The Nativity scene in a shared religious space: The case study of Saint-Pierre’s Church in Montreal

Abstract

French

Once called “the priest-ridden province,” the transformations brought about by the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s left the churches in Quebec deserted, while the idea of a secular Quebec became part of the public discourse about Quebec identity. Lacking the financial support of an active community, many Catholic churches were demolished or repurposed. They were thus transformed into residential or institutional spaces, entering what might be conceptualized as a secular order. Some churches managed to delay this major transformation by sharing their space with another religious community. This is the case of a Catholic church located in Montreal that we call Saint-Pierre’s Church. Today, the old building of Saint-Pierre’s Church accommodates two Christian communities: one is French-speaking Catholic and the other is Romanian Orthodox. At first glance, no tensions seem to trouble their coexistence. However, people’s perspectives of religious artifacts depict a slightly different image. Starting from participant observation and interviews carried out in 2016 and 2017 with members of both communities, we use the material religion framework to examine the power of materiality to invoke people’s emotions and to tell a story. The material religion framework allowed us to explore how the understanding of the shared place is linked to the dynamics and the contingencies of each community, and how the transformation of religious space happens in a rapidly changing context to which traditional majoritarian religion is attempting to adjust.

Keywords

shared religious space lived religion material religion Catholicism Orthodoxy Quebec espace religieux partagé religion vécue religion matérielle catholicisme orthodoxie Québec

It was Sunday, June 19, 2016, and we were attending the religious service of an Orthodox community who shared the space of the church with a Catholic community.¹ We had learned about the Saint-Basil Romanian Orthodox Church on the Internet.² Its website announced the beginning of the Mass at 9 o’clock, so we took care to arrive on time. We saw the black silhouette of the Orthodox priest opening the doors of the church and we followed him inside. He was alone. In fact, we were the first “faithful” arriving for the religious service. As we learned later, the Orthodox churchgoers normally arrive a bit late, even after the beginning of the service, which lasts several hours. We chose a pew and sat down silently while observing the Catholic decor: several statues, religious paintings, and the Stations of the Cross in plaster embellished the decaying walls. Orthodox monastic music engulfed the space and our eyes glanced at the priest who moved around and transformed the Catholic space into an Orthodox one. Piece by piece the Orthodox decor was built: a table of oblations covered with a red fabric, the liturgical artifacts, a big cross set behind the altar, several icons and special recipients for candles, the relics, the flag, and finally an iconostasis that closed the sanctuary. All of these artifacts were brought from Romania and adapted to the nomad life of the community in Montreal. In a period of about 15 minutes, the decor was assembled and the space was prepared to welcome the Orthodox parishioners, who eventually started to fill the church’s pews.

The theatrical display of the space piqued our curiosity and the church became our field site on shared religious space. Saint-Pierre’s Church is one of the many decaying Catholic churches of Montreal whose existence is on “standby” as the representative of the Catholic Church, Monseigneur A. M., told us. The closure of the church has been announced twice by the Archdiocese of Montreal, but somehow it has survived each time. A small number of parishioners continue to attend the religious service each week and since 2015 they have shared the space of the church with a Romanian Orthodox community. The future of the building, however, remains uncertain as its physical state continues to deteriorate in the absence of much-needed repairs and renovations.

Between October 2016 and March 2017, we attended the religious services of both communities in our effort to understand the ways in which people experienced the shared space and its transformation.³ We carried out our fieldwork in two steps. First, we did participant observation for three months, which allowed us to observe the dynamics of Catholic and Orthodox Churches and to become an accepted, familiar presence among the practitioners. Then, we conducted 11 semi-structured interviews with both communities. While the two communities are Christian, their traditions are different enough to necessitate adjustments for each of them and perhaps similar enough that they feel the need to defend small distinctions as important differences. For a while, our observations as well as the informal and formal discussions with members of the two communities and their religious leaders did not reveal very much: on the surface, their life together sharing the old church was smooth and trouble-free. The detached and polite answers of the Catholic and Orthodox parishioners avoided talk about the everyday adjustments imposed by their shared space that was itself in a precarious state. In fact, it was quite difficult to convince people to answer our questions as everybody wanted to avoid trouble. But then a story about the presence and the absence of an artifact, the Nativity scene, opened a door and let us see more fully what sharing the space means to two Christian communities. This article explores the narratives that surround the physical presence and absence of the Nativity scene at Saint-Pierre’s Church in order to examine the power of materiality to invoke people’s emotions and to tell a story. The material religion framework allowed us to explore how the understanding of the shared place is linked to the dynamics and the contingencies of each community, and how the transformation of religious space happens in a rapidly changing context to which traditional majoritarian religion is attempting to adjust. Ours is a very specific case study in the Montreal context. Our contribution is to shift the analytical focus from relations between those who use the church space, to a material object, the Nativity scene, as a flash point for emotion and a mediator of social relations. We began our study with the intention of focusing on relations between those who shared the church space. But through our participant observation, we realized the importance of a material object in revealing the complexity of those social relations. Moreover, we emphasize the situated nature of the social relations we describe and their dynamic nature. The tenuousness of the very existence of the church building—its existence in intermediary time—and the shifting nature of religion in society add to this, making for a complex picture that we access through the Nativity scene.

This study is part of a larger project called the Local Regulation of Religion, which aims to explore how the transformation of space—caught in a circuitous movement between religious and secular—takes shape in everyday life in the metropolitan area of Montreal.⁴ Our fieldwork, based on multiple sites, showed that people often use material objects—such as pews, statues of the Virgin Mary, or the Christmas tree—to express the ways in which they experience a changing world and religious diversity. The case of Saint-Pierre’s Church was no exception. Our observation converges with a growing body of research that examines the role of material culture in the study of religion (Arweck and Keenan, 2006; Houtman and Meyer, 2012; Kaell, 2015; King, 2010; Morgan, 2010, 2017; Zubrzycki, 2016a). The artifacts, imagery, and the space mediate people’s encounters with the sacred (Brenneman and Miller, 2016; Orsi, 1999; Williams, 2010) and become objects of navigation, negotiation,⁵ creation, and appropriation (Beekers and Arab, 2016; Engelbart and Krech, 2016; Hoover, 2014; Knott, 2005). But, material objects also become mediators of social relations.

Our interest in exploring the dynamics of the shared religious space follows the work of other scholars of religion who have questioned the cultural diversity and interreligious relations through shared sacred spaces in the last decade (Albera and Couroucli, 2012; Barkan and Barkey, 2015; Hoover, 2014). The sharing of religious space is not a simple affair, remarks Maria Couroucli, since “it does not imply an equivalence between groups or an absence of hierarchy” (2012: 4). These sites are “hybrid structures” (Hoover, 2014) that are affected, as David Henig suggests, by “the contingent confluence around them of divergent actors with sometimes contradictory commitments involved in multiple intertwined processes frequently working at cross-purposes” (2015: 156). Such is the case of Saint-Pierre’s Church. To understand the coexistence of two groups (Catholic and Orthodox) that have distinct religious practices, but who share the same space, we rely on David Henig’s insights. We examine what happens on the ground when social actors assemble as well as the dynamics and the contingencies which characterize each group framed in the culturally diverse and secularized context of Quebec. We see the dynamic and dialectical process of the social and the spatial in this case study: cohabitation produces a necessity for negotiation and sometimes results in controversy. While the studies on shared space mostly question the dynamics of power displayed through negotiation of sacred space between two or more communities, this case study begins with an artifact that acted as a point of refraction for the relationship dynamics in a religious space. To be sure, there are power dynamics, but they are very much relational rather than hierarchical (Couroucli, 2012). The shared use of Saint-Pierre’s Church has in turn constituted it as a sacred space, rescuing it, at least for the moment, from a precarious future which might include demolition or, as we have seen in other examples from our broader study, a repurposing alienated from its sacred origins.

The Nativity scene, also known by its French name crèche, is part of the Christian tradition (mostly Catholic, but also in some types of Protestantism) where popular devotion encounters the Christmas liturgy. It is displayed each year during the Advent season and stays in the church until the Epiphany (January 6) or the feast of Presentation of the Lord on February 2. The crèche is a reproduction of the stable in Bethlehem with principal characters Mary, Joseph, the infant Jesus in a manger, and the three Wise Men, accompanied by other characters such as shepherds, angels, and animals.⁶ The characters usually enter the scene gradually during the Advent, the last one being the infant Jesus who arrives during the Christmas Eve Mass. The Nativity scene does not have a fixed form; under the priest’s supervision, the volunteers redesign the Nativity display each year. For religious practitioners, it represents a medium of religious materialization which renders the Christmas story visible and tangible (Orsi, 2005), encapsulates community traditions and symbolizes the coming together of a community (King, 2010: 55). Performing the ritual of displaying the crèche is also, according to sociologist Paul Connerton, a reminder to the community of its identity “as represented by and told in a master narrative” (1989: 70). It thus plays an active role in the process of social memory construction (King, 2010: 52) and cultural identity maintenance. The Nativity scene is very much part of lived religion in that it takes variable forms and includes local and specific traditions (Ammerman, 2007; Hall, 1997; McGuire, 2008; Orsi, 1997). For our research, it became a useful artifact to explore the dynamics of a space caught in the process of change and transformation.

However, the choice of studying this artifact is not only due to its popularity. It was an entry point into the challenges of shared space that were identified by our participants during our fieldwork: as opposed to “official” narratives embraced by both communities when asked directly about their cohabitation, the conversation about the Nativity scene revealed tensions, expectations, hopes, and adjustments in their shared space. It was in 2015 that the tradition of displaying the Nativity scene was interrupted for the first time in the history of Saint-Pierre’s Church. The disappearance of the artifact coincided with the arrival of the Romanian Orthodox community in this Catholic church. The missing Nativity scene during the Christmas Mass stirred up emotions and fears of several Catholic parishioners who were afraid that the church was losing its Catholic identity. The story does not end here, though. Further, in 2016, the presence of the Nativity scene was said to have interfered with the religious practices of the Orthodox community: it reminded them that they were not “at home” (acasă) and they thus needed to adjust to this reality. While the presence and the absence of the Nativity scene served to simultaneously alienate and act as reminder of the gap between the two religious groups, it also reinforced the idea that the space in which it rested, or not, belonged to neither.

By focusing on an artifact, or a cultural object embedded in social practice, our analysis intersects with both the material and lived religion approaches, or what David Morgan (2010) names “the material culture of lived religion.” According to Morgan (2017: 15), the study of material artifacts in lived religion—meaning the religion as understood and practiced by ordinary people in everyday life—is the study of the ways in which “an object participates in making and sustaining a life world” through religious practices of ordinary people. It is important to stress here that our approach to lived religion concerns not only the ordinary people but also the clergy (Grigore, 2015a). As the representatives of the Church interpret the dogmas and the official practices, they give birth to another form of lived religion. From this perspective, we study the narratives of both believers and clergy that surround the practice of displaying the Nativity scene. While Morgan and other scholars of religion propose analyzing the social life of artifacts, we take a different approach. We argue that exploring the absence and the presence ⁷ of an artifact in a place of worship offers an interesting entry point to explore “the choreography of shared sacred space” (Barkan and Barkey, 2015). Absence and presence mark the discontinuity and the continuity of a tradition and show how two communities engage with each other in a social and spatial context that both enables and constrains. Ultimately, it speaks to the destiny of religious space in Quebec context.

Religious space in Quebec context

To gain a better understanding of the issues, it is important to place the case of Saint-Pierre’s Church in a broader context: in Quebec, Saint-Pierre’s Church is not an exceptional case. Once called “the priest-ridden province,” the transformations brought about by the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s left the churches deserted, while the idea of a secular Quebec became part of the public discourse about Quebec identity (Baum, 2000; Filion, 2013; Gauvreau, 2005; Seljak, 1996, 2000; Simpson, 2000; Zubrzycki, 2016a). The transformations imposed by Vatican II as well as the diminishing number of people who embrace a consecrated life accentuated the rapid decline of weekly Mass attendance in the French-speaking province of Canada from 80% in 1960 to 7% in 2014—42.7% of Roman Catholics in Quebec report never attending Mass in 2011 (Clarke and Macdonald, 2017).⁸ Though the vast majority of Quebeckers still identify as Roman Catholic, they are what some scholars of religion call “cultural Catholics” who show an interest in church buildings because they are part of Quebec heritage rather than because of their faith (Clarke and Macdonald, 2017; Meunier et al., 2010; Noppen, 2013; Zubrzycki, 2016b).⁹ Similarly, Wilkins-Laflamme (2016: 176) argues that:

Catholics hold on to their religious identities even while they are not actively religious. The Catholic Church appears to provide a stronger, more unified resistance to modern transformations that, although not managing to promote regular practice within its doors for a majority of its Western members, does maintain certain cultural and identity ties with them for a much longer period.¹⁰

Without the support of an active community, many Catholic churches have been torn down or repurposed.¹¹ In 2016, the Conseil du patrimoine religieux du Québec estimated that since 2003 one church in six has been sold, closed, or repurposed.¹² In the wake of parish mergers caused by the lack of priests and financial problems, the church councils (fabriques des églises) had to decide what buildings are surplus (édifices excédentaires) and need to be repurposed. In 2013, the Archdiocese of Montreal counted only 70 active parishes among the 172 Catholic French parishes that formerly functioned on this territory (Noppen, 2013). As traditional institutional religion continues to decline in Quebec (Clarke and Macdonald, 2017),¹³ the parishes will collapse, church buildings will close, be repurposed, demolished, or integrated into other structures to preserve some piece of this once-dominant feature of Quebec life.¹⁴ In the midst of this period of intense transition, some churches are struggling to survive. One survival strategy has been to share space, sometimes with similar, yet different, religious groups.¹⁵ This forced mutual dependence means crafting compromises that might have been unimaginable to both groups in other circumstances. The Catholic church we call “Saint-Pierre” is one of these “surplus buildings” owned by the Archdiocese of Montreal that maintains a religious purpose while waiting for a new owner.

Saint-Pierre’s Church

Saint-Pierre’s Church is located in a French-speaking, working-class, low-income neighborhood of Montreal. The church, built at the beginning of the 20th century, is the oldest parish of the neighborhood, which includes eight Catholic churches situated within a 10–15 minute walk of each other.¹⁶ The church is considered part of Montreal’s heritage by the municipal administration, but it did not qualify as part of Quebec’s heritage according to the classification produced by the Ministry of Culture and Communication of the province of Quebec.¹⁷ Practically, this means that the church does not receive money for renovations but needs to respect rules concerning the repurposing of its building.¹⁸ For example, Father Tremblay—a retired priest who performs the religious services for the Catholic community of Saint-Pierre’s Church—recounted that at one point they were unable to rent the space of the presbyteries to a potential tenant—an organization for persons with physical disabilities—as the City opposed adapting the building to the needs of the members of this organization.

Since the last renovations in the 1980s, the church has not had any additional improvements or major upkeep. While waiting for a new purpose, the church continues to exist in a state of disrepair because its dwindling congregation (which today numbers around 30 regular attendees aged between 60 and 95) cannot cover the maintenance of the space. Lacking a priest and a vibrant community, the church lost its parish status in 2009. A year later, in 2010, the religious services were reduced to a single Mass on Saturday afternoon. According to Father Tremblay, the decision to keep one religious service was motivated by finances rather than faith: without a religious service the church would lose the tax benefits that religious organizations accrue. Since 2015, a Romanian Orthodox community (which numbers about 100 regular members aged between 30 and 90) has rented the space of the church and has been its principal user: they hold religious services nearly every day of the week. For the first time in its history, Saint-Pierre’s Church has become a shared religious space. So, what does this space look like?

To a visitor, it might seem to be two churches in one building. The Catholic aesthetic of the space, which has remained untouched on its exterior, becomes less clearly defined as the visitor enters the place of worship and approaches the sanctuary. There are several Orthodox artifacts which, because of their size, cannot go unnoticed. On the left side, there is a shelter that houses several boxes with relics and icons. A big piece of the iconostasis covers a beautiful stained glass window, which has inspired contemplation and devotion in the past.¹⁹ A table used as an altar by the Orthodox clergy stays inside the sanctuary. On the table, there are several liturgical artifacts which are covered by a red cloth. The right side of the sanctuary is also occupied by a number of Orthodox artifacts: another piece of the iconostasis, two church banners with icons, the Romanian flag, a vessel for holy water, some crosses, and liturgical books. These artifacts are put together almost daily to build an imperfect and imagined Orthodox space. The Romanian clergy, as well as the lay members, work hard to reproduce their tradition. And also almost daily, this imperfect and imagined Orthodox space is undone and placed on the margins to give back the space its Catholic character. Members of both communities come and go to their religious services and usually they do not cross paths with each other. All, Catholics and Orthodox, seem to love the old building of the church and yet are powerless to stop its rapid decline: the stairs are dangerous, the roof is eaten away with rust, and big chunks of plaster fall from the ceiling after heavy rain (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

The display of the Nativity scene in Saint-Pierre’s Church (December 2016, copyright Monica Grigore-Dovlete).

During the Christmas period, one special artifact—the Nativity scene—joins the other religious symbols displayed in the church space. The Nativity scene’s time in church is limited, but exudes glamour: it brings some color to the space, it occupies the center of the stage, and it is not put away once the Catholic religious service is finished. It accompanies, as we will see, the Orthodox ceremonies. As a celebrity, the presence and the absence of this artifact capture the attention of the parishioners, and certainly its presence draws the attention of visitors as well.

Displaying the Nativity scene

Following tradition, the Nativity scene was displayed in Saint-Pierre’s Church each year before Christmas. Then, in 2015, with volunteers and a priest in short supply, the Catholic community of Saint-Pierre celebrated their Christmas Mass without the Nativity scene. Coincidentally, that year also marked the arrival of the Romanian Orthodox community at Saint-Pierre’s Church. Some Catholic parishioners inferred that the absence was due to the wishes (or demands) of their new soul mates. To avoid further tension or conflict, in 2016, Father Tremblay personally made certain that the Nativity scene was displayed for the Christmas Mass.

The reactions to the presence and the absence of the Nativity scene belied the apparent indifference of members of both communities. These reactions allowed us as sociologists to see beyond what could be characterized as a contractual arrangement to begin to understand the ways in which sharing space impacted each community in different ways. Beneath the initially superficial statements were emotionally charged reactions that responded to loss, belonging, and identity.

The absence of the Nativity scene

The absence of the Nativity display in 2015 upset the Catholic parishioners. After the Christmas Mass, Father Tremblay, who was a retired Catholic priest appointed by the Diocese just before Christmas that year to conduct the religious service in Saint-Pierre’s Church, tried to explain the absence of the Nativity scene. He suggested three main reasons: (1) the lack of volunteers; (2) he was new in the parish and did not know what the situation was; and (3) the Orthodox community was a more frequent user of the church and so to display a Nativity scene would require the approval of the Orthodox community. Although he wanted to “appease and soften” the situation, his arguments did not convince everybody: one of the parishioners stood up and spoke out. Father Tremblay recounted that moment:

We were 100-120²⁰ people and there was an old parishioner who stood up and talked publicly. I thought that he was going to say “thank you” because we had music, a singer, there was ambience. That was it, it was planned, it was OK. Not at all. He complained that we didn’t display a Nativity scene, that he never saw something like that at Saint-Pierre’s Church, that he was born here, etc. Then he bitched…and he bitched about the Romanian community in the sense that it is not up to the others to tell us what we can do [in our church]. (Interview, February 1, 2017)

The ways in which parishioners remembered this moment during our conversations with them suggested that there was a general sense that the absence of the Nativity scene was a sad moment and a consequence of sharing the church with another community. The Catholic practitioners we interviewed revealed four main attitudes. First, they remembered the event in a way that made the Orthodox community more visible: the Nativity display was not absent, but it was replaced by an “Orthodox Nativity scene.” This interpretation surprised us since we knew that Romanian Orthodox do not have the tradition of displaying a Nativity scene during Christmas time. Our curiosity piqued, we asked our interviewees for more details about this supposed Orthodox crèche. Gérard, a Catholic parishioner, said: “Me, I took a look and I didn’t find anything wrong. Nothing too different [from what we know]” (Interview, January 18, 2017). In his words, the person who complained after the Christmas Mass said that “it’s not acceptable to have [in a Catholic church] the Nativity scene of another religion.” At first we thought that the remark about the alternative crèche was simply an embellishment of the story, the sort that happens in the transferral of information in communities that we might describe as “gossip” (Amiraux, 2016). However, on further exploration in our interviews with the Orthodox parishioners, we realized that there was a foundation for this alternative crèche story: in 2015, a group of children performed a live Nativity play during a religious service before Christmas Eve and for a short period the stage set for the play was in Saint-Pierre’s Church. It is very possible that the Catholic believers saw and interpreted the set as having been erected by the Orthodox community as their version of a Nativity scene. The fact of the complaint and its recounting to us revealed that the seeming indifference to the sharing of the church space we had first observed was not quite accurate. Secondly, our Catholic interviewees expressed shock at not seeing the Christmas Nativity scene during Christmas 2015. Although they knew things were changing, and that their religious lives connected to the church were on the brink of disappearing, this did not mean that they had forgotten the rituals, practices, and artifacts associated with that connection. Third, they suspected that the representatives of the Catholic Church had not properly negotiated the terms of usage of the space. For them, the absence of the crèche was a sign of the indifference of the Archdiocese of Montreal toward their church. They felt abandoned and hopeless. Finally, they emphasized that while the presence of the crèche is important, the Romanian community had in fact helped them keep the church alive. Consequently, they recognized the need to approach the issue with tact and diplomacy, despite their emotional attachment and reaction.

Our Orthodox interviewees showed that they did not know about these discussions and they could not imagine that staging a living Nativity scene troubled the Catholic community. For them, it was a way to involve their children—most of them born in Quebec—in church activities. However, they knew that the Catholic community had not displayed a Nativity scene in 2015 which they interpreted as a sign of abandonment of Saint-Pierre’s Church by the Catholic community. That the community did not have the resources to maintain the tradition did not occur to the Orthodox community.

The presence of the Nativity scene

The day before Christmas Eve 2016, Father Tremblay himself arranged the Nativity scene in Saint-Pierre’s Church. A rocky landscape with several figurines crafted in painted plaster and some artificial flowers occupied the space in front of the altar. Two little angels sat on the left and right sides of the sanctuary entry. During the interviews, the Catholic parishioners seemed particularly attached to these angels, which moved their heads and said “merci” as they put 25 cents (un sou) in the angels’ little baskets. The “little babies,” as they called them, seemed to bring back memories of the good days when Saint-Pierre’s Church had a growing and active community. After the religious service, parishioners gathered near the divider that separates the sanctuary from the nave of the church and gazed at the Nativity scene while expressing their opinions and curiosity about the Orthodox artifacts displayed all around the sanctuary. Some of them had some knowledge about the Orthodox artifacts and practices because of their previous contact with Orthodox communities. Near the crèche, they shared their impressions about the “others”: their ceremonies last several hours, they sung and lit candles, and the two big pieces of the iconostasis were always assembled before the religious service to hide the sanctuary from laypeople’s eyes. This last observation reminded some of them of how religion was practiced before Vatican II (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

This picture was taken after the Orthodox religious service. Because women do not have the right to enter the sanctuary, I took the picture from the outside. However, behind the flag, we can see the Nativity scene between the Catholic altar table and the Orthodox one (December 2016, copyright Monica Grigore-Dovlete).

Figure 3.

The display of Orthodox artifacts in Saint-Pierre’s Church. On the right, we can see one part of the iconostasis, the church flag, an icon, etc. On the left side, there is a shelter that houses several boxes with relics and icons (Novembre 2016, copyright Monica Grigore-Dovlete).

Since the Orthodox community used the church more frequently, Father Tremblay asked permission of his Orthodox counterpart, Father Vasile, to set up a Nativity scene. Cautiously, Father Tremblay delegated the churchwarden (marguillier) to initiate the discussion almost 6 months before Christmas. The presence of the intermediary was necessary because of a language barrier: the Romanian representatives spoke only Romanian and English, while Father Tremblay spoke only French. Unfamiliar with the Catholic tradition, Father Vasile quickly agreed. As he told me during an informal conversation, he thought that the crèche would be removed after the Christmas Eve Mass. When he learned that the artifact displayed in front of the altar would stay in place until Epiphany, Father Vasile complained to the churchwarden and tried without any success to negotiate a change of this material practice. He justified his claim by noting that the place and the extended presence of the artifact disturbed the flow of the Orthodox religious services.

During the interviews, each group presented its position as follows. For the Catholics, it was out of the question to remove the Nativity scene earlier than tradition dictates. Father Tremblay thought that sufficient effort had been made to accommodate the Orthodox community when he chose not to use all the material for the Nativity scene. As for the parishioners, they pointed out that the location of the Nativity scene had already changed. In the past, it had been set in the left or right corner of the sanctuary. Since the Romanian community had taken residence, two pieces of a large Orthodox artifact, the iconostasis (a wall of icons that separates the nave from the sanctuary of the church), had been erected. Father Tremblay found it difficult to understand, given their compromises, the objection of the Orthodox priest to the presence of the Nativity scene for the duration of the Christmas season: “I don’t know the Orthodox liturgical tradition. We didn’t use a lot of space, I don’t see their problem” (Interview, February 1, 2017).

However, knowledge of the rituals might have shed some light on the objection. Father Vasile was not celebrating the Mass facing the people as his Catholic counterpart did, he performed facing the East with his back to the people. In other words, he officiated the religious services sitting in front of the altar, there where the Nativity scene was displayed. Faced with the refusal of the Catholic community, Father Vasile adopted a compromise solution: a small altar was improvised in front of the Nativity display. To calm emotions, he explained his compromise by framing the Catholic religious practice in an Orthodox context where the cult of relics is very powerful: the Nativity scene needed to remain in front of the altar because relics were buried under the altar.

What then does the presence and absence of a Nativity scene tell us about the shared lives of a Catholic community and its Orthodox “roommates” at Saint-Pierre’s Church?

The French Catholic and the Romanian Orthodox communities

In talking with our interviewees, both the Catholic and Orthodox referred to and framed the community with whom they share the sacred space as “the others.” When we arrived at Saint-Pierre’s Church, the French Catholics and the Romanian Orthodox had been using the building together for a year. Although at first glance, they seemed indifferent to the presence of “the other,” our interviews revealed that both communities played (consciously or not) a double role of both the observer and the observed. In fact, the little information they had about the “other” was usually gained through the observation of the space. However, the reasons behind the observation appeared to be different: while the Catholic community seemed motivated by curiosity, the Orthodox community used the observations to confirm its cultural identity.

Observing and being observed

Let’s return to the Christmas Mass in 2015, the moment when the absence of the Nativity scene prompted a Catholic parishioner to complain publicly about the Orthodox community. His action seemed to be related to the presence of a Nativity scene decor that belonged to the Orthodox, which had staged, unusually, a living Nativity that year. The changes in the Nativity scene were noticed by the other Catholic laypeople and while they express regrets about it, they did not support the parishioner who complained. We will discuss this more fully in the following section. During our fieldwork in 2016, the Catholic practitioners also noticed the Orthodox artifacts while admiring the crèche. The interviews revealed a sense of curiosity about “the other” among several members of the Catholic community. Aware that one of us is Romanian Orthodox, we were asked about the Orthodox rituals: if they baptize, confess, divorce, or if it is true that their priests are married. Gérard, a Catholic parishioner, confessed to us that one Sunday he attended the Orthodox Mass.²¹ He could not understand what was said, as the service was in Romanian, but he observed that people use candles, sing and celebrate with a closed sanctuary. There was a good atmosphere and a lot of children, he said. Françoise, another Catholic practitioner, remembered her first encounter with the Romanian priest and how her curiosity was awakened at that moment:

At one moment, I went [to Saint-Pierre’s Church] Sunday to bring a box of clothes [for the bazaar]. Then I saw a man, all dressed in black and with all Orthodox priests symbols. (…) this impressed me as much as a woman dressed in niqab; [I could see] only the eyes, all in black, it’s intimidating to see a big [man], all dressed in black, with a beard and other religious signs…. (Interview, February 21, 2017)

Françoise assumed that the Orthodox priest was also surprised by her presence. However, members of the Romanian community mentioned that they were aware of the presence of some Catholic practitioners on Sunday celebrations. They felt like they were being observed and because they wanted to make a good impression among the Catholic parishioners they decided to introduce the prayer “Our Father” in French and in English. Nevertheless, they kept in mind the differences that historically divided the two Christian branches and created some polite ways to refuse communion to Catholic believers.²²

If the Orthodox community piqued the curiosity of the Catholic parishioners, the reverse was not true. This does not mean that the Orthodox were not observing, in their turn, “the others.” They saw that the Catholics had no crèche for Christmas in 2015 and interpreted the presence of the item a year later as a response to their presence in Saint-Pierre’s Church. According to our Orthodox participants, they not only revitalized the space but also the Catholic community. In their view, the decay of Saint-Pierre’s Church and the decrease of its community was a good example of the decline of the Catholic Church in Quebec, which, as they claimed, had not done “a good job” lately. They used this observation to formulate a criticism against Western countries and especially the Catholic Quebeckers who adopted secularism as a way of life. For example, Adriana—an Orthodox interviewee—said:

It breaks my heart to see how churches are disappearing because they throw, how do I say, in disgrace something they need it. Their parents and their families have invested a lot of energy and heart in [these churches]. I am sure that there is life and history there (…) if we only think to marriages, burials, or baptisms, these things that attach us to the Church. It breaks my heart to see that here is a Christian nation which denies its roots because it emancipated. I don’t think that [secularism] brought them more stability. (…) I would like to see people coming to the church. I don’t think that other confessions renounce as easily to their faith. I don’t think that Muslims (…) or Jews renounce as easily to their values. They are proud to be a Muslim, a Jew. Why would I not be proud that I’m an Orthodox and they [the Quebeckers] that they are Catholics? Why would not they want to have their sacred space? (Interview, January 26, 2017)

Coming from a country that has experienced a strong religious awakening²³ and attraction of the traditional way of life over the last 30 years (Grigore, 2015b; Stahl and Venbrux, 2011; Voicu and Constantin, 2012), the Orthodox practitioners and clergy showed a lack of understanding and were critical of the decline of traditional religion in Quebec. They lived what Brett C. Hoover called a “cultural encapsulation,” meaning “the lack of understanding, or ignorance, of another’s cultural background and the influence this background has on one’s current view of the world” (2014: 176). The Orthodox looked at the Catholic Quebeckers through the Romanian cultural framework (that of a very religious country) and expressed positive feelings about themselves while showing incomprehension toward the decline of religion in Quebec even though they had a general knowledge about the oppressive role played by the Catholic Church in this province.

The compromise

The attempt to have the Nativity scene removed after the Christmas Eve Mass was unsuccessful, and the Orthodox community simply accepted the presence of the crèche at the front of the altar until the end of the Christmas season. A small altar was installed in front of the Nativity scene in order to respect the Orthodox rituals. From their standpoint, there was not much room for negotiation. They were a tenant community that would need references in the future in order to be able to rent a new religious space. Their situation was more delicate as they did not have a lease and thus the agreement could be ended easily, as the Catholic Church representative told us. The Orthodox community was not willing to risk losing their place in Saint-Pierre’s Church, which was the third religious space they had rented since the establishment of their church in Montreal in the 1990s. During the interviews, the Orthodox confessed that renting a place of worship was quite difficult in Montreal and they were quite happy with the present deal: a low rent, an almost unlimited time for usage of the building, and enough space to display their (large and many) artifacts. From this perspective, Saint-Pierre’s Church was, said Ioana, “the heaven on earth” for the Romanian community. If their contentedness was easy to understand, the remark that it is not easy to find a religious space to rent in Montreal—a city where a large number of churches encounter financial difficulties—was a bit surprising. Were the Catholic communities not willing to share their buildings with other religious groups or did the problem originate with the Orthodox community? Several reasons were offered by the Orthodox parishioners during the interviews.

First, the religious practices of Romanian Orthodox are time and space consuming. Their religious services last several hours and they often organize community meals. For example, Adriana summarized the situation in this way:

The Orthodox need a free space for Sunday and they make a lot of meals. They do not have a strict schedule, from 10 a.m. to 12 a.m., and they disappear. The liturgy is between 10 a.m. and 12 a.m., but then somebody commemorates his dead relatives, somebody has a baptism…there is a community lunch, it’s Saint Peter feast, it’s the beginning of Lent (…) That’s it. We cook complete meals. We don’t eat chips, we don’t eat McDonalds’ sandwiches. We don’t necessarily offer food for the poor, for those who have nothing to eat. [At our community meals] we eat good food because the Romanians are like that. (Interview, January 26, 2017)

This kind of remark reveals the way in which the Romanian community imagines how Quebeckers live their lives. They transposed onto the people with whom they shared the church’s building what they saw as the failings of Western/Quebec society who abandoned the traditional way of life. This move, conscious or not, was part of a process of reinforcing their identity by distinguishing themselves from the Catholic parishioners and reinforcing who “they” are.

Secondly, the Orthodox religious practice posed some problems in the Quebec context. For their rituals—as Catholics observed—the Orthodox use candles that remain lit for the entirety of the religious service. Consequently, it is almost impossible to keep the worship space free of wax. The wax drippings were mentioned in the references received from their last location, also a Catholic church. For this reason, the Orthodox community is known as being a “bit messy,” said Ioana—an Orthodox practitioner—who remarked equally that they were not “messy,” but it is their religious practice and “there is no Orthodox church in Romania that does not have wax stains on the floor” (Interview, December 28, 2017). Montreal churches are not, however, like those in Romania, so the Orthodox parishioners have to respect their rules. It was one of the conditions that they had to fulfill when they received permission to move into Saint-Pierre’s Church. Monseigneur A. M., the Catholic Church representative who negotiated the lease, made it clear during the interview: “it’s not about the wicked Catholics who do not want to welcome the Orthodox…but sometimes you have wax on pews, it’s very annoying to remove it and it takes time” (Interview, April 14, 2017). While they were unwilling to renounce the use of candles, the Orthodox reserved time after the religious service to clean the floors of candle drippings.

In addition to the rules of occupation and use, some Catholic parishioners were open to the possibility of giving even more freedom to the Orthodox community. While remembering the discussion provoked by the absence of the Nativity scene, some of our respondents said that Romanians should be allowed to use the space of Saint-Pierre's Church according to their customs, culture, and traditions. According to some Catholic parishioners, it was important that the Orthodox community feel welcome and develop an attachment to the space and thus take care of it. They were interested in any solution that could save the church and for this reason they thought that the complaint concerning the absence of the Nativity scene expressed after the Christmas Mass in 2015 was misplaced, especially because it was made by somebody who did not regularly attend the religious service at Saint-Pierre’s Church. According to the Catholic interviewees, their desire to accommodate the Orthodox community was a gesture to applaud rather than condemn because the future of the church was at stake. Any solution that could save the church building was good for the moment. The Romanian Orthodox community helped them to keep the space alive and also nourished the hope that maybe one day they would decide to take a step further and buy the building. They felt that losing their church would accentuate the feeling of otherness that was instilled gradually in their community in the last 20 years. “We’ve become strangers,” said our Catholic interviewees, while they remarked that they do not know their neighbors and remember all the Church activities that brought together people in the past: the religious services, the choir, the bazaar, and procession. They felt that the neighborhood was transforming. The change was immanent and with it their way of life was disappearing.²⁴

The Catholic community also felt that Church leadership was not committed to saving the church building. They suspected that the Church was in fact waiting to see the building collapse. Their feelings were not completely without basis: according to Monseigneur A. M., the church could be sold, demolished or sold and integrated in another construction in the future since the Archdiocese of Montreal had no money for the restoration of the building.²⁵ The Catholic Church was only willing to sell the church for a good price. Monseigneur A. M. said that the Church was not disposed to continue to sell its buildings at a low price only to preserve the religious vocation of the buildings. Having seen former churches purchased at a bargain price by other religious groups and then later resold at a considerable profit, the Church decided to only sell at market value, even if that meant the destruction of the building. More connected to the people, Father Tremblay explained in this way the attitude of the Church: “Why should we invest in a building that will have no use in a near future given that Quebeckers do not practice anymore. (…) We have too many buildings” (Interview, February 1, 2017). However, the price of the building and its restoration was too high for the Romanian community and probably any other religious community. For the practitioners and the Church leadership, it was clear that the buyer needs to be somebody very rich as the building is in an advanced state of disrepair.

By way of conclusion: An “intermediary time”

We noted at the beginning of our discussion that two cultural groups were reluctant to talk about their experience of sharing the sacred space. Maybe, we thought, they actually coexist happily. But we were also a bit reluctant to accept what we initially saw and heard at face value. Following the tradition of sociologists such as Howard S. Becker (2007 [1961]) and Alvin W. Gouldner (1954), we looked at phenomena that seemed to produce tension and conflict. This does not mean that we were looking for “dirty linen and skeletons” (Becker et al., 2007 [1961]: 21), but we were trying to uncover the dynamics of the shared sacred space or in Becker’s words to understand how things work when they work well. It appeared that the tensions and conflicts that cross the religious shared space are expressed through the materiality, and “the small things.” Seemingly simple configurations of material things, or an absence of material things, can have consequences and carry much more profound meaning than might at first be thought. Further, such material artifacts attract an emotional response that reveals information that otherwise people are reluctant to discuss directly.

The discussions about the absence and the presence of the Nativity scene in Saint-Pierre’s Church revealed that the shared sacred space in the Quebec context takes place in an intermediary time for the church building that is waiting to be repurposed. This tenuous existence in turn impacts on the occupants of the church: aware that it is potentially a temporary situation, the actions of the two groups are orientated by the way in which they perceive the “Other” and their own situation, as well as by their willingness to make compromises in order to overcome difficulties. The fragility of the church future shapes both the emotion around the Nativity scene and the investment in resolving issues around its placement.

The Nativity scene as a site of contention allowed us to see that both communities, Catholic and Orthodox, wanted to keep and protect their traditions. However, their desire to be rigid about keeping tradition diminished as both Catholics and Orthodox parishioners understood that without the space of Saint-Pierre’s Church their communities will suffer. Consequently, the desire to preserve access to the space of Saint-Pierre’s Church shaped the way in which the two groups act: the dissatisfaction was expressed in a faint voice and the negotiations for compromise or change lacked tenacity.

The desire to maintain their traditions was a way to confirm and maintain their identities. This need was nourished especially by the fact that both communities were “in transition,” as the French Catholics were renegotiating their place in Quebec society (Kaell, 2017; Meunier and Wilkins-Laflamme, 2011) and the Romanian Orthodox—as immigrants—were caught between two worlds and are not “capable of feeling sufficiently a part of either” (Kivisto, 2014: 33). But their attachment to tradition also caused some tensions usually nourished by the lack of knowledge about the “other” and accentuated by a language barrier. Absorbed in their own lives and contained by their own cultural practices, Catholics and Orthodox did not know much about each other. The tenuousness of the arrangement, because of the lack of a lease, the precariousness of the status of the church as “belonging” to either of them because of its designation as a surplus property, as well as its physical deterioration impacted the two groups in terms of motivation to invest time in getting to know their “roommate” better. Their coexistence depended largely on the future of the space: put on the market, the building of Saint-Pierre’s Church could be sold at any moment. The shared space was consequently perceived as temporary, a fact which did not encourage people to cultivate a more enduring relationship. In this way, the church itself shaped the social relations between the two groups, and, of course, their ability to navigate and negotiate their relations with each other impacted the existence of the church. At a more complex level, the intersection of the material culture of both groups and the spatial configuration of the church also created a framework within which they were forced to interact.

The lack of knowledge and cultural misunderstanding made interaction difficult and inclined both communities to consider avoidance to be a better strategy than the interaction. As Hoover suggests, the cultural encapsulation perpetuates mutual ignorance of other groups’ perspective “that increase tensions by keeping groups unaware of the ways in which their actions might be interpreted in a negative light by another group” (2014: 176). The presence of the crèche decor used by Orthodox children in 2015 was as a consequence of limited knowledge about the Orthodox and their activities, misinterpreted by the Catholics practitioners. They interpreted the crèche decor used by Orthodox children as the imposition of another religion in their church instead of seeing it as a sign of the adaptation of Romanian Orthodox to the Catholic culture of Quebec. For their part, the Orthodox looked at the relation between Quebeckers and the Catholic Church through the Romanian cultural lens. Consequently, they were more inclined to judge and condemn and less likely to comprehend the problems that their Catholic “roommates” encountered. That this was a time of intense anguish for many of the Catholic parishioners was not fully appreciated by the Orthodox.

The presence and the absence of the Nativity display in Saint-Pierre’s Church show how an established religion and a migrant religion negotiate spatial regimes through “place-keeping” and “place-making” strategies (Becci et al., 2017; Vasquez and Knott, 2014). To keep their place, the Catholic community was open to compromise but not complete renunciation. As long as the building remains a place of worship, they are able to preserve their presence and to reproduce symbolic power through the building’s aesthetics which carries significance within collective memories of congregants and French Quebeckers in general. The Orthodox, as place-making group, displayed practices that aimed at “symbolic and material appropriations of a space, geared towards producing familiarity and belonging in already religious marked terrains” (Becci et al., 2017: 83). Moreover, sharing a decaying space marked by the Catholic aesthetics allowed them to reinforce their own cultural identity.

In this context, the priests played an important role in the dynamics of the shared space; they were a medium between the two communities. The way in which they provided the information to the laypeople appeared to be very important as it could both minimize and exacerbate tension and conflict. Justifying the absence of the Nativity display by the presence of the “other” or complaining about the discomfort produced by the presence of the crèche did not improve the relationship between the two groups.

More generally, the presence of Catholic and Orthodox artifacts in the same space gives visibility to the story of transformation of religious space in Quebec. It is a story of the everyday negotiation and navigation of the traditional order and one in which a new order around a new diversity (Beaman, 2017) is being created—which includes the decline of traditional religion, the increase of migrant religions, and a strong “nonreligious” presence. It is a story of loss, social change, and the complexity of “vivre ensemble.”

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Cory Steele for his editorial and research assistance.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Religion and Diversity project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Lori Beaman would also like to acknowledge the ongoing financial support for her research through her Canada Research Chair in Religious Diversity and Social Change.

ORCID iD

Monica Grigore-Dovlete

Notes

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