January 15th marks the 144th anniversary of the Redemptorist’s arrival at St. Patrick’s, Toronto. Following a Redemptorist mission at St. Michael’s cathedral in November 1880, Archbishop John Joseph Lynch was quick to reach out to the Baltimore Province and offer up St. Patrick’s parish, the city’s poorest parish situated near “The Ward”.
The parish fit well with the Redemptorist charism of caring for the most abandoned and in January 1881, the Order assumed care of the parish.
Even within the first year of their arrival, the Redemptorists initiated a number of changes. In April, Fr. Miller and McInerny set out on their first mission and by the end of the year a further 18 were held in the city and in the surrounding dioceses. By the 1930s, the mission team stationed at St. Patrick’s had conducted over 1000 missions across the country.
In December, the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help was installed in a solemn ceremony, with devotions beginning not long after.
In 1886, in order to accommodate the growing community of Redemptorists, a three-storey monastery was constructed. Similarly, in 1903 as the parish numbers continued to expand, construction on a new church began, and opened on McCaul Street in 1908.
The previous church remained with the Redemptorists and was renamed to Our Lady of Mount Carmel for the Italian-speaking congregation.
The larger church also allowed for an increase in the devotions being offered to two times a week by 1916 and the continuous novena being introduced in 1929. The Wednesday devotions increased to 6 by 1937, then to 10 by 1942, reaching their peak number of 11 in 1961.
In 1912, the existence of the monastery at St. Patrick’s made the parish the ideal choice as the administrative centre for the newly founded Toronto Vice-Province and it continued to act as such for its successor the Toronto Province until 1968.
As the community around the parish changed over the years, so did the parish itself. When the hospitals in the area began to expand, many of the confreres stationed at St. Patrick’s took up postings as hospital chaplains. Another large change has been the disappearance of the immigrant community in the area, replaced by a population that largely dwells in the condominiums that were built up around the church.
Despite these changes resulting in a much smaller congregation, new initiatives and ministries continue to help serve the community. The 1990s saw the parish join the inter-faith program Out of the Cold as well as the emergence of Street Patrol, both of which focus their efforts on the homeless population in the downtown area.
The Redemptorist’s also continued to make use of the monastery for their own ministries, launching Ignite Canada also in the 1990s, a ministry focused on the youth and young adults.
One constant of the church though has been the veneration of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. In 2016, the Archdiocese officially designated St. Patrick’s as a shrine church, though it had previously been long seen as one by the community.
To aid in contemporary prayer, the Redemptorist’s launched both a televised version of these devotions, Devotions TV, in 1995 and a web-based version in 2009.
Elora Garbutt, Archivist (The Scribe, Vol 24 Issue/N°1 | January/Janvier 2025)
