The History of the Newman Centre of McGill University

Professor Peter McNally, McGill University*

The idea of Roman Catholic chaplaincies at secular universities had its genesis in the writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), the great English theologian and educator. He has inspired generations of educators and young people concerned that Christian thought and doctrine retain their generative place in the Western university curriculum. Newman has also inspired students, faculty, and staff to develop facilities at secular universities where the Catholic faith can be shared and lived within an academic setting.

In 1897, the first effort to develop an organization for Catholic students at a secular Canadian university occurred at McGill, when a group of students met at St. Patrick’s Church under the leadership of Father Edward J. Devine SJ, followed by Father Gerald McShane, the curate of St. Patrick’s. McGill University, at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century, was Canada’s leading university and well on the way to achieving an international reputation. Although its flavour was vigorously Scottish and Presbyterian, it was officially non-denominational. Under its great Principal, Sir John William Dawson (1855-1893), McGill was transformed from a fledgling college into a university with a strong reputation in science and medicine.

Under his successor, the taciturn Scotsman Sir William Peterson (1895-1919), McGill’s reputation was further strengthened when it adopted the German-American approach to higher education. The major elements of this approach involved a drastically revised undergraduate liberal arts curriculum – science, social sciences, and humanities – along with a wide range of graduate and professional programmes.

The lack of provincial government funding during this era was more than compensated for by the generous support of wealthy benefactors such as Peter Redpath, Lord Strathcona, and Sir William Macdonald, whose impressive buildings and endowments turned McGill into one of the finest academic institutions on the continent. Among notable scholars of the time were Sir William Osler in the Medical Faculty, and Lord Rutherford and Frederick Soddy in Science, whose pioneering research on the atom profoundly marked the twentieth century, and for which they received Nobel Prizes.

McGill’s reputation grew and flourished as a secular institution with little place for religion except in its affiliated Protestant theological colleges. Quebec English-speaking Roman Catholics were faced with a genuine paradox at the start of the 20th century, when it came to higher education. As a result of Bishop Bourget’s extended fight with l’Institut Canadien de Montréal during the middle of the 19th century, the ultramontane position would completely dominate the Church in the province until the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.

The ultramontanists kept a firm grip on the Francophone universities, with their stringent programs of classical study and not particularly welcoming attitude toward Anglophones, even Roman Catholics. Loyola College, developed for Anglophone Catholics, was left to struggle even into the 1970s when it merged with Sir George Williams University to form Concordia University. It never enjoyed the prestige or range of programmes of McGill. It was inevitable, therefore, that some Roman Catholics – Francophones as well as Anglophones – would attend McGill.

To ensure that the university’s Catholic students would continue to travel deeply into their tradition, acquiring Catholic intellectual formation as they simultaneously deepened other branches of knowledge, the Loyola Club was founded in 1897. In 1907 it became the Columbian Club, and in 1929, the year of the stock market crash and start of the Great Depression, was renamed the Newman Club. Since then, “Newman” has always remained part of its name.

The Thirties and the Forties were tumultuous decades of economic and social upheaval – depression and war. Yet the archival records of that period reflect a growing prominence and stability for the Club: fund-raisers, retreats, prominent speakers, social events, political activism, and growing membership. For a brief time during these years, there was a chaplain from the Paulist order. The most prominent chaplain, otherwise, was Father J. E. Cooney. The quarters at St. Patrick’s on Dorchester (now René Lévesque) Boulevard were becoming increasingly cramped.

The post-World War II years ushered in a period of buoyant growth and optimism for all aspects of Canadian society, including universities. McGill experienced significant growth as returning veterans flooded the classrooms, seeking degrees to assist them in making new lives. At this point, the Newman Club gained a dynamic new leader, Fr. Gerald Emmett Carter – who would later become a bishop, archbishop, and Cardinal. With the support of a committed group of returning veterans, Carter raised the Club’s campus profile dramatically by purchasing in 1949 a “Newman” house on McGill College Avenue, one block south of the Roddick gates. In 1951, the Newman Association of Montreal, Inc was created by a group of dedicated Catholic lay people to operate and fund the Newman Club. In 1954 the Association purchased 3484 Peel Street the former Lafleur mansion, designed by Maxwell brothers, – adjacent to the McGill campus – which remains to this day the home of Catholic spiritual and intellectual life at McGill.

Canon Carter was succeeded by Father Russell Breen, who would later serve as vice-rector academic of Loyola College and later Concordia University. In 1965, he was succeeded by Father Robert Nagy, who in the ’70s would become chaplain at Loyola College. In 1971, Father Redmond Fitzmaurice, an Irish Dominican, become chaplain. In 1973, he was succeeded by the Paulist Fathers of New York who remained as chaplains until 1990 when the order left Montreal. The ferment of the ’60s left its mark on McGill’s Newman Centre in many ways.

The Second Vatican Council, with its liturgical and theological change, coincided with Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and rising French-Canadian/Québecois nationalism. Reform of Quebec’s system of higher education coincided with enormous expansion of enrolment, student unrest, political turmoil, and language legislation. Francophone universities were laicized; both Francophone and Anglophone universities, including McGill, began receiving much better government grants. Quebec’s English-speaking Catholic community, including McGill’s Newman Centre, as it was renamed in 1970, faced new challenges as benefactors died or moved away.

The Association’s Board of Directors scrambled to find money to keep Newman’s doors open. In 1973, the Pillars Trust Fund assumed responsibility for the Newman Centre’s operating budget, through an annual fund-raising campaign among the Anglophone Roman Catholic community of the Montreal Archdiocese, while the positions of the Director and Campus Minister continued to be supported by the Archdiocesan Chancery.

McGill University, which had long enjoyed a national and international reputation, but whose enrolment had come largely from Montreal’s Protestant Anglophone community, found its student profile undergoing major change in the late 1970s. By the ’80s, international students, students from other Canadian provinces, and Francophones each began accounting for 20% of enrolment. By 1985, women accounted for 50% of enrolment. The Newman Centre adapted to this new demographic reality.

Ecumenism and inter-faith co-operation led to the formation of the McGill Chaplaincy service in the 1970s, headquartered at the Newman Centre until 1999 when the Brown Student Services Building opened. In 1990, Father Francis McKee became chaplain. His nearly ten years at Newman coincided with provincial, national, and international evaluations of higher education pronouncing McGill Canada’s leading university and among the world’s leading institutions of higher learning.

In 2000, Dr. Daniel Cere was promoted from Campus Minister to Director of the Newman Centre, thereby inaugurating an era of lay Directors. Among other qualities they have been expected to possess academic credential consistent with McGill’s status. Along with a priest and a lay campus minister, the lay directors have extended the Centre’s range of activities especially teaching, publishing, and community outreach. The Newman Rambler, Newman Institute for Catholic Studies Inc., and Dominus Vobiscum Retreat Centre were founded and remain integral to the Centre’s life and mission. Through generous donations from Mr. Leon Podles and the Podles family, the Board was able to undertake systematic renovation and refurbishing of the Centre’s heritage building and adjoining coach house. Meeting spaces and student living quarters were upgraded.

The Podles family also endowed McGill’s chair of Catholic Studies, headquartered at the Newman Centre. As it enters into the 21st Century, a number of factors characterize the role and importance of McGill’s Newman Centre. The Centre continues to provide a focal point for staff, faculty, and students at McGill University who are searching for Christian meaning in their lives, which is at once both Catholic and academically enriching. It continues to have its administration and finances overseen by a lay Board of Directors. The pastoral programme revolves around liturgies and other religiously focused events, such as retreats. Students organize a wide range of activities encompassing such things as service, liturgical ministry, catechesis, Bible study, prayer meetings, and social events. Students have been and always will be the beneficiaries of the McGill Newman Centre.

The challenge of providing young people with opportunities to learn about their faith in tandem with the best intellectual offerings of a secular university continues to be our mission for today and tomorrow.

*Peter McNally is retired professor of the School of Information Studies. He is Director of the History of McGill Project.