St. Ignatius of Loyola Parish at 100

The year 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the St. Ignatius of Loyola parish. Founded in 1917 by Jesuit missionaries, St. Ignatius is an Anglophone Roman Catholic community in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG) neighborhood in the city of Montreal. This paper seeks to present, based on new archival research, a brief history of St. Ignatius by doing a comparative analysis of the design and material culture of two of its buildings: Henri Labelle’s English Collegiate church (built on the grounds of Loyola College in 1933, during the hardships of the Great Depression), and its successor, Robert Fleming’s organic, midcentury modern church (inaugurated, a block away, in 1967, in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council and amidst the popular excitement surrounding Expo 67). Decades later, despite significant changes in the province of Quebec and in the Roman Catholic Church, both spaces continue to be in operation. The older church on the Loyola campus continues to hold regular Catholic services, but it has become a multi-faith worship space (especially after the merging of Loyola College with Sir George Williams University to form Concordia University in 1974). The newer church also welcomes hundreds of parishioners and visitors each week. This paper asks a series of questions to reveal these sites’ layered histories: What can their façade and their décor tell us about the shifting aesthetic and pastoral priorities of Canadian Roman Catholic clergy members and lay people? How did these buildings evolve with Montreal’s changing religious, cultural and socio-political contexts? Finally, how do these sites respond to the changing needs, both material and spiritual, of their increasingly diverse users?