Catholic church in Canada’s capital to become a mosque

Feb 03, 2023

By Marguerite de Lasa
After three years of inactivity, the former St Margaret Mary Catholic Church in Ottawa, Ontario will soon be reopened. But this time as a mosque.

The Islamic Supreme Council of Canada plans to close out its purchase of the building in March, the community’s founder, Imam Syed Soharwardy, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

The organisation owns 32 mosques across the country, including two former churches. The imam suggested that not all of the property was destined to become a mosque. Instead, he plans to use most of the land as a multi-faith cultural centre that will welcome senior citizens, a music and arts group and a Montessori school for children, among other things.

“I [want to show] respect because this has been a church for over a century and people are emotionally, spiritually connected with this church,” Syed Soharwardy explained to CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning programme.

He said the exterior of the old church will be preserved, while limited renovations will be made to the interior. The imam “hoped [the project] would serve as an example for how different faith groups can live in harmony”.

“I’m 100 per cent sure that when this [sale] is closed in March, it will be a big nice model for the entire society of Canada and maybe for the world,” he told the network.

St Margaret Mary in Ottawa is not the first church in Canada whose buildings have been reused to house a mosque. In November 2016, a place of worship belonging to Northwestern United Church of Canada in the west end of the nation’s capital was bought by the Ottawa mosque for $1.5 million, said CBC Radio. Prior to the construction of this mosque, the basement of the church had already been used by Ottawa’s Muslim community as a prayer room, and the two communities have continued to maintain a relationship.

Such multi-faith cooperation does not appear to be a source of tension in the country.

“In English Canada, the fact that a church becomes a mosque is even seen almost as a blessing because at least the building retains its religious vocation,” said Martin Meunier, a sociologist of religion at the University of Ottawa. “Most disused churches (in Canada) are more often demolished or transformed,” he pointed out. In fact, this event is indicative of a much broader phenomenon: the massive disaffection of churches in the country. In Quebec alone, a quarter of all places of worship have closed since 2003, according to the newspaper Le Devoir’s analysis of data from the Religious Heritage Council’s inventory.

Of the 663 churches affected by closure, 278 remained closed or were demolished, and 385 were transformed into community centres, libraries, theatres or housing units.

The relationship to pluralism is completely affirmed, especially in English Canada. One of the reasons for this is the secularisation movement, which has led to a decline in religious practice. And the Catholic Church, whose attendance dropped following the residential school abuse scandals, also saw its revenues drop during the COVID-19 crisis. Impoverished, the Church is being forced to sell off its property, including places of worship.

“The dioceses are identifying several loss-making or very expensive churches and selling them to keep others,” said Meunier. “It is operating a prioritisation strategy,” he noted.

If the transformation of a church into a mosque does not generate controversy, it is also because “pluralism is completely affirmed, especially in English Canada”, he stressed. For example, in Toronto, the largest city in the English-speaking part of the country, 46 per cent of the population was not born in Canada. The “dividing line” separates believers and non-believers more than “Catholicism and Islam”, Meunier suggested. But he suspects people in mostly French-speaking Quebec, where the dividing lines are not the same, probably would have reacted differently to turning a church into a mosque.

“As in France, there is a kind of greater attachment to the Catholic Church in Quebec,” Meunier contended. “The fact that a church is being sold to the Muslim faith would perhaps be seen as a signal to question it,” he said. --LCI (https:// international.la-croix.com/)