they established, operating alongside those offered by non-Catholics, helped to meet the spiritual and social needs of the Catholic community and provided employment opportunities for Irish Catholic men and women.

A few examples demonstrate the importance of these religious orders and the prominent role of Irish Catholics in them. In the 1840s Bishop Power of Toronto asked the Jesuits to assume control of missions, while Mary Ward’s Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Loretto Sisters) were invited to establish schools for girls in the diocese. Likewise, his successor, Armand-François-Marie de Charbonnel, called upon the Brothers of the Christian Schools in 1851 to educate young men and the Basilian Fathers in 1852 to establish a minor seminary, which, after its founding in 1856, evolved into St Michael’s College. He also recruited sisters from the Congregation of St Joseph (CSJ), a dynamic women’s order that, once in Upper Canada, established schools, St Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, several orphanages, homes for the aged, and St Joseph’s College, which federated with St Michael’s College in 1910. By the mid-twentieth century the Sisters of St Joseph had houses in five Ontario dioceses and in several centres in British Columbia. Although coming originally from France, via the United States, the Toronto-based CSJ served as a home for young Irish Catholic descendants, thus giving a distinctive Irish-Canadian flavour to the order. As the CSJ expanded its operations throughout Canada, this Irish Catholic ethos travelled with it.

In a path that parallels the Toronto experience, Bishop William Walsh of Halifax in 1859 invited the Sisters of Charity, under the leadership of Mother Mary Basilia McCann, to establish educational and social services in the Diocese of Halifax. Their operations soon included St Patrick’s School, the Halifax Infirmary, and Saint Joseph’s Orphanage. By 1895 the order had spread to Cape Breton, New Brunswick, Ontario, and Bermuda, and by 1926 it was active in British Columbia and Alberta. The Sisters of Charity also gave birth to a new group, the Sisters of St Martha, which had its headquarters in Antigonish. This order also expanded, establishing a second house in Charlottetown and a variety of services in Lethbridge, Canmore, Toronto, and Ottawa. Many of the sisters of these orders were of Irish and Scottish origin.

By the end of the nineteenth century anglophone Catholic priests were increasingly Canadian-born and usually of Irish parentage. In the Archdiocese of Toronto, for instance, priests born and educated in Canada had surpassed their Irish-born colleagues, and by 1905 they accounted for 48 percent of the total number of priests. Twenty-five years later, Canadian-born priests, most of whom were of Irish descent, constituted 70 percent of the priests in the archdiocese. This process of indigenization among the clergy was facilitated by the growth of local English-language seminaries – Holy Heart in Halifax (1895), St Peter’s in London (1911), and St Augustine’s in Toronto (1913) – the last eventually becoming a national seminary for much of English-speaking Canada. Institutionalized and formal religious training in the religious and priestly life was underscored and supported by the dedication of small Irish Catholic parish communities. In Pakenham, Lanark County, Ontario, the tiny Catholic community of 150 families at St Peter Celestine parish produced thirty-two religious vocations between 1892 and 1965. The founding priest, Dominic Lavin, had set up a special fund to help finance these home-grown vocations.

Such pastoral initiatives by clergy and parishioners underscore that the development of Irish Catholicism in Canada was by no means a one-sided initiative directed from above – whether by parish priest, “mother superior,” or episcopal fiat. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, lay Catholics demonstrated leadership and vision in laying the foundations of the Church in British North America. In fact, long before a bishop’s mitre was seen in the colonies outside Quebec, the Irish Catholic laity was busy buying land, erecting church buildings, and making applications for resident priests. Lay initiative was witnessed most clearly in the formation of boards of trustees in prospective Irish Catholic parishes in the early nineteenth century. In such colonial towns as St John’s, Saint John, Halifax, and Toronto, boards comprised of members of the Irish Catholic business and professional classes began to see themselves as the patrons of the parish, with what amounted to the rights of chief proprietor.

Irish Catholic trustees, jealous of their power, frequently fought with the clergy when the latter attempted to exercise control over local parishes. In Halifax, for example, the church wardens had been partly responsible in 1783 for securing Catholic relief from the penal laws and so preparing the way for the erection of St Peter’s parish. Protective of their status in the parish, they feuded bitterly with Father James Jones over such things as his use of the presbytery, burials in the churchyard, and even his right to be retained by or dismissed from the parish. By 1803 the intervention of Bishop Pierre Denault of Quebec and the restrictive electoral practices placed on church wardens by the new pastor, Edmund Burke, temporarily ended the lay-clerical battles, although lay activism would eventually secure the creation of the “Irish” diocese of Halifax. Then, however, the new bishop, William Walsh, established an episcopal corporation and thereby effectively transferred control of parish properties from the trustees to himself.

This solution became operative in other colonies, but not without some struggle. In Newfoundland, Bishop Michael Anthony Fleming’s popularity among the working-class Irish laity helped overcome the hostility of middle-class church wardens in St John’s; in New Brunswick, Bishop William Dollard’s creation of an episcopal corporation in 1846, amidst stiff opposition from Irish Catholic merchants in Saint John, undermined lay influence in parish life. Finally, from 1830 to 1834, St Paul’s Church in York was split between rival groups of trustees, some backing the Irish pastor, William O’Grady, and others the Scottish bishop, Alexander Macdonell. In a titanic battle that featured the clash of strong personalities, ethnic tensions, and the assertion of the Irish working class against the Irish petite bourgeoisie, Macdonell won episcopal control, but only after placing the parish under interdict and forcing O’Grady’s departure.

These battles between bishops, clergy, and laity underline the importance of the parish as the hub of the Irish Catholic community. The parish was a spiritual place where Irish Catholics could hear the Holy Mass, have their children initiated into the Christian community in baptism, be joined in matrimony to other Catholics, confess and repent their sins, and be buried after death. It was also a social place where people met weekly and where voluntary fraternal and devotional societies gathered different segments of the Irish Catholic community. The parish also became a focus of education, offering catechetical instruction by the parish priest or a sister, or, in some cases, more formal training in a parochial school.

Considering the Church’s importance in daily life, it is not surprising that the first Irish Catholic migrants sought a house of worship soon after arrival, and this pattern was repeated as they moved into new frontiers or suburban areas. Private homes were used for Mass in the earliest stages of settlement, a practice that continued until the Irish could afford the land and materials for a church. In the case of St Patrick’s Church in Fallowfield, Nepean Township, Upper Canada, for example, in 1834 farmer Thomas O’Meara sold almost one hectare to the parish trustees for a mere two shillings and sixpence. In other locales, such as St Andrew’s, New Brunswick, a prospective parishioner donated the land for the town’s first Catholic church. In large urban areas, however, local committees were not so fortunate; in 1831 the founding of St Patrick’s parish in Quebec City required a capital expenditure of £1,200 for land in the Upper Town.

What resulted from these simple foundations was the creation of community centres for Irish Catholic migrants, centres that in a very short time would proliferate and create an Irish Catholic network in each British North American colony. In Upper Canada, there had been only three Catholic churches in 1800 but by 1847 there were sixty-two more – and only six of these served exclusively non-Irish communities. Seven were dedicated to either St Patrick or the Celtic missionary St Columba. Thus, in some cases the very name of the church itself became an expression of a distinctive Irish Catholic piety.

In the nineteenth century Irish Catholic piety and devotionalism underwent significant renewal. Sparked by the universal resurgence of ultramontane Catholicism – the assertion of Catholic prerogatives in the political sphere and the revitalization of personal devotions and parish sodalities – Catholic Europe and communities in North America increasingly looked to the clergy and to Rome for guidance in their spiritual and social lives. In Ireland, it has been said that a devotional revolution swept across the country between 1850 and 1875. This revolution, which had been evident in southeast Ireland and other parts of Europe and America previously, was characterized by clerical reform, the introduction of such Roman devotions as the rosary, the forty hours, novenas, benediction, vespers, and devotion to the Sacred Heart, and a profound increase of Marian piety. It also included the rise in popularity of prayer books, catechisms, medals, and missals, and the formation of a score of pious associations, fraternities, and sodalities.

For the Irish, this new Catholic identity could not have come at a better time, since their traditional culture, way of life, and language were being seriously eroded by the “anglicization” of Ireland. The devotional revolution offered Irish Catholics a new cultural identity in replacement for the one they had lost, and one of the results has been that in the Republic of Ireland the terms Irish and Irish Catholic have become virtually synonymous.

In Canada, clerical and lay initiative was jointly responsible for fostering the devotional revolution that transformed the spiritual ethos of Irish Catholic communities. Dissatisfied with the irregularity of Irish worship, and the curious fusion of pre-Christian and Catholic traditions among the Irish, bishops and religious orders attempted to reshape the religious culture of Irish Catholicism by imposing on it an indelible Tridentine stamp. In the process, the clergy tried to cultivate Irish loyalty to the Church, foster regular church attendance, enhance the moral discipline of the laity, and turn Irish Catholics away from social iniquity. The St Vincent de Paul Society (founded in 1833, France), for example, was introduced to Canada both as a means of aiding the poor in Canada’s inner cities and as an exercise of piety for individual Irish Catholic members. Acts of charity were a means whereby the pious Irish Catholic member of the society could “bribe the porters of heaven” and help secure his own salvation. Local clergy, notably in Toronto and Halifax, also established temperance societies, akin to those of crusader Father Theobald Mathew in Ireland, in the hope of transforming both spiritually and socially the Irish character by depriving it of the corrupting influence of demon rum.

It has been argued that the primary agent of the devotional revolution was the clergy, through whose agency the Irish migrant became thoroughly “churched” and hence better able to adapt to Canadian society. According to another view, however, lay voluntary associations were the principal crucible of Irish Catholic piety. Although such groups may have been initiated by the clergy, it was the laity who cultivated and nourished the vision of the association and effectively sustained devotion and piety on the part of individual Catholics. Irish nationalist associations, for instance, brought Irish Catholic laymen together for both political and religious reasons. Eventually, as Irish nationalism became more muted, these societies effectively helped to “church” Irish Catholic males.

Perhaps even more important were the women’s sodalities. Such devotional associations as the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary (est. 1860s, Canada), the Society of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, the Apostleship of Prayer (est. 1879, Rome) and the Archconfraternity of the Holy Family (est. 1880s, Canada) promoted the Irish Catholic women’s role as moral teacher and reinforced the idea that the Irish Catholic home was a safe spiritual haven from the profane. Yet they also offered Irish Catholic females a sense of community involvement, “respectable recreation,” moral support, and, since a parish priest could not direct every meeting of a sodality, a measure of independence. In Toronto, it has been calculated that at least 42 percent of Irish Catholic women belonged to some sort of parish sodality. Through such bodies and the promotion of piety in the domestic sphere, Irish Catholic women acted as vehicles of the Irish Catholic devotional revolution.

Originally, these lay voluntary associations had a distinctive Irish flavour. However, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, owing to the decline of Irish nationalism and the changing interests of new generations of Canadian-born Irish Catholics, men and women of Irish descent preferred to join associations that stressed the Catholic rather than the Irish element of their group identity. By 1911 the Catholic Mutual Benefit Association, whose first Canadian branch was founded in Windsor, Ontario, in 1871, had become the largest Catholic fraternal and insurance association in Canada, claiming some 23,000 members nationwide. Most of its policyholders were the descendants of Irish Catholic immigrants. Similarly, by the 1920s the Knights of Columbus (est. 1897, Montreal), the Holy Name Society (est. 1871, United States), and the Catholic Women’s League (est. 1920, Canada) dominated the associational landscape among the laity; all of these reinforced a Catholic piety that complemented a growing sense of Canadian identity. In contrast, traditional Irish Catholic societies – the Ancient Order of Hibernians (est. 1887, New Brunswick), the Irish Catholic Benevolent Union (est. 1869, United States), and the Emerald Benefit Association (est. 1872, Hamilton) – were in serious decline by the early post–World War I era.

Not even the inclusion of women could arrest the fall in membership. Although Quebec’s chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians remained numerically and financially strong enough to erect a memorial on Grosse Île to the victims of the Great Famine, that organization was clearly being eclipsed by the Knights of Columbus as the pious and fraternal association of choice among Irish Catholics. In 1910 the Knights, who had been in Canada only thirteen years, claimed 9,000 Canadian members organized in sixty councils. The Knights of Columbus continue to be the largest and most active male Catholic fraternal organization in Canada, with hundreds of branches nationally and a visible presence in every Canadian diocese. By the same token, the Catholic Women’s League is Canada’s largest lay association for women, having branches in most Canadian parishes and a total national membership of 110,000.

The Irish Catholic laity were not easily controlled by the clergy. In Montreal and Toronto, for instance, determined laymen did battle with the clergy in order to establish the Knights of Columbus, which the bishops of those cities described as a “secret society” and therefore contrary to the teaching of the magisterium. At length, the laity prevailed by enlisting the support of other bishops and lay leaders elsewhere. Trouble could result when the laity perceived a threat to their distinctive church customs. The Irish Catholics of Toronto rebelled openly during the episcopate of Denis O’Connor (1899– 1908), a former schoolmaster who issued regulations governing morality, parish activities, and liturgical music while also imposing restrictions on mixed marriages and women in choirs. In 1908 strenuous opposition from both priests and people eventually prompted O’Connor’s resignation. Women returned to the choirs, Gregorian chant had to share the liturgical stage with classical and more popular music, and parish picnics and fund-raising events, both of which O’Connor had prohibited, resumed. Such incidents challenge the image of Canada’s Irish Catholics as a sheepish and priest-ridden people. Devotion should not be equated with submission.

By the early twentieth century the efforts of the clergy, episcopacy, and laity to “church” the Irish Catholics, particularly males, had been reasonably successful. In the only Canadian census to date to do so, the census takers of 1901 asked Canadian religious groups to report on the actual membership of their churches. When this information is cross-referenced to the declarations of Canadians to census enumerators regarding their religious affiliation, it is clear that professing a creed and at least practising such were not necessarily directly related. The Roman Catholic Church had the highest percentage of “communicants and Sunday school scholars” among Canada’s principal Christian denominations. These rates continue to be the highest even when one eliminates the French-Canadian Catholic bastion of Quebec from the statistical sample. Furthermore, in areas where the Irish constituted the clear majority of Catholics, the Church recorded a proportionally higher rate of membership than that of other Christian denominations. These areas of strong Irish Catholic Church membership included Charlotte County, New Brunswick (73 percent), Saint John (82 percent), Halifax (85 percent), and, in Ontario, Hamilton (99 percent), East Hastings County (87 percent), south Renfrew County (81 percent), and Peterborough County (68 percent). In the same areas, the church-membership rates of Anglicans, Methodists, and Presbyterians fluctuated between 40 and 70 percent. Even when one takes into account the fact that the Catholic numbers may include some individuals who attended church only at Easter, the rates of Irish Catholic membership in local churches in 1901 are impressive.

The devotional and liturgical activity engendered by the nineteenth-century devotional revolution remained a feature of Irish Catholic Canadian life until the mid-twentieth century. Generations of Canadians of Irish Catholic descent were educated in the faith either by means of catechism classes sponsored by parishes or in Catholic parochial schools that received provincial funding in Alberta, Newfoundland, Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan, and, by “gentleman’s agreement” until recently, Nova Scotia. In other provinces the faith was maintained among Catholic youth in Sunday schools, youth groups, or in special classes in public schools after regular class hours.

Catholic piety, church attendance, and catechetical education came under sweeping revision during and after the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II, as the council came to be known, signalled “aggiornamento,” or updating, which included Masses in the vernacular, the greater participation of the laity in parish life, an expanded role for women in the liturgy, and important revisions and restatements of Catholic doctrine, clerical authority, and religious practice. In Canada, the council’s legacy for Catholics, including those of Irish descent, was a new look to the architecture and interiors of churches, increased lay leadership in parish life, ecumenical efforts, growing interest in issues of social justice, and a decline in popular piety and Marian devotion.

The “liberalization” of the Church since Vatican II has been accompanied by a growth in the number of “non-practising” Catholics – in other words, Catholics who generally use the church only for the rites of passage (baptisms, weddings, and funerals) and major feasts such as Christmas and Easter. Although falling church attendance has been more pronounced in Quebec, where Vatican II coincided with the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s, the number of practising English-speaking Catholics, particularly in urban areas, has also declined and Catholic youth, whether or not they have been trained in parochial schools, have increasingly refocused their lives on secular concerns and values. Catholics throughout Canada, like Canadians of other faiths, are treating religion more and more like a smorgasbord, choosing what they please from this creed or that. Similarly, Canadian Catholics have increasingly ignored the church’s moral stipulations on such things as artificial contraception and sex outside marriage. All these trends are evident in the Catholic community as a whole, including that part of it which is of Irish Catholic ancestry.