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The clanging sound of unbridled rejoicing rang across Ottawa the moment the Dominion of Canada came into being at midnight on July 1, 1867. And one of the very bells that joined in that chorus 150 years ago today, pealing its welcome to Confederation, still tolls in the heart of the 21st century capital.
But the old church bell resonates with new meaning now. It rings out a weekly call to prayers that are led by both men and women of the cloth. It invites same-sex spouses into a where place they were once forbidden. It has welcomed a Muslim family rescued from Syrian peril by the church’s own Samaritans. It has resounded with sorrow — and shame — for grievous wrongs done to the original peoples of the land.
And just last night, on the eve of today’s historic sesquicentennial celebrations to usher in Canada’s next 150 years, the bell summoned not only Protestants and Catholics but also Muslims, Jews and those of all other faiths to a special “Prayer for Canada” — beginning with invocations from an indigenous spiritual leader.
You don’t have to venture far beyond the shadow of the Peace Tower to discover a place in downtown Ottawa where the “New Canada” is being forged today, a century and a half after the nation formally came into existence on that long-ago first Dominion Day.
And the place may come as a surprise, emblematic as it is of the Old Canada, too.
Christ Church Cathedral at the west end of Sparks Street — longstanding bastion of Anglican power and privilege in Canada’s capital — encapsulates much of this country’s very complicated story: its richly layered history of darkness and light; its unfolding future of challenge and change.
It’s the place where “Truth and Reconciliation” aren’t just high-sounding words — there’s too much acknowledged blame and regret for that — but are instead an urgent call to action and atonement for the countless injustices suffered by indigenous Canadians throughout the country’s history. Central among those offences were the Indian Residential School horrors perpetrated, in part, by earlier generations of Anglicans themselves.
Christ Church is the place where, thanks to a team of charitable parishioners, a family of refugees from Syria — Shoq and Mohamad Othman and their four children — found support and sanctuary after escaping a homeland shattered by war, terrorism and tyranny.
Pastoral Vicar Catherine Ascah recalled how the determination to sponsor a family — any family in need, no matter their faith or circumstances — emanated from the cathedral’s pews.
“This wasn’t a call from the pulpit,” she says. “The feeling was: We have the resources. We have the capacity. We need to do our part. We need to do something.”
Today, thanks to the church and its Rotary Club partners, the Othmans have settled into a home in Kanata.
“At first I felt afraid — I didn’t understand anything about Canada,” says Mohamad Othman, thinking back to when he first heard his family would find refuge in Canada. After fleeing Syria’s violent collapse and spending long months as refugees in Lebanon, the Othmans finally reached Ottawa in early 2016.
A visit to Christ Church to thank the congregation for their sponsorship was one of the family’s first outings on Canadian soil.
“When we came to Canada, I saw that people were very nice, very good. My feeling had changed,” says Othman, who is taking courses to improve his English and plans to begin training soon as a mechanic. “They worked very, very hard for us. I love Canada.”
The cathedral, too, is where the quest for interfaith harmony — the transcending of age-old religious hatreds, the building of bridges across ethnic and cultural divides, in ways that would have confused and enraged the church’s sectarian founders in the 1830s — is a high-priority mission.
That’s in lockstep with Canada’s own goals, however elusive they remain, to become a nation of unified founding peoples and warmly welcomed immigrants, of official multiculturalism and peaceable diversity.
So it was at Christ Church, just a few minutes’ walk west of Parliament Hill, where Friday’s ecumenical Prayer for Canada service was held, in bid to celebrate difference while symbolizing the solidarity of the faithful in a world where religion too often divides.
“A prayer is a powerful thing,” says Kitigan Zibi elder Albert Dumont, the Algonquin spiritual guide who led the gathering with “my friend,” the cathedral’s Dean Shane Parker.
“My prayer for Canada would be that the citizens of Canada interlock their roots with the roots of the people who came from the Middle East or from Ireland or from Britain or whatever the case,” says Dumont. “The indigenous roots have been here a long time, but we should all lock our roots together and we’ll be a stronger nation because of it.
“Canada is a great country now,” he adds, “but imagine how much greater it could be if there was no such thing as hatred.”
The event’s order of service reads like an ode to Canadian pluralism: indigenous “spirit keeper” Barbara Dumont Hill and Imam Samy Metwally of the Ottawa Mosque delivering calls to prayer; Timothy Erkloo performing an Inuit drum dance; Ayurittsuiyi Aigah Attagutsiak of Saint Margaret’s Vanier giving a blessing. Others, too, enlisted to address the congregation, including Rabbi Eytan Kenter of Kehillat Beth Israel and Catholic priest Rev. Jacques Kabangu of Ottawa’s Paroisse Saint-Gabriel.
Parker says the service was arranged in large part to honour the Anishinabe presence in the Ottawa Valley “since time immemorial,” but also to preach a message of tolerance and togetherness, regardless of the gods people worship. The Capital Region Interfaith Council — which includes leaders from the Hindu, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and many other faiths — was also represented at the event.
“It’s very important for us to be seen as a safe and peaceful place to gather, no matter who you are,” adds Parker. “We want very much to express the diversity of our city.”
A group of local religious leaders gather at Christ Church Cathedral.
The cathedral is also a place, as it happens, where Ottawa’s rapidly evolving urban landscape comes sharply into focus — albeit controversially, in the juxtaposition of weathered stone and modern glass-and-steel structures of towering intensity.
Confronting the financial strain that many churches face in an era of smaller congregations and soaring costs to maintain creaky buildings, Christ Church has risked some conflict with neighbours to pursue high-rise development on its surplus lands — ensuring survival of the flock and its mission while transforming the city’s skyline atop “Cathedral Hill.”
“We own a heritage building that’s important to the wider community,” says Parker. “We have land that is prime and we realize that we need to be good stewards of that land and to develop it in order to, on the one hand, ensure that the building, which houses our ministry, is cared for and also to ensure that there are resources for that ministry.”
Saving the cathedral from the ravages of time and unforgiving bottom lines wasn’t just the church’s business, Parker adds. He notes that some 300 community events — including scores of cultural performances under the Cathedral Arts banner — are held on-site every year, and which “have nothing to do with church stuff.”
Despite objections from some neighbours, a condo tower to the west of the cathedral has already been built. Construction on a second one immediately to the east is expected to begin soon.
The planned sandwiching of one of the city’s oldest and most prominent architectural landmarks between two modern high-rises was bound to generate criticism.
But other old churches all over Ottawa have been sold off, repurposed and sometimes artfully redesigned as upscale living quarters. Christ Church, at least, was not shutting down. And similar towers have risen above open lots all across central Ottawa over the past decade as the city’s prosperity — along with eco-friendly policies meant to encourage downtown residential intensification, greater use of mass transit and more cycling and walking — fuelled a condo-building boom that has dramatically altered Ottawa’s streetscapes.
Parker says the cathedral’s choice to work with Windmill — the Ottawa firm behind the controversial Zibi development around the Chaudière Islands, known for the cutting-edge greenness of its real estate projects — has ensured that both of Christ Church’s bookend towers will be environmentally friendly while preserving or even enhancing “village” atmospherics.
“Yes, we’ve developed yet another highrise,” he says, “but we’ve developed it to the highest standards of sustainability. And all of a sudden, there are people here. Sparks Street at this end is no longer a bit of a backwater, frankly.”
Rejecting old taboos. Befriending other faiths. Embracing upheaval and once-unthinkable change — even courting controversy.
Yet all of this intriguing edginess can be found, paradoxically, in an old church that stands as an enduring symbol of 19th century Canada — a place so firmly in touch with the past that it still houses, amid the rafters of its gloomy Gothic steeple, a bell that was likely heard by Sir John A. Macdonald and every other resident of the capital on Confederation Day.
The bell at Christ Church Cathedral at the west end of Sparks Street rang out on the first ever Dominion Day, on July 1, 1867. Credit: Randy Boswell.
At Christ Church, history is heaped upon history. For whom has the cathedral bell tolled? The funeral for Vincent Massey, the country’s first Canadian-born governor general, as well as those for Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker and Liberal prime minister Lester B. Pearson, were held at Christ Church.
And on the weekend in July 1967 when Canada celebrated its Centennial, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip attended Sunday service at Christ Church. A severe summer storm cut power to downtown Ottawa just as Her Majesty and a multitude of other dignitaries settled into their seats, but the prayers proceeded in eerie candlelight and the hymns were sung without the organ’s musical accompaniment.
But the church is not captive to its breathtaking history; the trappings of the past are not the prime focus of cathedral life today. The parish community and its leaders are fully seized by the great challenges of the present — and even Christ Church’s old bell has been pressed into service to help change the world.
Two years ago, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was about to wind up its harrowing task, TRC officials urged that churches across Canada should mark the end of years of heart-rending testimony about residential schools by ringing their bells at noon on May 31, 2015 — a tribute to Indigenous survivors of sexual and physical abuse and many other injustices at the hands of these government-backed, church-run warehouses of misery.
The Anglican Church of Canada had officially apologized in 1993 in what Parker calls “an important and moving statement of our profound sorrow and contrition at our involvement in a very misguided government policy.”
Some of the precise words spoken at the time by then-Archbishop Michael Peers are worth recalling for their startling abjectness: “I accept and I confess before God and you, our failures in the residential schools. We failed you. We failed ourselves. We failed God. I am sorry, more than I can say, that we were part of a system which took you and your children from home and family … ”
But in response to the TRC’s call for a symbolic bell-ringing, Parker and other senior Anglican clergy decided to dramatically amplify the simple gesture. Instead of a one-time sound of sorrow, there would be a prolonged and thunderous summons of the Anglican community — and all of Canada — to transformative action.
Church bells across the country, including the old cathedral bell in Ottawa, would ring for as long as five hours every afternoon for 22 straight days — until National Aboriginal Day on June 21, 2015. The tolling would not only proclaim the church’s support for the TRC’s mission and its recommendations, but also remind Canadians of the more than 1,000 missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the country, and to back the TRC’s demand for a national inquiry into that tragedy.
“There’s the bell that rang at the birth of Confederation,” says Parker. “And now it’s tolling loudly to remember one of the darkest parts of our history.”
The bell-ringing blitz gave rise to many associated events and activities that built into a crescendo of commitments by Anglican parishes to open their churches to Indigenous faith leaders, to help rescue Indigenous languages, to launch fundraising campaigns for various causes.
Steps were taken to forge stronger ties with First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities and to generally reinvent the relationship between Canada’s Indigenous people and one of the churches most deeply implicated in what TRC commissioner Murray Sinclair would insist was nothing less than “cultural genocide.”
It’s no coincidence that last November, Sinclair — by then a senator — accepted an invitation to Christ Church Cathedral to deliver a high-profile public lecture about the TRC’s long list of recommendations and Canada’s need to implement them. During the speech, he paid special tribute to the Anglican Church’s 1993 apology for its role in the residential schools tragedy: “It was heartfelt, it was generous, it was kind, it was true and it was meaningful for those who heard it.”
Christ Church Cathedral on Sparks Street in Ottawa.
The erection of two soaring residential towers on either side of Christ Church — one now in place, one more to come — matches the metaphorical encroachment of modern Canadian realities on the old, stone-walled cathedral and its even older bell.
And the 19th century world known to the church’s founders would seem just as perplexing to a time-travelling, 21st century citizen of Ottawa as today’s multifaith-friendly, LGBTQ-positive congregation — and its female vicar — would seem to Rev. S. S. Strong, that “much respected pastor” and bell buyer from pre-Confederation Bytown.
“The cathedral has changed dramatically, even over the last — I would say — 10 to 15 years,” says Ascah, highlighting the Christ Church community’s fervent embrace, in practice and spirit, of its motto: “A diverse and vibrant parish that glorifies God and welcomes all people.”
To historian and public opinion researcher Jack Jedwab, president of the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies and the allied Canadian Institute for Identities and Migration, the newborn Dominion of Canada and where we live 150 years later are so profoundly different that the vaunted “Fathers” of the nation wouldn’t know what to make of today’s Canada.
“We’re in such a different place today than in 1867 — or for that matter 1967,” he says. “Religion is no longer the defining dimension of relationships in the country. . . . The BNA Act was very preoccupied with guarantees for Catholics and Protestants moreso than anything else. It’s hard to imagine today.”
Cries of “No Papal domination!” would have been routinely uttered, says Jedwab, in the 1860s by insular Anglicans — adherents of the “English Church” as they were often called at the time.
“The idea of mixing Catholics and Protestants was anathema to a lot of people,” he adds, emphasizing the contrast between that worldview and the ecumenical spirit that infused Friday’s Prayer for Canada service.
“Mixing is inevitable. And with all the technologies of the modern age, they’ve made it more inevitable. We’ve gotten to know each other. Mixing is ultimately what made us get to know each other and be much more open to our respective realities.”
The inevitability of such change — and the idea that social and economic benefits will flow as a result — are not embraced by everyone, Jedwab notes. And while Canada officially promotes multicultural diversity and a welcoming posture toward immigrants — including refugees such as the Othmans — the present backlash in the U.S. offers proof that reversals can occur.
But today’s Canada, he says, seems to have a firm commitment to diversity and cultural bridge-building in all its forms: “We’re trying to create a reconciliation approach that takes elements of our history that have been neglected or ignored, and blends them with the changing composition of our country over the past 30 or 40 years.”
But he doesn’t see what’s happening today as the natural outcome of forces set in motion 150 years ago when the country was created.
“Some people say this was a vision our founders carved out in 1867. I don’t think that’s true,” he says. “Our country has been significantly improved upon. It’s taken a fundamentally different direction than its founders envisioned. That’s why it’s hard to glorify our founding period.”
The Christ Church bell that called parishioners to worship in 19th century Ottawa — and rang out its greetings to the new nation on Dominion Day 1867 — may sound the same today.
But it’s heard much differently.
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That Bell
The fireworks that lit up the Ottawa sky on July 1, 1867 flashed their magic for only a moment, then faded into oblivion. The gun-salute soldiers, Fathers of Confederation and revellers of every sort from that first Dominion Day — all long gone, of course, amongst the shadows of history.
Even the original House of Parliament, magnificent backdrop for the cannon blasts and regimental parades that thrilled thousands in the capital the day Canada came to be, was consumed by fire more than a century ago.
But one remarkable relic from the country’s inaugural birthday bash — a tangible link to the seminal seconds of our collective past — still vividly recalls that distant time. It is suspended four or five storeys above Sparks Street in the cathedral’s high stone tower: a quarter-ton bell that, exactly a century and a half ago today, did its patriotic duty.
An official notice printed in local newspapers spelled out Ottawa’s formal itinerary for the “Inauguration of the Dominion of Canada.” The great occasion would be “ushered in by the ringing of City Bells, Firing of Cannon and Bonfires,” read the proclamation, issued by order of city council’s “celebration committee.”
It was the pealing of church bells — in towns and cities all across the land — that first and foremost announced Canada’s birth on that summer Monday morning in 1867. Bells atop schools, civic halls and fire stations were said to have chimed in, too.
But in the new country’s new capital, among the loudest heralds of the nation’s arrival would have been the hefty, handsome English-made bell of Christ Church.
It was cast in 1839 at Thomas Mears’ world-renowned Whitechapel Bell Foundry in east-end London. The foundry, coincidentally, closed this year — May 2017 — after an astounding 450 years in business, including 250 at the Whitechapel manufacturing site.
But one living legacy of the venerable foundry — the Christ Church bell that rang in Confederation — can still be heard just a few minutes before the cathedral’s weekly 10:30 a.m. Sunday service, among other times.
The old bell can still be seen, too — but only after some heartfelt pleading by a curious scribe, and the kind permission of church administrator Josephine Hall.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks, like a Sherpa acquainted with Everest’s perils.
Hall leads the climb up a steep, winding staircase to the gallery at the back of the church, from which can be seen a tiny attic portal. We scale a rickety wooden ladder and squeeze through the opening to a floor of thick, heavy planks that still lie some distance below our destination.
Another nerve-testing ascent up a long, shaky aluminum ladder takes us only to the base of the musty, dusty belfry. Hunched over for one more climb, this time up hand-hewn steps with a headroom hazard from the beams that house the bell, I am Quasimodo with a camera — and intensifying jitters.
Up here, in the dim light that angles into the tower through red vents really meant to let sound escape, the scary end of a very long rope is tethered to a great wooden wheel that controls the bell’s swinging. Far below, in the vestibule just inside the cathedral’s main doors, the rope’s other end has been fed through a hole in the ceiling and then coiled around the staircase handrail, waiting to be unwound for a church warden’s next spirited pulls.
Dear God, why did I just look down?
A braver soul would have climbed a bit more and actually touched history. But this last set of steps is the most precarious yet, not to mention the highest. There’s faith, and there’s foolishness. A digital eye with “megapixel” zoom will have to do. The quarry is captured.
The bell is a lustreless, gunmetal grey, a coat of dust adding to the matte finish. There’s a red band of tarnish visible on opposite sides of the inner bell where the rusted clapper makes contact for each ding and dong.
The faint outlines of the bell-maker’s mark are visible, but it takes some post-climb enlarging and filtering of a snapped image to decipher the faded inscription: THOMAS MEARS LONDON 1839.
Issues of the old Bytown Gazette trace the bell’s distant beginnings. “On Monday last, the Rev. S. S. Strong, the much respected Pastor of Christ’s Church, in this Town, left for England,” noted a June 1839 news item. “Mr. S. has kindly undertaken to procure an Organ and a Bell for the Church.”
Then, in October ’39: “Intelligence has been received in Town, that a first rate Bell, for Christ Church of this place, weighing 516 lbs. has been shipped by one of the most celebrated founders in England.”
Finally, in January 1840, it was reported that the “handsome bell” had “arrived safe” in Canada, awaiting only the spring thaw to reach Bytown by boat from Montreal. “It is from the foundry of Thomas Mears, London, and has all the appearance characteristic of their workmanship.”
Initially raised in the old Christ Church built in 1833, the bell was hanging there when it was rung on July 1, 1867. It was one of just a few objects rescued and re-used when the original church was demolished in 1872 and the present, much larger building was erected at the same site a year later.
The church was declared a cathedral when the new Diocese of Ottawa was created in 1896.
There is another amazing fact about the bell that speaks to the great depth — and deep-seated Britishness — of the history that it represents. In 1840, evidently to celebrate the bell’s arrival from England and its subsequent installation, Christ Church choirmaster J.F. Lehmann composed a rousing melody for a popular patriotic poem by the British playwright J.E. Carpenter, who had proclaimed The Merry Bells of England to be “a Briton’s native music” — the “gladsome chime of olden time that spreadeth joy around.”
An original print of Lehmann’s composition is, in fact, the oldest known piece of sheet music in Canada, a treasured possession of the national archive. It’s also a sign of the powerful hold that ties to Britain had on both the early Anglican church and 19th century English-Canadian identity.
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But the old church bell resonates with new meaning now. It rings out a weekly call to prayers that are led by both men and women of the cloth. It invites same-sex spouses into a where place they were once forbidden. It has welcomed a Muslim family rescued from Syrian peril by the church’s own Samaritans. It has resounded with sorrow — and shame — for grievous wrongs done to the original peoples of the land.
And just last night, on the eve of today’s historic sesquicentennial celebrations to usher in Canada’s next 150 years, the bell summoned not only Protestants and Catholics but also Muslims, Jews and those of all other faiths to a special “Prayer for Canada” — beginning with invocations from an indigenous spiritual leader.
You don’t have to venture far beyond the shadow of the Peace Tower to discover a place in downtown Ottawa where the “New Canada” is being forged today, a century and a half after the nation formally came into existence on that long-ago first Dominion Day.
And the place may come as a surprise, emblematic as it is of the Old Canada, too.
Christ Church Cathedral at the west end of Sparks Street — longstanding bastion of Anglican power and privilege in Canada’s capital — encapsulates much of this country’s very complicated story: its richly layered history of darkness and light; its unfolding future of challenge and change.
It’s the place where “Truth and Reconciliation” aren’t just high-sounding words — there’s too much acknowledged blame and regret for that — but are instead an urgent call to action and atonement for the countless injustices suffered by indigenous Canadians throughout the country’s history. Central among those offences were the Indian Residential School horrors perpetrated, in part, by earlier generations of Anglicans themselves.
Christ Church is the place where, thanks to a team of charitable parishioners, a family of refugees from Syria — Shoq and Mohamad Othman and their four children — found support and sanctuary after escaping a homeland shattered by war, terrorism and tyranny.
Pastoral Vicar Catherine Ascah recalled how the determination to sponsor a family — any family in need, no matter their faith or circumstances — emanated from the cathedral’s pews.
“This wasn’t a call from the pulpit,” she says. “The feeling was: We have the resources. We have the capacity. We need to do our part. We need to do something.”
Today, thanks to the church and its Rotary Club partners, the Othmans have settled into a home in Kanata.
“At first I felt afraid — I didn’t understand anything about Canada,” says Mohamad Othman, thinking back to when he first heard his family would find refuge in Canada. After fleeing Syria’s violent collapse and spending long months as refugees in Lebanon, the Othmans finally reached Ottawa in early 2016.
A visit to Christ Church to thank the congregation for their sponsorship was one of the family’s first outings on Canadian soil.
“When we came to Canada, I saw that people were very nice, very good. My feeling had changed,” says Othman, who is taking courses to improve his English and plans to begin training soon as a mechanic. “They worked very, very hard for us. I love Canada.”
The cathedral, too, is where the quest for interfaith harmony — the transcending of age-old religious hatreds, the building of bridges across ethnic and cultural divides, in ways that would have confused and enraged the church’s sectarian founders in the 1830s — is a high-priority mission.
That’s in lockstep with Canada’s own goals, however elusive they remain, to become a nation of unified founding peoples and warmly welcomed immigrants, of official multiculturalism and peaceable diversity.
So it was at Christ Church, just a few minutes’ walk west of Parliament Hill, where Friday’s ecumenical Prayer for Canada service was held, in bid to celebrate difference while symbolizing the solidarity of the faithful in a world where religion too often divides.
“A prayer is a powerful thing,” says Kitigan Zibi elder Albert Dumont, the Algonquin spiritual guide who led the gathering with “my friend,” the cathedral’s Dean Shane Parker.
“My prayer for Canada would be that the citizens of Canada interlock their roots with the roots of the people who came from the Middle East or from Ireland or from Britain or whatever the case,” says Dumont. “The indigenous roots have been here a long time, but we should all lock our roots together and we’ll be a stronger nation because of it.
“Canada is a great country now,” he adds, “but imagine how much greater it could be if there was no such thing as hatred.”
The event’s order of service reads like an ode to Canadian pluralism: indigenous “spirit keeper” Barbara Dumont Hill and Imam Samy Metwally of the Ottawa Mosque delivering calls to prayer; Timothy Erkloo performing an Inuit drum dance; Ayurittsuiyi Aigah Attagutsiak of Saint Margaret’s Vanier giving a blessing. Others, too, enlisted to address the congregation, including Rabbi Eytan Kenter of Kehillat Beth Israel and Catholic priest Rev. Jacques Kabangu of Ottawa’s Paroisse Saint-Gabriel.
Parker says the service was arranged in large part to honour the Anishinabe presence in the Ottawa Valley “since time immemorial,” but also to preach a message of tolerance and togetherness, regardless of the gods people worship. The Capital Region Interfaith Council — which includes leaders from the Hindu, Sikh, Zoroastrian, Buddhist and many other faiths — was also represented at the event.
“It’s very important for us to be seen as a safe and peaceful place to gather, no matter who you are,” adds Parker. “We want very much to express the diversity of our city.”
A group of local religious leaders gather at Christ Church Cathedral.
•
The cathedral is also a place, as it happens, where Ottawa’s rapidly evolving urban landscape comes sharply into focus — albeit controversially, in the juxtaposition of weathered stone and modern glass-and-steel structures of towering intensity.
Confronting the financial strain that many churches face in an era of smaller congregations and soaring costs to maintain creaky buildings, Christ Church has risked some conflict with neighbours to pursue high-rise development on its surplus lands — ensuring survival of the flock and its mission while transforming the city’s skyline atop “Cathedral Hill.”
“We own a heritage building that’s important to the wider community,” says Parker. “We have land that is prime and we realize that we need to be good stewards of that land and to develop it in order to, on the one hand, ensure that the building, which houses our ministry, is cared for and also to ensure that there are resources for that ministry.”
Saving the cathedral from the ravages of time and unforgiving bottom lines wasn’t just the church’s business, Parker adds. He notes that some 300 community events — including scores of cultural performances under the Cathedral Arts banner — are held on-site every year, and which “have nothing to do with church stuff.”
Despite objections from some neighbours, a condo tower to the west of the cathedral has already been built. Construction on a second one immediately to the east is expected to begin soon.
The planned sandwiching of one of the city’s oldest and most prominent architectural landmarks between two modern high-rises was bound to generate criticism.
But other old churches all over Ottawa have been sold off, repurposed and sometimes artfully redesigned as upscale living quarters. Christ Church, at least, was not shutting down. And similar towers have risen above open lots all across central Ottawa over the past decade as the city’s prosperity — along with eco-friendly policies meant to encourage downtown residential intensification, greater use of mass transit and more cycling and walking — fuelled a condo-building boom that has dramatically altered Ottawa’s streetscapes.
Parker says the cathedral’s choice to work with Windmill — the Ottawa firm behind the controversial Zibi development around the Chaudière Islands, known for the cutting-edge greenness of its real estate projects — has ensured that both of Christ Church’s bookend towers will be environmentally friendly while preserving or even enhancing “village” atmospherics.
“Yes, we’ve developed yet another highrise,” he says, “but we’ve developed it to the highest standards of sustainability. And all of a sudden, there are people here. Sparks Street at this end is no longer a bit of a backwater, frankly.”
Rejecting old taboos. Befriending other faiths. Embracing upheaval and once-unthinkable change — even courting controversy.
Yet all of this intriguing edginess can be found, paradoxically, in an old church that stands as an enduring symbol of 19th century Canada — a place so firmly in touch with the past that it still houses, amid the rafters of its gloomy Gothic steeple, a bell that was likely heard by Sir John A. Macdonald and every other resident of the capital on Confederation Day.
The bell at Christ Church Cathedral at the west end of Sparks Street rang out on the first ever Dominion Day, on July 1, 1867. Credit: Randy Boswell.
•
At Christ Church, history is heaped upon history. For whom has the cathedral bell tolled? The funeral for Vincent Massey, the country’s first Canadian-born governor general, as well as those for Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker and Liberal prime minister Lester B. Pearson, were held at Christ Church.
And on the weekend in July 1967 when Canada celebrated its Centennial, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip attended Sunday service at Christ Church. A severe summer storm cut power to downtown Ottawa just as Her Majesty and a multitude of other dignitaries settled into their seats, but the prayers proceeded in eerie candlelight and the hymns were sung without the organ’s musical accompaniment.
But the church is not captive to its breathtaking history; the trappings of the past are not the prime focus of cathedral life today. The parish community and its leaders are fully seized by the great challenges of the present — and even Christ Church’s old bell has been pressed into service to help change the world.
Two years ago, when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was about to wind up its harrowing task, TRC officials urged that churches across Canada should mark the end of years of heart-rending testimony about residential schools by ringing their bells at noon on May 31, 2015 — a tribute to Indigenous survivors of sexual and physical abuse and many other injustices at the hands of these government-backed, church-run warehouses of misery.
The Anglican Church of Canada had officially apologized in 1993 in what Parker calls “an important and moving statement of our profound sorrow and contrition at our involvement in a very misguided government policy.”
Some of the precise words spoken at the time by then-Archbishop Michael Peers are worth recalling for their startling abjectness: “I accept and I confess before God and you, our failures in the residential schools. We failed you. We failed ourselves. We failed God. I am sorry, more than I can say, that we were part of a system which took you and your children from home and family … ”
But in response to the TRC’s call for a symbolic bell-ringing, Parker and other senior Anglican clergy decided to dramatically amplify the simple gesture. Instead of a one-time sound of sorrow, there would be a prolonged and thunderous summons of the Anglican community — and all of Canada — to transformative action.
Church bells across the country, including the old cathedral bell in Ottawa, would ring for as long as five hours every afternoon for 22 straight days — until National Aboriginal Day on June 21, 2015. The tolling would not only proclaim the church’s support for the TRC’s mission and its recommendations, but also remind Canadians of the more than 1,000 missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the country, and to back the TRC’s demand for a national inquiry into that tragedy.
“There’s the bell that rang at the birth of Confederation,” says Parker. “And now it’s tolling loudly to remember one of the darkest parts of our history.”
The bell-ringing blitz gave rise to many associated events and activities that built into a crescendo of commitments by Anglican parishes to open their churches to Indigenous faith leaders, to help rescue Indigenous languages, to launch fundraising campaigns for various causes.
Steps were taken to forge stronger ties with First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities and to generally reinvent the relationship between Canada’s Indigenous people and one of the churches most deeply implicated in what TRC commissioner Murray Sinclair would insist was nothing less than “cultural genocide.”
It’s no coincidence that last November, Sinclair — by then a senator — accepted an invitation to Christ Church Cathedral to deliver a high-profile public lecture about the TRC’s long list of recommendations and Canada’s need to implement them. During the speech, he paid special tribute to the Anglican Church’s 1993 apology for its role in the residential schools tragedy: “It was heartfelt, it was generous, it was kind, it was true and it was meaningful for those who heard it.”
Christ Church Cathedral on Sparks Street in Ottawa.
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The erection of two soaring residential towers on either side of Christ Church — one now in place, one more to come — matches the metaphorical encroachment of modern Canadian realities on the old, stone-walled cathedral and its even older bell.
And the 19th century world known to the church’s founders would seem just as perplexing to a time-travelling, 21st century citizen of Ottawa as today’s multifaith-friendly, LGBTQ-positive congregation — and its female vicar — would seem to Rev. S. S. Strong, that “much respected pastor” and bell buyer from pre-Confederation Bytown.
“The cathedral has changed dramatically, even over the last — I would say — 10 to 15 years,” says Ascah, highlighting the Christ Church community’s fervent embrace, in practice and spirit, of its motto: “A diverse and vibrant parish that glorifies God and welcomes all people.”
To historian and public opinion researcher Jack Jedwab, president of the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies and the allied Canadian Institute for Identities and Migration, the newborn Dominion of Canada and where we live 150 years later are so profoundly different that the vaunted “Fathers” of the nation wouldn’t know what to make of today’s Canada.
“We’re in such a different place today than in 1867 — or for that matter 1967,” he says. “Religion is no longer the defining dimension of relationships in the country. . . . The BNA Act was very preoccupied with guarantees for Catholics and Protestants moreso than anything else. It’s hard to imagine today.”
Cries of “No Papal domination!” would have been routinely uttered, says Jedwab, in the 1860s by insular Anglicans — adherents of the “English Church” as they were often called at the time.
“The idea of mixing Catholics and Protestants was anathema to a lot of people,” he adds, emphasizing the contrast between that worldview and the ecumenical spirit that infused Friday’s Prayer for Canada service.
“Mixing is inevitable. And with all the technologies of the modern age, they’ve made it more inevitable. We’ve gotten to know each other. Mixing is ultimately what made us get to know each other and be much more open to our respective realities.”
The inevitability of such change — and the idea that social and economic benefits will flow as a result — are not embraced by everyone, Jedwab notes. And while Canada officially promotes multicultural diversity and a welcoming posture toward immigrants — including refugees such as the Othmans — the present backlash in the U.S. offers proof that reversals can occur.
But today’s Canada, he says, seems to have a firm commitment to diversity and cultural bridge-building in all its forms: “We’re trying to create a reconciliation approach that takes elements of our history that have been neglected or ignored, and blends them with the changing composition of our country over the past 30 or 40 years.”
But he doesn’t see what’s happening today as the natural outcome of forces set in motion 150 years ago when the country was created.
“Some people say this was a vision our founders carved out in 1867. I don’t think that’s true,” he says. “Our country has been significantly improved upon. It’s taken a fundamentally different direction than its founders envisioned. That’s why it’s hard to glorify our founding period.”
The Christ Church bell that called parishioners to worship in 19th century Ottawa — and rang out its greetings to the new nation on Dominion Day 1867 — may sound the same today.
But it’s heard much differently.
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That Bell
The fireworks that lit up the Ottawa sky on July 1, 1867 flashed their magic for only a moment, then faded into oblivion. The gun-salute soldiers, Fathers of Confederation and revellers of every sort from that first Dominion Day — all long gone, of course, amongst the shadows of history.
Even the original House of Parliament, magnificent backdrop for the cannon blasts and regimental parades that thrilled thousands in the capital the day Canada came to be, was consumed by fire more than a century ago.
But one remarkable relic from the country’s inaugural birthday bash — a tangible link to the seminal seconds of our collective past — still vividly recalls that distant time. It is suspended four or five storeys above Sparks Street in the cathedral’s high stone tower: a quarter-ton bell that, exactly a century and a half ago today, did its patriotic duty.
An official notice printed in local newspapers spelled out Ottawa’s formal itinerary for the “Inauguration of the Dominion of Canada.” The great occasion would be “ushered in by the ringing of City Bells, Firing of Cannon and Bonfires,” read the proclamation, issued by order of city council’s “celebration committee.”
It was the pealing of church bells — in towns and cities all across the land — that first and foremost announced Canada’s birth on that summer Monday morning in 1867. Bells atop schools, civic halls and fire stations were said to have chimed in, too.
But in the new country’s new capital, among the loudest heralds of the nation’s arrival would have been the hefty, handsome English-made bell of Christ Church.
It was cast in 1839 at Thomas Mears’ world-renowned Whitechapel Bell Foundry in east-end London. The foundry, coincidentally, closed this year — May 2017 — after an astounding 450 years in business, including 250 at the Whitechapel manufacturing site.
But one living legacy of the venerable foundry — the Christ Church bell that rang in Confederation — can still be heard just a few minutes before the cathedral’s weekly 10:30 a.m. Sunday service, among other times.
The old bell can still be seen, too — but only after some heartfelt pleading by a curious scribe, and the kind permission of church administrator Josephine Hall.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asks, like a Sherpa acquainted with Everest’s perils.
Hall leads the climb up a steep, winding staircase to the gallery at the back of the church, from which can be seen a tiny attic portal. We scale a rickety wooden ladder and squeeze through the opening to a floor of thick, heavy planks that still lie some distance below our destination.
Another nerve-testing ascent up a long, shaky aluminum ladder takes us only to the base of the musty, dusty belfry. Hunched over for one more climb, this time up hand-hewn steps with a headroom hazard from the beams that house the bell, I am Quasimodo with a camera — and intensifying jitters.
Up here, in the dim light that angles into the tower through red vents really meant to let sound escape, the scary end of a very long rope is tethered to a great wooden wheel that controls the bell’s swinging. Far below, in the vestibule just inside the cathedral’s main doors, the rope’s other end has been fed through a hole in the ceiling and then coiled around the staircase handrail, waiting to be unwound for a church warden’s next spirited pulls.
Dear God, why did I just look down?
A braver soul would have climbed a bit more and actually touched history. But this last set of steps is the most precarious yet, not to mention the highest. There’s faith, and there’s foolishness. A digital eye with “megapixel” zoom will have to do. The quarry is captured.
The bell is a lustreless, gunmetal grey, a coat of dust adding to the matte finish. There’s a red band of tarnish visible on opposite sides of the inner bell where the rusted clapper makes contact for each ding and dong.
The faint outlines of the bell-maker’s mark are visible, but it takes some post-climb enlarging and filtering of a snapped image to decipher the faded inscription: THOMAS MEARS LONDON 1839.
Issues of the old Bytown Gazette trace the bell’s distant beginnings. “On Monday last, the Rev. S. S. Strong, the much respected Pastor of Christ’s Church, in this Town, left for England,” noted a June 1839 news item. “Mr. S. has kindly undertaken to procure an Organ and a Bell for the Church.”
Then, in October ’39: “Intelligence has been received in Town, that a first rate Bell, for Christ Church of this place, weighing 516 lbs. has been shipped by one of the most celebrated founders in England.”
Finally, in January 1840, it was reported that the “handsome bell” had “arrived safe” in Canada, awaiting only the spring thaw to reach Bytown by boat from Montreal. “It is from the foundry of Thomas Mears, London, and has all the appearance characteristic of their workmanship.”
Initially raised in the old Christ Church built in 1833, the bell was hanging there when it was rung on July 1, 1867. It was one of just a few objects rescued and re-used when the original church was demolished in 1872 and the present, much larger building was erected at the same site a year later.
The church was declared a cathedral when the new Diocese of Ottawa was created in 1896.
There is another amazing fact about the bell that speaks to the great depth — and deep-seated Britishness — of the history that it represents. In 1840, evidently to celebrate the bell’s arrival from England and its subsequent installation, Christ Church choirmaster J.F. Lehmann composed a rousing melody for a popular patriotic poem by the British playwright J.E. Carpenter, who had proclaimed The Merry Bells of England to be “a Briton’s native music” — the “gladsome chime of olden time that spreadeth joy around.”
An original print of Lehmann’s composition is, in fact, the oldest known piece of sheet music in Canada, a treasured possession of the national archive. It’s also a sign of the powerful hold that ties to Britain had on both the early Anglican church and 19th century English-Canadian identity.
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