Loyola Park

Biography of Father Martin Callaghan

A drawing of Father Martin Callaghan when young

Father Martin Callaghan in 1903

Photo montage of the pastors at St. Patrick's Church, Montreal;
Fr. Martin Callaghan, top middle

Father Martin Callaghan

Father Martin Callaghan was born on 20 November 1846 in Montreal. He attended the Petit Seminaire du College de Montreal (1860-1868) and he studied at the Grand Seminaire from 1869-1872. He was ordained a priest in 1872 and the following year he asked his Bishop to be allowed to enter the Sulpician Order for further training. The Sulpicians are a secular order, dedicated to training priests, but are not allowed to recruit priests to their order. Sulpician priests are referred to as "The Gentlemen of St. Sulpice" and are addressed as 'Monsieur'. Father Martin served as an auxiliary professor at the College de Montreal from 1872-1874. He served as vicar at St. Patrick's Church from 1875-1902; from 1902-1908 he was the pastor at St. Patrick's. He resigned from St. Patrick's in 1908 after thirty-five years service and was designated confessor of the Freres des Ecoles chretiennes. He also served at Notre Dame Church from 1908 to 1915 where he occasionally worked as a minister. Father Martin was dedicated to helping the poor and the working class, the class from which he came. He was also renowned for converting people to the Catholic faith; a church biography of Father Martin states, "par le nombre des convertis estimes par les statistiques les plus moderees a 3,000," which includes "protestants, juifs, Negres, Chinois".

In 1915, upon returning to Montreal from Baltimore where he assisted at a funeral for another priest, Father Martin fell ill; this soon developed into congested lungs. Father Martin died on 10 June 1915 in his sixty-ninth year. His brother, Father Luke Callaghan, sang the mass at Father Martin's funeral. One booklet describes the funeral: "A large cortege of mourners accompanied his remains to their last resting place beneath the chapel of the Grand Seminary on Sherbrooke Street."

Father Martin was also an authority Canadian on folklore and for a number of years he was the owner of the Fleming Windmill, an historical landmark located in Ville LaSalle.

His obituary, published in the Montreal Star of 11 June 1915, states that, 'Father Martin,' as he was affectionately known to many, 'was a true Irishman in warmth of heart and breadth of sympathy. His gifts to charitable movements were countless, and many of his benefactions were known only to himself. The poor and needy always found him a ready listener to the story of their troubles.'

Here is an article on Fr. Martin Callaghan from 1915:

LATE FATHER CALLAGHAN

 BELOVED PRIEST,

REV. M. CALAGHAN

HAS PASSED AWAY

 

Formerly of St. Patrick’s

Well Known Throughout Province

 

Good Violinist

And Wrote Music

 

Authority on Canadian

Folklore—Gave Much

to Charity

The Reverend Martin Callaghan, former…. and [one of the] best known English speaking priests in the Province of Quebec, died last evening at the Hotel Dieu, after an illness of two weeks. He was sixty-nine years old.

Father Callaghan, whose career in the priesthood was long and useful, was born in Montreal, November 1846. He was educated, under the Rev. Father Mayer and the Sulpicians on Sherbrooke Street where after completing his studies he was professor of English for one year, having among his pupils Archbishop Bruchesi of Montreal and Archbishop Langevin of St. Boniface, and many men now prominent in the public life of this Province.

 

ST MARY’S CURATE

Father Callaghan studied theology under Rev. Fathers Levigne and Colin (?), and was ordained priest by the late Bishop Bourget. He was admitted a member of the Sulpician community in Paris, and began his ministry in Montreal as a curate of St. Mary’s under Father Campion. After one year at St. Mary’s he was appointed to St. Patrick’s under Father Dowd, and afterwards Father Quinlivan, succeeding the latter as pastor of St. Patrick’s. He served for a year under the Sulpician regime under Archbishop Bruchesi.

In December, 1907, after four years service as pastor of St. Patrick’s, Father … resigned to be…pastor…

Father Callaghan was well known as a musician. He was a violin pupil of Oscar Martel, violinist to the late King of Belgium. He was the author of many musical compositions, a number of which were rendered for the benefit of Montreal charities at various times. A deep student of Canadian folklore, his lectures on this subject had been enjoyed by thousands. “Father Martin,” as he was affectionately known to many, was a true Irishman in warmth of heart and breadth of sympathy. His gifts to charitable movements were countless, and many of his benefactions were known only to himself. The poor and needy always found him a ready listener to the story of their troubles.

 

GAVE AWAY LAND

A year ago he gave a piece of land in the parish of Lachine, which he had purchased some time before as a site for an English-Catholic college, to the Presentation Brothers, for a novitiate. The land was valued at $50,000. Later he gave the same community a site at Longueuil.

 As a missionary priest Father Callaghan met with great success, his converts being numbered by thousands. He took special interest in work among the Chinese of Montreal. In collaboration with the Rev. Father Montanard, now serving with the French army, he prepared a Chinese-English catechism.

 His brother, the Rev. Luke Callaghan, parish priest of St. Michael’s, was with him at the time of his death, as were his sister Mrs. Farrel, of Lachine, and Rev. Sister Morrissy, and assistants of the parish of Notre Dame. 

Fleming Windmill, Montreal, 1900's

On the Fleming Windmill (click on this link for the original text):

 

Farmhouse and Fleming windmill, Lasalle, near Montreal, QC, about 1870

In 1815, William Fleming, a Scottish immigrant, built a stone house and a wooden windmill on his property in Lower-Lachine, facing Lac Saint-Louis, near Chemin du Roi (present-day LaSalle Blvd), which was a major thoroughfare and transportation route at the time. He ground barley and rice for local farmers who sold to the Montreal breweries. In 1816, Fleming decided to grind wheat. But this was in direct conflict with the Seigneurial rights of the Sulpician Seminary in Montreal, who had the monopoly on all flour-producing mills since 1663, requiring farmers to have their wheat ground by Sulpician mills for a fee. The Seminary, insisting on their rights, ordered Fleming’s mill to be demolished. Fleming’s lawyers replied that the Seminary had no legal power to rule in Canada. Their status was given by the Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice de Paris, which had no authority in Canada. In 1822,the King’s Bench ruled in favour of the Seminary and ordered non-regulation mills to be demolished. Fleming appealed the decision. Three years later, the eight judges of the Court of Appeal were unable to reach a majority decision, which constituted a victory for Fleming, since, in the absence of a decision, the Montreal Seminary could not force him to demolish his mill. William Fleming took advantage of the victory and decided to rebuild the mill in stone in 1827. He signed a building contract with the mason, William Morrison to build the stone windmill that stands to this very day. From 1827 to the 1880s the ownership and operation of the mill remained within the Fleming family. When William Fleming died in 1860, his son John took over operation of the mill. When activities ceased in the 1880s, the mill’s condition rapidly deteriorated. In 1892, the mill lost two of its blades and the rotating mechanism collapsed. At the turn of the century, the roof and the mechanism had fallen inside the building. After John Fleming’s death, his widow, Isabella Wylie bequeathed the property to Reverend Martin Callaghan, who later transferred the property to Reverend E.P. Curtin. In 1914, Curtin donated the mill to a religious community known as the Presentation Brothers of Ireland. In 1928, The Wellcome Foundation acquired the mill and the surrounding land from the Presentation Brothers of Ireland with the intention of establishing a pharmaceutical company in the area. 

Around 1930, the mill and its internal mechanism were restored. As a result of the company’s efforts, the mill was saved from total destruction. In 1947, the City of LaSalle acquired the site from Burroughs Wellcome. Municipal authorities were more concerned about residential and industrial development than about heritage protection, and many old houses were demolished to make room for more modern buildings. In 1976, the Cavelier-de-LaSalle Historical Society convinced the city to apply to the Ministère des Affaires Culturelles du Québec, in order to have the mill recognized an official heritage site. They felt that their application was justified even if the millstones and the interior mechanism had disappeared without a trace. In 1982, the city of LaSalle adopted the mill as its official emblem and continued to put pressure on the Quebec government to accelerate the processing of the heritage recognition application. Finally, in 1983, the mill was officially classified as an archaeological heritage site by the Ministère des Affaires Culturelles du Québec. After being restored in 1990, it became a historical interpretation centre, open to the public every weekend during the summer. The Fleming Mill is the only windmill of Anglo-Saxon design with a device for turning its sails windward, still standing in the Province of Quebec.

F.R. Scott’s “central passion” was poetry

Every poem is a partner with the poet in the dance of creation. Are they two? Are they one? Does he make it, does it make him? Or the two make the one? The rhythms change, the fashions come and go, from metrical stanza and rhyme, from free verse and imagism, from surrealism, concrete verse and anti-poems, from this and that new intensity, the forms emerge, but always it is the dance of life, of the vision standing on the commonplace, of man and womb and woman, of yin and yang, of beginnings and endings without end. (p. 452)

This quotation, by F.R. Scott, is taken from Sandra Djwa’s biography of Scott, A Life of F.R. Scott: A Life of the Imagination (Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver and Toronto, 1989).

A walk in NDG (two)

Outside the Loyola Chapel at Concordia University, this rowan tree is full of berries; after the first snowfall, I was surprised that most of the berries had fallen. November 16, 2010.

Winter or a river

And it was at that age... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.

"Poetry" by Pablo Neruda
(trans. Alastair Reid)

Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems
(Penguin Books, 1975, page 218-219)

Holy Wells, Montreal (continuation)

Continuing my search for "holy wells," here is a view of water appearing through the earth and snow in Loyola Park in western NDG. See previous entries for more information on this site and the topic of "holy wells." The City of Montreal's error was locating their experimental ecological site in the wrong place, it should have been where the water appears on the surface of the earth.

Beyond Truth Is Compassion

Truth is not happy, cannot
make us happy or feel joy;
if truth were happy,
none of us would lie,
none of us would dispute
the others truth.
What brings people together?
Not truth but compassion,

C.G. Jung and the importance of family history

This quotation, from C.G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, was published in Harvey Shepherd’s “A Note From the Co-President” column in the March 2011 issue of The Newsletters of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal. I feel it expresses something of what I have been trying to do in my own work on my family’s history (which can be found at http://www.morrisseyfamilyhistory.com/); in much of my published poetry, for instance in Girouard Avenue (2009); in my essay, A Poet’s Journey: Notes on poetry and what it means to be a poet, published by Poetry Quebec (at http://www.poetry-quebec.com/pq/essay/article_80.shtml); and in this space.

Jung writes,

When I was working on the stone tablets, I became aware of the fateful links between me and my ancestors. I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parent to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more of a general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. (p. 233)

This is continued on page 236:

… it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mourning sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise … The less we understand of what out fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

A walk in NDG (one)

Here we are, walking on a winter day in Notre Dame de Grace. Quebec may be the most secular place in North America, but there are still many examples of religious symbolism. The presence of the numinous in everyday life helps us connect with the divine. I have tried to show evidence of this, of manifestations of spirit in everyday life, among everyday people, in these "walks in NDG." Society can try to repress spirit, make those who adhere in spirit look ignorant and old-fashioned, but spirit surfaces in its important psychic role in our lives, spirit has an archetypal role in life that cannot be repressed for long before it emerges in some new and relevant form. This street is a few blocks from where I live. It is January 2011.

The Motel Raphael today...

Someone had big plans to build on the site of the old Motel Raphael, just off Highway 2 & 20, the St. Jacques exit. Anywhere else this may have been a good plan, location, traffic, proximity to other buisnesses, it all seemed idea, but it seems to have fizzled out here in Montreal. The Motel Raphael was a fixture in this area of the city, a low cost motel... Photo taken in January 2011.

Decarie Square (two)

Decarie Square is home to various stores, a Winners, Sear's Warehouse, a motor vehicle bureau, a big Corrections Canada parole office, a two dollar cinema, various rug and carpet stores, and so on, assuming these stores haven't closed by now. It is just off the Decarie Expressway, and is worth a visit. Most people think of this as a failed shopping mall, failed probably because of its location and the changing demographics of the area. 

Decarie Square (one)

Transcendence (2)

This scultpure, "Transcendence," by Jack Harman is located on the campus of 

the University of British Columbia, outside of what used to be the faculty club.

Transcendence (1)

Located on the Loyola campus of Concordia University, outside of the Hingston Hall residence, is Walter Fuhrer's sculpture, "Transcendence."

Winter at Cote des Neiges

All's Good

Painted on the side of a former IGA grocery store next to the Montreal West train station and just a block from where Artie Gold used to live; this building was demolished last summer and condos are being built at this location. 

January 15th, 2011: This is the birthday of two dear old friends: Veeto, my friend from Oxford Avenue days and Hoolahan's flats, from the early 1950s, who lives in Australia, and my old friend Artie Gold who I met in the early 1970s. God bless both of them. How dull and boring life would be without people like Veeto and Artie, they bring life and enthusiasm and spirit to everyone they meet. It was Veeto who told me that "LG" means "Life is good," so when I saw this painted sign (not far from where I live) I thought of her. Artie would have been 64 years old today; he is still missed by all of us who knew him. Coincidentally, Veeto (who never met Artie) knew Mary Brown, Artie's companion on Lorne Crescent, when Mary worked at a summer camp years before Mary and Artie met. Veeto and Artie are the kind of people I love, people who embrace life and who are bigger than life, people who take chances and sing, loudly, as they walk along the street, or who just have to stop at every second store to buy something to eat. These are people who remind us that life is meant for living, for creating, for loving, that life is not to be lived in fear, or for money, or for what we can get. These are people who changed my life for the better!

Archetypal Patterns in Poetry

October 2012

In an article, “On the relation of analytical psychology to poetic art,” Dr. C.G. Jung has set forth an hypothesis in regard to the psychological significance of poetry. The special emotional significance possessed by certain poems—a significance going beyond any definite meaning conveyed—he attributes to the stirring in the reader’s mind, within or beneath his conscious response, of unconscious forces which he terms “primordial images,” or archetypes. These archetypes he describes as “psychic residua of numberless experiences of the same type,” experiences which have happened not to the individual but to his ancestors, and of which the results are inherited in the structure of the brain, a priori determinants of individual experience.

From Archetypal Patterns in Poetry: Psychological studies in imagination, by Maud Bodkin, Vintage Books, New York, 1958; first published in 1934

Magnan's Tavern, Point St. Charles, Montreal

This is a popular restaurant just off St. Patrick in Pointe St. Charles.