Beggar bishop.

Around Canada Day, July 1, 1996, reporters discovered several unpleasant facts about Canadians' lack of historical knowledge. For example, only 48 per cent of Ontarians and only 30 per cent of Quebecers know the year of Canada's Confederation. Earlier, some prominent historians also complained about the increasingly poor teaching of Canadian history in school. Catholic Insight is doing its bit to help overcome this deficiency. The following is the seventh article in our history of English-speaking Catholics in Canada.

Unlike in Lower Canada, Catholics were a small minority of the total population in Upper Canada. The Catholic Scots in Glengarry and the French in the Windsor and Penetanguishene areas were greatly outnumbered by the Irish, who settled primarily in the central area of the province. By mid nineteenth century, Upper Canada was moving from a colonial economy towards an industrial one. Indian trails were replaced by roads into the Canadian Shield and to Georgian Bay. By the 1850s surveyors had laid out farm lots as well as roads, and settlements expanded. Mills were congregating points for the scattered farmers, as were the blacksmith shops, general stores and churches of the villages and emerging towns. Railways opened up the area, and the Grand Trunk which linked Montreal to Toronto in 1856 promoted economic advancement.

In this environment, Catholics were on the outside looking in--economically, socially and politically. Their identity as Irish had ostracized them because of their religion and because of the contagion they brought with them during periods of high immigration. Certainly their numbers grew after the Famine migration in 1847. They were fewer than 3,000 in Toronto in 1835 but 7,940 by 1851. Toronto's streets, like those in Kingston, Montreal and Quebec, were crowded with emaciated, destitute Irish immigrants in the summer of 1847, many with typhus. On August 16, the Toronto hospital was crammed with 872 patients when it could hold about 150. St. Paul's Cemetery on Power Street was filled to overflowing. Moreover, the immigrants who moved to surrounding towns and farming communities carried the disease with them.

The poor Famine Irish immigrants enlarged the slum area of Toronto. They were congregated in an area from Queen Street to the waterfront, and from Parliament Street east to the Don Basin and the liberties beyond. This area was known as Cabbage Town, and sometimes called Irish Town or Slab Town. The Church introduced religious orders and established social agencies to assist the deprived Irish in their transition as Catholics in a new, hostile environment.

The growth of Catholic institutions and churches put fear into the predominant Protestant majority, who saw this as the infiltration of `Popery' into their province. At issue, particularly, was the push for separate schools which promoted a backlash. Both the Tory and Reform parties upheld anti-Catholic sentiment at times. The Orange Order, initially an Irish Protestant organization, expanded to become a powerful Protestant association that controlled the public schools, the militia, the police, and the civic administration, shutting the Irish out of municipal employment. Moreover, it fostered movements like the Equal Rights and Protestant Protective Association with their overtly anti-Catholic platforms.

As we have seen, then, the famine in Ireland had an enormous effect on the development of the Church in Upper Canada. Places like Toronto were hard pressed to deal with Irish immigrants, most of them Catholics who arrived in a state of destitution. The city's charitable resources were stretched to the limit, and the Church's were non-existent. The untimely death of Bishop Power in 1847 added to the crisis, especially because Toronto was left without a bishop for three years.

The benevolence of a layman: John Elmsley

During the interregnum, two influential laymen, John Elmsley and S.G. Lynn, both converts, helped to maintain the financial integrity of the diocese by personally guaranteeing the debts on Power's estate and on St. Michael's Cathedral. Ironically, Elmsley, first considered by the Irish as a pompous, meddling Tory squire, gained the respect of the famine immigrants for his dedication to them:

"Amidst the ridicule of his former friends, some of whom abandoned him, he went about doing good. His care of the poor, of the widows and orphans who were swept away by the fever, was incessant...He nursed and tended the sick; he consoled the dying; he buried the victims of the terrible scourge; he washed with his own hands the poor bereaved orphans whose condition would have excited disgust in the minds of those who lay claim to no ordinary share of humanity and benevolence."

He is commemorated in Elmsley Place and Elmsley Hall at St. Michael's College.

While Elmsley used his own and the Church's money (such as the Offertory fund) in aid of the poor, he dispensed it from City Hall, thus motivating the civic authorities to increase their own financial help. He also served on the board of the House of Industry, a secular institution which housed the poor; in 1853, however, he resigned, when it was reported that the House had been "converted into an organized system of `soup' proselytism" for the Protestants.

In 1849, Elmsley and his wife organized the Catholic Ladies of Toronto, to counteract the Committee of the Widows and Orphans Fund, which was giving Irish Catholic children to Protestant families. The Elmsleys obtained a property on Nelson Street which became a Catholic orphanage, with the Catholic Ladies supplying bedding, clothing and cooking necessities, and others donating food and fuel. Servant girls, under the direction of a matron, cared for the children while awaiting job opportunities.

The New Bishop

Armand Francois-Marie, Comte de Charbonnel, was born of privileged parents in Southern France on December 1, 1802. He was educated by a group of diocesan priests known as Basilians from the parish of that name; they were the founders of the Congregation of St. Basil. Despite his father's wish that he enter the military, Charbonnel went to the Sulpician Seminary at Issy and was ordained a priest in 1825. For fifteen years he taught dogma and Scripture at various Sulpician seminaries in France; but much of his priestly career was spent in avoiding opportunities of promotion. During riots in Lyons in 1834, he was instrumental in saving the city from pillage, and was offered the Cross of the Legion of Honour by King Louis Philippe--which he declined. To escape being made a bishop, he volunteered as a missionary to Canada.

Father Charbonnel worked among the Irish from 1840 to 1847. During that time, Archbishop Blanc of New Orleans sought him as coadjutor, and Governor-general Sydenham also pressed him to accept a bishopric. But he replied to the latter, "If I wanted to be a bishop, I would not have left France." Like Power, he fell ill with typhus contracted from the famine immigrants. He was recalled to France to convalesce, and then became Professor of Theology in the Seminary at Aix-en-Provence. But when the Canadian hierarchy pleaded with Propaganda to appoint him to the See of Toronto, all his protests were of no avail; Pope Pius IX personally bestowed the episcopal dignity on him on May 26, 1850.

Arrival in Toronto

One of his first undertakings was to address the laity in St. Michael's Cathedral on "The Duties of the Good Shepherd." The Mirror reported:

"He began by hoping that they would excuse his imperfect English . . . He spoke of his labours in Montreal amongst the Irish immigrants . . . He stood then before them as their chief Pastor, ready at all times to risk everything to sacrifice everything, even life itself, if necessary, for the welfare of the flock committed to his care. In proof of his entire devotion to their services he assured them that he had made over the whole of his paternal estate in France to assist in liquidating the debt contracted for the building of the magnificent Cathedral in which they were, and for such other religious purposes as the Diocese mostly stood in need of, without so much as reserving a farthing for his own private use. He concluded by promising to visit them all; but he wanted especially to see the poor, to cheer, to console, and if possible to relieve them."

With such dedication, Charbonnel applied himself to his enormous task. He realized at once the need to provide assistance for the poor, the sick, hungry and unskilled immigrants if they were to survive. He soon invited from France religious orders which had profited from the devotional, moral and social renewal of St. Alphonsus de Liguori. Through them, he planned to establish schools and seminaries and to serve the neglected spiritual needs of the laity. To begin with, he had only two churches, two priests and a few Sisters of Loretto in Toronto, and twenty-eight priests scattered throughout his diocese.

Charbonnel established a Cathedral Loan Fund to reduce the debt on the unfinished building. Money flowed in from Canada East, Canada West, and the United States; Catholics from Montreal, where Charbonnel had never accepted a stipend, helped him with land and savings and insurance policies. He also established a Toronto Savings Bank to keep track of money loaned to the Church, and to encourage the laity to save for education, housing, times of illness or unemployment, or old age. In all financial matters, Charbonnel required strict accountability. Each parish or institution was to keep its books up-to-date, and priests were to keep accurate records of all collections and other income (including bazaars and picnics) so that the diocese could receive its Cathedraticum, one-tenth of parish revenue. None of this money went to keep Charbonnel in the style of a count or a bishop; in his personal habits, food, and clothing, he adopted the lifestyle of a beggar, and he expected a similar charitable commitment from his clergy.

Division of the Diocese

In 1852 the Bishop made a visitation throughout his vast diocese--all of southern Ontario. Subsequently he called the priests into the city for seven days to attend a retreat, ending with a synod. As a step towards decentralization, he re-established the system of deaneries Bishop Power had begun. But he realized that the diocese was too big, and recommended that it be divided in three: Toronto with 6 counties and 40,000 Catholics; Hamilton with 8 and 22,000; and London with 9 and 10,000. This division took place in 1856.

Dealing with bigotry

In his request to Rome for this proposal, Charbonnel wrote, "Thank God our Irish know only how to believe in the Church and Protestants make less noise than we could fear." But when he appealed for a division at the Second Council of Quebec in 1855, he revealed the problems his laity faced:

"Protestantism reigns supreme in the Diocese of Toronto, powerful, rich and zealous; it has at its beck and call landed property, business and labour and numerous clergy, well endowed, teaching in schools of every branch and degree, churches and magnificent schools in abundance, elections and all the seats in Parliament, almost all public employment, houses of charity, the press and secret societies. (Meanwhile) the Bishop of Toronto is insulted in the streets of this city and in several counties there have been different attempts on the life of the missionaries."

The Protestant majority in Toronto viewed the Famine Irish not only as an alien group but as worthy of contempt because of their Catholicism. As one man put it,

"God has destroyed the Roman Catholics in the South and West of Ireland with famine and disease . . . God gave them a final overthrow in the distant towns and other parts of North America."

By the time Charbonnel arrived, this unsympathetic stereotype of the Irish made it difficult to obtain assistance for them. George Brown's Globe abused them constantly:

"Irish beggars are to be met everywhere, and they are as ignorant and vicious as they are poor. They are lazy, improvident and unthankful; they fill our poor-houses and our prisons, and are as brutish in their superstition as Hindoos."

Charbonnel's response to Brown's biting remarks about his priests and to attacks against his flock on the streets was to try to build a separate society for them. The growth of Catholic churches, institutions, and solidarity naturally made the Protestants uneasy and even more hostile. But the Bishop stood his ground. When the mayor of Toronto asked for a contribution to the Patriotic Fund in 1855, Charbonnel replied that the thousands of children in Toronto and the rest of his Diocese who were intellectually starving and perishing because of want of religious education and the means necessary for it, and the thousands of immigrants whom the most unjust tyranny sent to Canada every year, had a prior claim on his charity.

Spiritual Assistance: The Religious Orders Arrive

The Sisters of Loretto, excellent teachers but few in numbers, had already begun work in the two Catholic schools of Toronto. In 1851 the Sisters of St. Joseph arrived to take over the orphanage which John Elmsley had established to protect the religion of the Famine Irish infants. They also began a program of outdoor relief and visitations to the homes of the poor, the sick, and the dying.

In 1855, Charbonnel opened the House of Providence, which was to become a crucible for social action under the administration of this dynamic group of nuns. It was a home for the orphaned, sick, aged and destitute, run on a voluntary basis with the sisters begging for its maintenance both in the city ad outside it. From this single institution begun by the Bishop, there developed Providence Villa for the aged, three hospitals (St. Michael's, St. Joseph's, and Our Lady of Mercy), three orphanages, St. Nicholas Home for street boys, and Notre Dame for working girls--all under the care of the Sisters of St. Joseph

At Charbonnel's invitation, the Christian Brothers arrived from France in 1851 to open St. Michael's College in the Bishop's rectory, and to assist the Sisters of Loretto in teaching the primary grades. Later they expanded their work to establish De La Salle High School and St. John's Training School. So the training of skilled and educated young Irishmen proceeded at the hands of teachers whose methods were widely acclaimed.

In response to Charbonnel's plea for the establishment of a seminary in Canada West, the Basilian Fathers arrived in 1852. Charbonnel gave the Christian Brothers charge of the Catholic boys' schools in the city, and the Basilians the responsibility of administering the newly constructed St. Basil's Church and St. Michael's College, built on land donated by John Elmsley. Like the Christian Brothers, the Basilians were plagued with financial problems at the outset.

Clerics were subjected to the same persecution as the Irish population, but this only helped to draw the Catholic community in Toronto closer together. Raids against the St. Joseph's Orphanage especially provoked Catholic ire. The nuns who ran it were very dear to the Bishop's heart; working 14 to 16 hours a day, sharing beds with orphaned children and having barely enough to eat, they proved to the people that they too lived at subsistence level. Witnessing the mild response Charbonnel and his clergy gave to physical attack and verbal abuse, the laity adopted a similar attitude of Christian forbearance which alleviated some of the old tensions.

The St. Vincent de Paul Society

To supplement the work of the religious orders, Charbonnel required a lay organization to function in a voluntary manner, and he found it in the Society founded in France in 1833 by Alfred de Mun and Frederick Ozanam. Ozanam said.

"Go to the poor, go to the worker. Go not with empty hands. And what is more, go live among the poor and the workers."

Members of the Society, established in Toronto in 1850, did not consider poverty a sin but a human condition that had to be overcome. The Bishop often accompanied members on their visits, saying "God loves the poor," he would lift his outer robe, the gift of a Toronto merchant, to reveal his tattered garments underneath, and this gesture uplifted the spirits of those who saw it.

Besides visiting the sick and the poor, the St. Vincent de Paul Society found living accommodation, paid rents, provided food, furnished tools for workers, and even established libraries to spread the faith and educate the poor. It influenced the formation of benevolent and insurance societies, and in 1890 it started what was to become the Catholic Children's Aid Society. Other societies were formed which were modelled along its lines, especially women's groups which supplied food and clothing to school children, assisted the nuns in various ways, and raised money for the religious orders.

Catholic Schools and Controversy

Even before he arrived in Toronto, Charbonnel had been told by Elmsley "that your arrival will be the commencement of a new era: that religion and religious education will soon be planted upon the best possible footing." One of his major goals was to secure Catholic schools for his flock. He soon concluded that only through a system of separate education could the Catholic children be kept as practising Catholics. He was determined to make this system independent of the common one. He did not want it based on an educational philosophy attuned to Protestantism.

When he came to Toronto, there were only two Catholics schools, and he immediately asked for assistance to set up a school to accommodate the Catholic children who were allowed to run wild in the eastern portion of the city. He offered a reasonable compromise: the school would be staffed by the sisters and therefore would be operated at minimal cost, and it would help regenerate a class of children who might otherwise become criminals. But the city rejected his plan. This led him to become embroiled in a bitter conflict with Egerton Ryerson, the Methodist leader who was largely responsible for setting up the public school system in Ontario. However, the Bishop's own approach was not always popular with Catholics; they felt he was pressuring them to support a system of whose merits they were not convinced. They began to support his stand more forcefully, however, when they realized the implications of various pronouncements by Ryerson, particularly as they applied to Catholic teachers employed in the common schools.

A Lenten pastoral letter that Bishop Charbonnel issued in 1857 produced considerable controversy. It said that Catholic electors who did not use their electoral power in behalf of separate schools were guilty of mortal sin, as were confessors who gave absolution to parents who sent their children to mixed schools. The letter was especially directed against those in the hinterland who by their lack of support threatened the existence of Catholic schools. Most Irish Catholics in rural areas did compromise their religious principles and sent their children to mixed schools. Even the leading Catholic politician in the province, John Sandfield Macdonald from Glengarry, did not favour separate education and spoke out against it.

In the urban centres, the Church was hard pressed to meet the demands of the growing lay population for separate schools. The Irish newspapers in Toronto supported the Bishop's concept of Catholic schools throughout his tenure and well beyond. Still the financial problems were enormous; Charbonnel had to use the residue of his personal estate from France to make up the deficit in the year 1854. But, one year after Charbonnel's departure, praise of Catholic teachers came from a strange and unexpected source, Egerton Ryerson:

"The good sisters of St. Joseph and the Christian Brothers deserve our gratitude for the manner in which they are educating our Catholic youth. They are a blessing to the city of Toronto. They are pointing out to the youthful mind the way of virtue, religion, morality and useful knowledge."

The Good Bishop Retires

In 1860, Bishop Charbonnel submitted his resignation as Bishop of Toronto. He may have been impelled to do so by the abuse directed towards him and his French Basilians because of their French accents and backgrounds. The abuse came from a small fraction of the urban Irish, yet it may have been a signal to the bishop of the need for change. He went back to France, and entered the Capuchin Order. His last gift to Toronto was an eminently qualified English-speaking bishop, John Joseph Lynch. Charbonnel was able to escort his successor to a place among the archbishops at the Vatican Council of 1870, for the see which he himself had divided had now entered on a new dignity and importance: it was a metropolitan see, an archbishopric.