“From Sea to Sea”

By Fr. Jacques Emily and Fr. Daniel Couture

“Your story is an epic.” These words of the French-Canadian National anthem have a wonderful application with the history of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) in Canada. It is an epic in the true sense of the word in this country so vast, so diverse and once so Catholic, redeemed by the blood of valiant martyrs. It is a story where many trails providentially cross, like a delicate lace, some of them going back to the 1950s, some connected to a pilgrim statue blessed by a pope, all of them filled with beautiful graces.

The Origins of the Canadian District

This epic of the SSPX in Canada begins long before the Second Vatican Council, when Archbishop Lefebvre, then archbishop of Dakar, came to Canada seeking missionary vocations for his archdiocese. It was in May 1955. The Archbishop visited several religious communities, amongst which the house for the African Mission Society of Lyons, based in Shawinigan (near Three-Rivers) in Quebec. Twenty-two years later, on March 19, 1977, this same property was bought by the Society and was to become St. Pius X Priory, the first bastion of the Society in Canada.

Here are a few extracts of our founder’s speech to these Religious, back in the 1950s. We can hear the same anxiety for the salvation of souls which lead him to found our Society.

“This is the purpose of my visit to Canada: to ask for your help in the immense work of evangelizing black Africa. The future of Catholicism in Africa will be played out in the quarter century to come, an immense harvest awaits the Divine Message. Will there be sufficient workers to convert them all? We need many of them and right away!”

In 1971 the Archbishop returned to Canada at the invitation of Mr. Louis Even, founder of the Pilgrims of St. Michael (also known as the White Berets). He noticed, with much regret, how greatly things had changed since his last visit in 1955. Subsequent to the famous “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s (which was essentially the destruction of Catholic schools), all the great values of Faith, Christian families and vocations which had so motivated him during his earlier visit to Canada, had collapsed. Unfortunately, on this occasion Mr. Evan, choosing the path of legality to the path of the preservation of the Faith with the Traditional Mass, parted ways with the Archbishop.

In 1972, sensing that something could be done in French Canada, the Archbishop sent a small group of half a dozen Swiss faithful with Fr. Pierre Epiney, then the parish priest of Riddes, (the village in which the seminary of Écône was). The main contacts were made in Montreal, Quebec City and Sherbrooke. Some of these faithful had been reading the French magazine Itinéraires, thus already knew of the Archbishop, of the newly founded SSPX, and of the various battlefronts of the crisis in the Church.

In French Canada, between February 1973 and December 1975, when the New Mass was rapidly overthrowing the Old Mass in all the parishes and convents of La Belle Province, Providence used two laymen and a team of old priests to alert French Canadians on the need to hold on to Tradition. About 30 times in less than three years, “Triduums of Prayers” were held monthly all over the province, in whatever parishes and convents that could still be found. It always started with the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament on Friday night at 6 pm, then the Rosary was said almost continuously, day and night, until Sunday afternoon; the old priests—a Jesuit, a veteran missionary with the Eskimos, a hospital chaplain—offering the traditional Mass and preaching solid doctrine. The seeds of our main Mass centers thus were planted.

Our Lady’s Intervention

At the same time, and for a few more years afterwards, a pilgrim statue of Our Lady of Fatima, blessed by Pope Paul VI particularly for Canada, started to circulate from coast to coast. Our Lady was establishing a network of prayer groups many of which would later become our present-day SSPX Mass centers.

Early in 1975, the Swiss group came a second time, scouting on behalf of the Archbishop. In November, the Archbishop himself came to support the battle of the early pioneers for Tradition in the country. He did this with a series of conferences. During this visit, he celebrated a Sunday Mass in the parish of Saint-Yvette, the Italian parish of Montreal, where the pastor was Fr. Yves Normandin. Fr. Normandin had returned to the Mass of his ordination a few months earlier. The consequences were seen rapidly. In January 1976, in the deep cold of January, Fr. Normandin was deprived of his post and expelled from his parish by the Archbishop of Montreal. What was his crime? Quite simply his fidelity to the Mass of all time. The detailed story of this heroic priest—still fighting at 95 years old as this text is being written—can be found in the book A Pastor Out in the Cold.

God, who always draws good out of evil, then gave him the whole of Canada as a parish! Thanks to all the publicity around his expulsion, Fr. Normandin received invitations from some faithful across the country who understood that the battle was truly around and for the Traditional Latin Mass. Many of these faithful were associated with the Fatima groups, and thus, in a very short time, the parish priest of St. Yvette was doing a regular pastoral run, from Newfoundland to Vancouver Island (4,200 miles) and back, every month, by bus, train, car, or plane. The faithful had to be ready to receive the priest at anytime, day or night, if they wanted to receive the sacraments. These were truly heroic days. Two of our priests are the fruits of such sacrifices, Frs. Violette and Lemieux. Later, in 1984, with the arrival of Fr. Emily as the district Superior, Fr. Normandin, having returned to Montreal, handed over his trail of Mass centers to the Society. That is the origin of most of our Mass centers in Canada. Deo gratias!

The Archbishop made several more visits to Canada: in 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1982 and 1985. On each occasion he experienced the sadness of noticing more and more the ravages of the crisis in the Church in this country once so Catholic. However, our founder was also edified by the zeal of those who kept up the good fight: on the one hand, independent priests who were the pioneers of Tradition in the country; and on the other, our Society colleagues who carried on their work.

St. Pius X Priory in Shawinigan

Taking advantage of the encouragement given by the Archbishop’s visits, a group of lay people purchased a house which would serve as a spear head for the Society of Saint Pius X in Canada. This house was to act as a focal point for faithful priests who had been working with the traditional faithful of Quebec. On March 19, 1977, the former Novitiate house of the African Mission Society at Shawinigan, was purchased in the name of the Society.

In the summer of 1977, Fr. Ludovic-Marie Barrielle (+1983) came to Shawinigan to preach the first Ignatian retreats. He had been the intimate companion of Fr. François de Paule Vallet (+1947), who had compressed the Thirty Day retreat of St. Ignatius into the Five Days retreat. This was to become a main apostolic tool for the Society in the coming years, to this very day.

In October 1977 Shawinigan welcomed its first prior, Fr. Edmond Samson. Then on November 8 of the same year, Archbishop Lefebvre came to bless the first Society priory on Canadian soil. In his sermon, our founder recalled the providential circumstances that permitted the acquisition of this house for the Society. In those early years, the priory of Shawinigan was truly a center of attraction for Tradition in Quebec. We had too few priests for them to cover the whole province, so they organized the famous “Saturdays at the Priory,” a kind of day of recollection to which the faithful would come from all over Quebec, to strengthen their faith and rekindle their devotion. In July 1978 the first Solemn Mass of Fr. Diamond was celebrated, first Canadian priest of the Society, ordained on June 29 of that year. In the summer of 1978, Fr. Le Boulch, OSB (+1987), teacher in Écône, visited Shawinigan to preach retreats. 1984 saw the ordination of Frs. Daniel Couture, Andre Lemieux and Jean Violette, which gave the opportunity for a series of First Solemn High Masses at Shawinigan and Winnipeg.

On August 15, 1985, the autonomous house of Shawinigan was given the status of District Headquarters, Fr. Emily being made the first District Superior. In November, Fr. Dominique de Vriendt was ordained by the Archbishop in our newly purchased church in Montreal.

Winnipeg and the West

In 1980, a house and a small chapel had been bought in Winnipeg, Manitoba, by a lay association, The Society of Saint Pius X, Inc., to serve as a center for Fr. Normandin. In the autumn of 1984, when Fr. Normandin went back to Montreal, the faithful asked the help of the SSPX. Consequently, in January 1985, Fr. Jean Violette took up residence in Winnipeg, and the former home of Fr. Normandin, became St. Raphael’s Priory. That priory of Winnipeg was in charge of the apostolate all the way to the Pacific Ocean: two priests for half of Canada.

From Winnipeg, in 1992 Fr. Violette founded the priory in Calgary, and not long afterwards, another veteran priest, Fr. Greuter, who had started an old people’s home on the west side of the Rockies, in Vernon, British Columbia, handed over his properties to the SSPX in early 2000. This priory in Vernon, later moved to Langley, a south-east suburb of Vancouver and became our base for the apostolate in British Columbia.

The Priory and Holy Family School, Levis, Quebec

This priory was opened in 1989, by Fr. Emily, in response to an agonizing appeal on the part of numerous families in Quebec, seeking a Catholic school for their children. After different projects involving the restructuring of the priory, Divine Providence sent us the magnificent building which was the former Msgr. Guay Institute—founded in 1905 for orphans—on the south bank of the St. Lawrence river, opposite the city of Quebec. A businessman acted as an intermediary for the transaction. In fact, the building belonged to the Diocese of Quebec, which was not particularly disposed to sell it to us. Imagine the surprise of the sisters acting as guardians of the property, when on the October 6, 1989, they saw Frs. Emily and Violette arriving, only to inform them that the SSPX was the new owner.

The year 1989-1990 was devoted to the necessary renovation of the building, and in September 1990 it was ready to open its doors to a first contingent of students. The school, the only non-funded private school in the whole province of Quebec, has now opened its door for its thirtieth academic year. Over its history, it has changed a number of times from being a day-school, from Grades 1-12, for boys and girls, to having a mixed primary, and high-school for boys only, as it is in the present. The high-school girls can go to the Dominican Sisters’ school in Massena, NY, which is four hours away by car.

The Precious Blood Residence for the Aged

In 1994-1995 some faithful from Quebec bought the former convent of the Sisters of the Precious Blood in Levis, just opposite the Chateau Frontenac. These people then entrusted the project to the Society, which after the necessary renovations, opened this old people’s home in January 1996. At the present, it is full with about 140 residents. The priests from Holy-Family Priory offer daily Masses and minister to the sick.

The Mission in Ontario

During the years 1990-1992, when Fr. Emily was prior at the Holy Family School, Lauzon, he would jump onto a plane on the weekend to serve Toronto and Orillia where the Society had acquired churches in 1991. Very quickly a permanent residence was envisaged for Toronto so as to limit the cost and the fatigue of these journeys and to provide the District Superior with the necessary peace and quiet to carry out his task. A priory was bought in 1993, and Fr. Emily settled in, gradually making it the residence of the District Superior and supervising the missions of Ontario.

In 2007, Fr. Rostand, then District Superior, acquired a school in New Hamburg, about 1 ½ hours west of Toronto. This is Our Lady of Mount Carmel Academy, which, besides its little primary school, hosts the only boarding school for boys in the whole of Canada. (A number of students come from the neighboring United States.) In 2016, a church with its rectory were purchased in the town of New Hamburg for the growing numbers of families moving near the school. Lately, thanks to the pandemic of the last few months, attendance at St. Peter’s church, New Hamburg, almost doubled, going from 200 Sunday attendants to over 350.

Saint-Joseph Center, Saint-Cesaire, Quebec

In December 2010, a venerable convent of the Presentation Sisters came up for sale in the little town of Saint-Cesaire, near Montreal. Fr. Wegner wisely acquired it to make it the new headquarters for the district and the new retreat center, instead of Shawinigan. This convent, founded in 1857, can boast having been the first center for the devotion to St. Joseph in Quebec, before the famous Oratory, and having seen young Alfred Bessette, Brother André, live in its shadows for two years.

Conclusion

“O Lord, how great are thy works! thy thoughts are exceeding deep” (Ps. 91). Looking back at these last fifty years and beyond, we can only admire the work of Providence in this vast country, making use of so many souls of good will to prepare, bring and assist the work of the Society of Saint Pius X.

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Archbishop Lefebvre at the ordination of Fr. Dominique de Vriendt in Montreal, Nov. 9, 1985.

The very first ever SSPX retreat in August 1977 in Shawinigan with Rev. Fr. Barrielle.

Fr. Yves Normandin with Fr. Jean De l’Estourbillon.
N.B. Fr. Normandin is still alive, he is 95.

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Four Canadian priests in Winnipeg: (l to r) Richard Vachon, Dominique Boulet, Jean Violette (District Superior 2000-06), Jules Belisle. 1998.

Archbishop Lefebvre with Fr. Jacques Emily (District Superior 1984-2000) and Fr. Paul Greuter.

Ordination to the priesthood of Fr. Joseph Stannus and to the diaconate of his brother Marcel, in Zaitzkofen, in 2015.  They are seen on the right of the photo, with Bishop Fellay.

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St Joseph Center, Saint-Cesaire, Quebec. 

 

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Fr. Daniel Couture (District Superior 2014-20).

 

Fr. Arnaud Rostand, District Superior (2006-08) in 2007 with Fr. Boulet.

Fr. David Sherry, new District Superior (2020- ).

Fr. Jürgen Wegner, District Superior (2008-14).

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Corpus Christi Procession in Saint Catharines, Ontario, 2019 with Fr. Dominic May, Fr. Raymond Lillis (r) and Fr. Marcel Stannus (l) 

Holy Family School chapel.

Church of St Joan of Arc, Sherbrooke, Quebec.