CENTURY OF CATHOLICITY IN WESTERN CANADA.

New Zealand Tablet, 3 October 1918, Page 35

CENTURY OF CATHOLICITY IN WESTERN CANADA.

In anticipation of the Church’s centennial in western Canada, Archbishop Beliveau, of St. Boniface, has addressed a pastoral letter to his flock, reminding them of the. great event, and calling upon them to unite in a real religious observation of the arrival of the first missionaries. On July 16 one hundred years ago, Father Joseph Norbert Provencher, accompanied by Father Severe Dumoulin and Mr. G. Edge, a seminarian, landed at Fort Douglas, then the headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Canadian West. He was sent by the illustrious Bishop of Quebec, .Monsignor Plessis, at the request of Lord Selkirk, who was in charge of the affairs of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the North-west Territory. This broad-minded Protestant understood that there were interests above mere financial considerations : and it was with a view to having the people under his temporal jurisdiction progress spiritually and intellectually as well as materially, that he had gone to Quebec to beg the Bishop of that city to send him missionaries.