Sister Andrea Dumont, Thompson’s longest-serving religious, will receive the St. Joseph Award April 23, the highest honour Catholic Missions in Canada bestows, at the annual Tastes of Heaven Gala at Bellvue Manor in Vaughan, Ontario, which includes the amalgamated towns of Woodbridge, Concord, Maple and Kleinburg, and is just a few kilometres north of downtown Toronto. The gala is hosted by Cardinal Thomas C. Collins, archbishop of Toronto and apostolic chancellor.
The St. Joseph Award is the highest award for outstanding missionary work bestowed by Catholic Missions in Canada, which was founded in 1908 as The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada. The organization comes to the aid of isolated missions across the country where a lack of resources makes it impossible to maintain a Catholic presence without outside financial help.
Three years before the founding of The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada, the Vatican in 1905 had changed the official statuses of the Catholic Church in Canada and the United States from being “mission” churches, receiving missionary funding for their operations, to being “independent” churches having to finance their own operations, presenting challenges and difficulties in numerous areas.
On Sept. 23, 1908, Monsignor E. Alfred Burke from the Diocese of Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island, founded The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada to raise funds to help “cultivate the missionary spirit in the clergy and the people,” and “to preserve the Faith of Jesus Christ among Catholic immigrants” then resettling in the Canadian West.
Papal approval and pontifical status were granted to The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada by Pope Pius X on June 9, 1910, for “the protection and diffusion and the preservation of the Catholic Faith in the territories of the Dominion of Canada.”
In the early days, The Catholic Church Extension Society of Canada undertook to bring Roman Catholicism through a Catholic Church presence to thousands of Catholics settling in Western Canada. It began using funds collected in the east to build small chapels across the Prairies and in the mountain areas. Later, it encouraged priests in the Atlantic provinces to go west and serve in the remote and priest-less parishes. As the need for missionaries grew, the society began supporting the education of seminarians.
In 1999, the name of the Society was changed to Catholic Missions In Canada to better reflect its mission and outreach, which today includes missionaries, catechetical programs, ministry among First Nations peoples, church building and repair, religious education of children and youth, leadership formation of lay people, and seminarian education for ministry in its mission dioceses.
The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Keewatin-Le Pas takes, where Sister Andrea currently serves here in Thompson, takes in some 430,000 square kilometres and comprises the northern parts of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. The farthest point west is LaLoche, Saskatchewan, near the Alberta border. The farthest point north is Lac Brochet here in Manitoba and the farthest point east is Sandy Lake in Northwestern Ontario. There are 49 missions in the archdiocese: 27 in Manitoba, 21 in Saskatchewan and one in Ontario. The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI) established the first mission at Ile-À-la-Crosse, Sask. in 1860.
Sister Andrea, who first trained as a nurse, and candidly admits to dragging her feet and delaying on any call to become a nun initially – and for some years thereafter until she finally accepted it – spent 14 years in Guatemala until the mission closed and since returning to Canada has lived in Grand Rapids, Easterville and Thompson, where the main focus of her work is in adult education, which includes training lay presiders for times when there is no priest available, organizing and instructing in the various ministries, sacramental preparation and RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults). There are no parochial Catholic schools in the area. As well as Guatemala, the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto at one time also had foreign missions in Hong Kong, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nicaragua, Honduras and Haiti. They continue to serve in Honduras and Haiti.
Sister Andrea is originally from St. Catharines, Ontario and a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Toronto, who are the same sisters who taught some of my high school classes from September 1971 to June 1976 growing up in Oshawa, Ontario, just east of Toronto, when Sister Conrad Lauber was principal and Sister Dorothy Schweitzer taught me several English and literature classes – and Grade 10 general math – with little success in the latter through no fault of her own at Oshawa Catholic High School (now Monsignor Paul Dwyer Catholic High School) https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/high-school-redux/
In the truth is stranger-than-fiction category, almost 40 years after my high school days ended, I’ve been encountering Sister Andrea, who is good friends with Sister Conrad and Sister Dorothy, regularly over the last eight years since I moved here to Thompson in Northern Manitoba and joined St. Lawrence Roman Catholic Church parish.
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