Michael Power: The Struggle to Build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier.

Michael Power The struggle to build the Catholic Church on the Canadian Frontier WRITTEN BY Mark G. McGowan PUBLISHED BY McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005, ISBN: 0773529144, Hardcover, pp. 378, $49.95 CAN

Michael Power was the first Bishop of Toronto. He had only a brief episcopate (1842-1847) as he succumbed to typhus at the age of forty-three, after having fallen sick while ministering to the Irish immigrants in Toronto, victims of the Famine. In writing his biography, Mark McGowan has attempted to provide something more than the striking image of the Martyr of Charity, held dear in the memories of those who had known him, no easy task. Power was a modest man; that much at least is clear, if not much help to his biographer, who fell heir to the rather skimpy documentation left by his subject and has done well by it.

Michael was born in Halifax, the eldest son of Irish immigrants. His father, William Power, was, in his twenties, a captain of ships sailing to Newfoundland, the West Indies and New England, often being away for most of the year, leaving the care of the home with its growing family to his wife, Mary, who provided an example of faith and devotion. Michael was the oldest of their eight surviving children, with three brothers and four sisters.

Halifax was very much involved in the interests, both commercial and military, of the British Empire, and Michael received from his father an example of loyalty to the British Crown which would become one of the principal characteristics of his personality. Even more significant, though, was his mother's influence on Michael Power's life. It was she who, during her husband's long absences, had to lead the family in its life as a Catholic family. Outside the family, the most influential figure was Edmund Burke the parish priest and bishop-to-be.

In 1816, at the age of twelve, Michael Power left his home in Halifax to enter the minor seminary (petit seminaire) of Montreal. He was to spend eight years there studying the equivalent of high school and the undergraduate years of university. In 1824 he moved to the Grand Seminaire of Quebec, to spend two years there taking theology. During all this time, he left very little documentation for his biographer, hardly anything beyond the letters from his mother that he saved. In trying to follow and gain insight into Michael's personal development during his youth, McGowan has had to look more at the background of his life than at any personal records. In this, he has found considerable success; certainly we gain from this work a much better sense of the qualities of the future bishop than we could ever have had before. There was, however, a cost to this gain that shows up in the style of this part of the book. The biographer can show us what Power's life must have been like, but cannot say much of what actually happened; his narrative is marked by the use of "would," "would be,' "would have been," etc., so that on page 41, for example, there are fifteen such expressions.

Because of a shortage of priests, Power, like many of his contemporaries, was ordained early, leaving the last years of his theological instruction in the hands of a reluctant pastor. McGowan emphasizes this as well as the inadequacies of the academic program itself. Rooted in the seminary instruction of France, it did not necessarily prepare the students for the frontier conditions they would actually face in Canada.

Power always did well in his studies; but perhaps even more important, in practical ways, were the language skills he gained in French and Latin. French was the normal language of conversation and organization in the seminaries and Latin that of instruction; Power became fluent in both. His studies completed, he did not return to Halifax. At the initiative of the Bishop of Quebec, he became a priest of that diocese. For fifteen years, he worked as a priest there, serving successively in four parishes, from frontier foundations in the Eastern Townships and the Ottawa valley, where he worked in the seigneury of Louis Joseph Papineau, to larger and more established parishes on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, where his parish was caught up in the rebellion of 1838, counting some 300 parishioners deeply involved on either side, and finally to Laprairie. During this time he developed a close relationship with Jean Jacques Lartigue, episcopal vicar for the Montreal area, who became the first bishop of Montreal when it was made a diocese in 1836, and with Ignace Bourget who served as Lartigue's secretary and then succeeded him in 1840. Power played a leading role in the ecclesiastical politics involved in all this, serving as spokesman for the English-speaking clergy.

In 1880, he was sent to the Atlantic colonies to try to persuade the bishops there to support the plan for the establishment of Quebec as an archdiocese; an effort which had little success, but which did enable him to see his family--or what was left of it, his father and two of his brothers having died in the mean time--for the first time since he had left home in 1816. In 1841, Bishop Bourget took him on a lengthy visit to Europe, and especially to Rome and London, with the same general concern, but also with the purpose of proposing Power--much against his own will--for the diocese to be cut off from Kingston. Before the end of 1841, Pope Gregory XVI established the See of Toronto and named Michael Power as its first bishop.

Power took up his responsibilities as bishop with vigour. Both his training and his experience had made him a strong disciplinarian, determined to form his diocese according to both canon and civil law. He confronted any priests who showed themselves unwilling to accept this. At the very beginning of his episcopate, he presided over the first synod of Toronto, which published a set of diocesan regulations that he had prepared beforehand. He was responsible for beginning the publicly-funded Catholic schools. He also undertook the ambitious project of building St. Michael's Cathedral, although he did not live to see it completed. In many delicate situations, such as those involving Catholic and Protestant Irish, he was able to maintain a serene balance that was widely admired.

In 1847, he had to make his ad limina visit to the Holy See, where the new Pope Pius IX entrusted him with his letter on the Irish famine. He had also to visit London and went on to Ireland, where he was able to witness first-hand the devastating consequences of the loss of the potato crops. On his return to Toronto he came just as the effects of the arrival of the refugees, who were coming, poor and diseased, in unprecedented numbers. For all the priests of Toronto, the spiritual care of the sick and dying, and of course the dead, who had to be buried, became an overwhelming work. The time came when the bishop was the only one still able to carry on. Then he too was infected, struggled on for some days before the fatal fever hit. He was laid low and died five days later.

Mark McGowan has given us a splendid account of Michael Power's life. Adorned with three Appendices, 75 pages of notes and a useful index, his work will transform our understanding of the role of Bishop Michael Power in the history of Toronto and of the Church in Ontario.