QUEBEC, CANADA, February 28, 2009: Attendance is down at Catholic churches in Quebec, whose population–more than elsewhere in Canada–has turned its back on organized religion. Fewer than ten percent here attend mass. Virtually every parish is faced with the dilemma of what to do with a church it can no longer afford to maintain. Some churches have found new lives as community centres, libraries and social housing projects; others as condos, factories and even a rock-climbing gym; but many parishes that try to sell are not finding buyers. Increasingly, churches are being abandoned, barricaded and demolished. Over the last decade, well over 100 churches have been sold. The total number has never been tabulated; but in just three of Quebec’s 25 dioceses, 74 have disappeared in roughly that time frame.
According to Germain Tremblay of the Montreal-based Assembly of Catholic Bishops of Quebec, “Even in selling them for $1, it’s happening that no buyer is interested in the churches for sale. This is new.”
A few years ago, concerned about loss of historical edifices, Quebec launched a program to help pay 70 per cent of the costs of keeping some of the older churches standing. But a church’s historic significance does not mean it will be saved. For example, maintenance costs of the historic Church of Saint-Eustache, whose walls still show traces of British cannon fire from 1837, are so prohibitive that it is being given away.
The trend is expected to continue: “Well, remember that the majority of people in the parishes nowadays are in their sixties to eighties,” said Louis-Philippe Desrosiers, who’s in charge of selling churches for Montreal’s parishes.