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Most of the buildings on St. Patrick Street are dull. Some are decrepit. The pizzeria and the barber shop would blend into
the background of a more cheerful street. Here, they are rare points of brightness and activity.
Here, St. Brigid's church is magnificent, despite its peeling paint. It's a church that is very much of this neighbourhood,
even as it redeems it.
In that way, this church reminds me of its namesake. Brigid was not the kind of saint to run off to a damp cave and talk
to her visions in solitude. She was a woman fully engaged in the Ireland of her day. The stories of her life depict her interacting
with ambitious kings and with young women in trouble.
Archbishop Marcel Gervais has decided that St. Brigid's church is, in addition to being expensive to repair, surplus to
the Catholic community's needs.
The internal finances of religious communities aren't any of my business. I don't care very much one way or the other whether
Catholics continue to worship at this church.
What happens to the building, though, is very much my business, and the business of every resident of Ottawa.
"I think that everyone walking by there, in the Market area, feels a sense of ownership," says Natalie Bull, executive
director of the Heritage Canada Foundation.
The trouble is, Canadians' sense of ownership of historic churches has not matured into a sense of duty. We don't know
what to do with churches that have no congregations. Here and there, Canadians have managed to convert religious buildings
into secular ones, or to preserve parts of them as museum exhibits. But we're still figuring it out.
We'd better figure it out fast. In his letter to the St. Brigid's parishioners, the archbishop wrote: "it would be very
difficult to justify spending the considerable amount of money that would be necessary to effect a restoration of St. Brigid's
Church, or any other inner-city Catholic Church." If St. Brigid's becomes empty, it won't be the last beautiful old downtown
church to do so.
That's something the secular community must start thinking about. What are we going to do with churches that religious
groups no longer want?
We might want to look to Europe for examples of how to integrate religious heritage sites into a modern secular landscape.
In St. Brigid's homeland, old and even ruined churches are places of importance. They aren't preserved out of piety alone.
They are preserved as monuments to human effort and ingenuity. They are preserved because they are works of art. They are
preserved because they are old.
The Canadian landscape will never be dotted with stone outlines that show where the 19th-century churches used to be. Our
society takes an all-or-nothing approach to buildings: We either tear them down or we preserve every window and light fixture.
This age will leave no ruins.
The all-or-nothing approach could be a problem for St. Brigid's. The inside of the building, like the outside, is at least
partly protected by heritage designation. It's hard to argue against that once you've seen the inside of the building, but
it might make it difficult for anyone to convert the church to a new use.
That limits the options. Some religious groups have reportedly expressed interest in buying the church, which would be
the least destructive scenario.
In the most destructive scenario, it would sit empty or very underused. It could remain that way until the city and the
province repent on the heritage designation and, out of desperation, allow a developer to do something rash. Across the street
from St. Brigid's, the century-old Our Lady's School has been boarded up for years. Any option looks good for that building
now.
Back to Europe, just for a moment. English Heritage has a new campaign called "Inspired!" to repair and preserve that country's
many churches. It is lobbying for funding to help congregations maintain religious buildings that are still in use, and to
restore underused religious buildings.
Some parts of Canada are moving toward a European-style respect for religious heritage. The Quebec Religious Heritage Foundation
was created in the mid-1990s to restore religious buildings and works of art.
It might be prudent for Ottawa to develop a trust or foundation dedicated to rescuing surplus religious buildings. If such
an organization exists here, I haven't been able to find it.
In the meantime, it's time for theatre companies, small museums and other enterprising folks to start thinking of uses
for St. Brigid's. It would be nice to keep every painting and statue in the church intact, but not if it means boarding up
St. Brigid's like a tomb. It's a living part of its neighbourhood, and should continue to be.
Kate Heartfield is a member of the Citizen's editorial board. E-mail: kheartfield@thecitizen.canwest.com
