Description
A History of the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, Montreal, 1803-2003
Saints, Sinners and Scots is the story of the remarkable congregations that make up the present Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul on Sherbrooke Street, Montreal. In these pages, you glimpse something of Montreal’s turbulent past and many contributions made by immigrant Scots to the social, political and educational life of the city.
The story is not a dull one. St. Andrew’s began in 1803 when a minority of the Scotch Church on St. Gabriel Street, angered by the choice of a minister, locked out the majority. The founding of St. Paul’s in 1843 was even more spectacular – a riot that saw church members jailed and required to furnish bail.
From these rowdy beginnings arose what the Illustrated London News of 1868 described as “among the finest ecclesiastical edifices in the country… some of the wealthiest and most influential citizens are found belonging to the congregations that worship in them.”
The membership lists read like a Canadian Who’s Who: A Governor-General and his family; three Canadian barons, the first mayor of Montreal, a principal of McGill, presidents of the Bank of Montreal, colonels of highland regiments, the founder of the oldest English girls’ school in Quebec, and such luminaries as Sir Hugh Allan of the Allan Shipping Line, Sir Joseph Hickson of the Grand Trunk Railway, Colonel John McRae and Dr. Wilder Penfield – to say nothing of names like Angus, Cross, Dawes, Dow, Durnford, Frothingham, Greenshields, Hutchison, McDougall, Ogilvie and Paton of the Scottish ascendency that once rules the city of Montreal.
Their ministers were also well-known – men like Dr. Alexander Mathieson who took on the Duke of Newcastle to secure his right to read a loyal address to the Prince of Wales in 1860; Dr. James Barclay, a chaplain in the North West Rebellion and favoured preacher of Queen Victoria; and two future principals of Queen’s University in Kingston.
The Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul, though noted for its good works and missionary zeal, was never far from controversy; the bitter struggle of the Church of Scotland to secure its share the the clergy reserves, the founding of the Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1875 which saw St. Andrew’s and St. Paul’s go their separate ways, and the Great Pew Case fought out before the Supreme Court of Canada.
This history recounts the fascinating tale of the union of the two congregations in 1918, lampooned by Stephen Leacock; the building of the cathedral-like church on Sherbrooke Street at the height of the Great Depression; its former church home on Dorchester Street, sold for a dollar and transported stone by stone to St. Laurent to become the chapel for a Roman Catholic order.
Saints, Sinners and Scots concludes with the church’s bicentennial celebrations in 2003 under a young and vigorous minister – its multicultural membership increasing and, still faithful to the two missionary saints for which it is named, reaching out into the community in new and exciting ways.
