Mass has ended, Go in Peace
I don’t often have much reason anymore to drive along Highway 23 between Bornholm and Monkton but a couple times a year or more, I somehow end up at a place called Kennicott, about halfway between the two communities.
It’s hard to say whether or not anyone knows for sure where Kennicott begins and ends but a good guess would be that it starts at an old one-room school and Catholic church and ends a half a mile north at a corner on which still stands a big brick building that once served, in my memory, as a grocery store, and I believe, before that, as a country inn.
In any case, Kennicott – named after a man by the last name of Kenney – doesn’t often make it into the big news picture, but this week it did. The parishoners at an old Roman Catholic country church called St. Brigid’s learned that it is all but certain it will be closed in 2008.
This won’t come as a surprise or a shock to many people who belong to the church, but it still must be hard for them to see the declaration posted on a website, announced from a pulpit and printed in a newspaper.
I say “them” because I moved away almost 30 years ago and haven’t been inside the church more than a dozen times since then.
And while it is not my church any more, it is a big part of my history and I will miss it when it is closed – or even torn down.
St. Brigid’s, of course, is more than a building, and so the community of Catholics will live on, but the clock for them will be turned back more than 150 years. When my ancestors first came from Ireland and settled at Bornholm, there was no St. Brigid’s and they had to make the long trek with horse and buggy to a small Irish community now called Kinkora which did have a Catholic parish and church building and still does.
In fact, my family’s association with that church dates well before the Kennicott one and my great-grandparents names can still be seen on a stained glass window their descendants bought for them after their deaths in the 1870s.
Eventually, however, the northern parts of Logan Township and Perth County were settled and the desire for a church of their own took hold of the mostly Irish pioneers of the region.
In time, a priest travelled to the area to minister to their needs and a wood-framed and wood-sided St. Brigid’s was built.
In the 1890s, my great-grandfather’s sister, Ellen Uniac, who lived next door to the church, was the first to notice a fire that had broken out inside and despite efforts to save it, the building was destroyed.
Out of the ashes rose a fine new brick church with a tall steeple housing a large bell. And one of the parishioners who lent his skills and muscle to the building task was John Hagarty, my great-grandfather, an Irish immigrant whose old country church back in Ireland, which once had a thatched roof, is still standing and open for business.
It looks now as though that church in County Cork, Ireland, and another newer one built in 1831 which he would have also attended, will outlive the one he helped build in Canada.
So for generations, St. Brigid’s was home to my family, and all our marriages, births and deaths were taken care of from that building. My parents were married there, their seven children were baptized there. And when Mom and Dad died, the masses that were celebrated for them took place there.
I spent so much time in that church in the first 18 years of my life, I can still close my eyes and see every square inch of it.
Our family always sat three rows from the front on the left side of the church. Close to all the action. Woe to the occasional visitors who sat there by accident before we arrived for Mass.
Memories include my many, many (well-deserved) trips to the confessional, praying the Stations of the Cross on Friday afternoons, card parties, bingos and great meals in the basement, and playing guitar in the folk choir.
And when I was younger, running around on the lovely church grounds with the other boys while the adults stood around outside and visited after Sunday mass.
Years ago, I could stop in to St. Brigid’s Church any time during the week, walk up the steps, open the door and have the inside to myself for as long as I wanted to sit and think or not think. And I did do that now and then.
Somewhere along the line, in response to an increasingly complicated world, the doors of the church were no longer open all day, every day.
Two years from now, barring a miracle, they’ll be closed forever.
(Update 2015: The church did close its doors. But nine years after I wrote this, it still stands. I took a tour inside a couple of years ago. It looks every bit the same as I remember it, though it is not being used at present. It was officially “de-sanctified” and will not be a Catholic church again. Its former parishoners have moved on to churches in the surrounding communities of Listowel, Mitchell, Stratford and Dublin.
©2006 Jim Hagarty
