Canada May 24, 2023
Archbishop mourns loss of historic Alberta church destroyed by arson
By The B.C. Catholic
The Archbishop of Grouard-McLennan in Northern Alberta says he is saddened but “not overcome” by the loss of a 121-year-old church to arson.
Archbishop Gerard Pettipas, CSsR, released a statement Tuesday following Monday’s fire that destroyed the historic St. Bernard Catholic Church.
Archbishop Pettipas said the church was “irreparably destroyed” and marks “a sad moment for the many people who have fond memories of this church. Frequent Masses, baptisms, funerals, confirmations, and confessions took place between these walls, which are now charred and rendered as rubbish.”
RCMP have charged two men in connection with the fire: High Prairie residents Kenneth Ferguson, 56, and Gerald Capot, 50, are both charged with break and enter to commit theft as well as arson.
The two were scheduled to appear in court in High Prairie May 29.
In his statement, the Archbishop said St. Bernard was “a place of immense historical significance. “It was not only a monument to the past, but a vital part of the present, and a building our diocese has been trying to restore, little by little, to its original beauty.”
Saying he greatly mourned the loss of the church and regretted “the incident that led to its destruction,” the archbishop said, said, “I am not overcome by this loss. Nobody lost their life in this fire.”
Although a church was destroyed, he said, “the Church – church with a capital C – will never be destroyed. The people of God, the Body of Christ, lives on. A building is lost to the flames, but the flames of faith kindled there are not. The Good News of Jesus Christ is as present and alive as ever.”
The archdiocese said the church was the diocese’s first cathedral, built when the Episcopal Vicar of Athabasca, Bishop Emile Grouard, chose Lesser Slave Lake Post as the seat of his diocese.
Bishop Grouard, a skilled artist, painted the mural that was displayed behind the altar.
In 1942 the vicariate was transferred to McLennan where the current cathedral was completed in 1945.
More than 50 Catholic churches in Canada have been vandalized or burned down since the announcement in 2021 that graves had apparently been found near a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.
The Catholic Civil Rights League of Canada maintains a Church Attacks Database at ccrl.ca cataloguing attacks against Catholic churches in Canada ranging from the breaking of stained-glass windows to acts of desecration and church burnings.