Deceased clergy, religious remembered at annual Mass

VANCOUVER—Grand Knight Armand Giroday remembers having picnics with Msgr. Thomas Nichol and a band of altar servers when he was 11 years old.

“I started serving at Mass in Grade 3. Msgr. Nichol was a beautiful man. He used to treat us, the altar boys, really well.”

Msgr. Nichol, who passed away in 1990, would take altar servers from Sts. Peter and Paul Parish on annual trips to Bowen Island. He also gave Giroday a rosary blessed by Pope Pius XII, a gift he still treasures today. “He was very generous.”

Giroday prayed for Msgr. Nichol and other deceased priests of the Archdiocese of Vancouver during a Mass in their honour Nov. 9, saying “we all have connections” to priests or religious who have died.

About 60 priests and many lay people attended the Mass for Deceased Bishops, Clergy, and Consecrated Men and Women at Holy Rosary Cathedral that day. Archbishop J. Michael Miller, CSB, made special mention of the six priests and five sisters who died in the last year.

“With affection, let us commend to God the souls of these faithful witnesses who served our Church, thanking him for their gifts of witness and ministry,” he said during his homily.

“Our lives were – and are still – profoundly linked to them.”

All the priests honoured were members of religious communities: Oblates of Mary Immaculate Fathers John Brioux and Donald Douglas McDonald; Salesian Father Giovanni Basso; Redemptorist Father Brendan Boland; Dominican Father Joseph Nguyen; and Pallotine Father Xavier Royappan.

Grand Knight Denis Faucher was in the honour guard for Father Boland’s funeral at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Feb. 11, 2017.

“Father Boland was very involved. He was in the Knights for 50 years,” said Faucher, who met the elderly priest four years before he passed away. “We started a new council of Knights at the parish, and that’s when we met Father Boland. He was really involved until ... he passed away. He would come to first degree ceremonies and represent the clergy.”

At the cathedral, Faucher prayed for Father Boland, as well as some bilingual priests he came to know after moving to Vancouver. The Mass was also a moment to honour a loved family member: “My father was a deacon, and he passed away last year, so this reminds me of my dad, as well.”

The local church also grieved the deaths of five consecrated women in the last year: Sisters of the Child Jesus Marianne Flory, Margaret Gormley, and Jean Holick; Daughter of St. Mary of Providence Sister Anna Maria Bilotta; and Good Shepherd Sister Deborah Isaacs.

“It is our radical belonging to Christ, and the fact that we are in him and he in us, that fills us with hope,” Archbishop Miller said.

“In short, we can truthfully exclaim with the Apostle: ‘If God is for us, who is against us?’”