Four: The Churches of Whitney Pier
Introduction
THE BUILDING OF CHURCHES FIRST got underway as a major human activity in the fourth century after the so-called Edict of Milan in 313 enabled Christians in the Roman world to emerge from hidden refuges and practise their religion openly. The architectural idiom they chose to use was not that of the classical temple associated with pagan religion but that of the basilica, or secular government assembly building. Generally speaking, a basilica consisted of a rectangular hall, or nave, sometimes flanked by lower-roofed aisles, or wings, from which its central space was divided by arcades of piers with a line of clerestory windows above, under a flat ceiling. At one end was a rounded apse in which the magistrate had his chair. This spot was adopted by the Christians for placement of the altar, and behind it was the chair of the celebrant, who presided at the celebration of the Eucharist, or the thanksgiving for Christ and his sacrifice, the principal act of Christian worship. If the celebrant was a bishop, or overseer, the chair was his cathedra, and the building a cathedral. Sometimes, if the church had been erected over the burial place of a martyr or an apostle, or if it marked a holy site, there was an opening in the floor in front of the altar through which worshippers might access the site, or reliquary, that contained the bones of the saint. This is how the great churches were ordered that marked the places of Christ’s Nativity and Resurrection in the Holy Land, as well as those that celebrated the witness of apostles and saints in Rome and elsewhere across North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.
The European settlers who came to Nova Scotia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thus were heirs to a history and tradition of church-building that extended back more than a thousand years. Insofar as what they built and how they went about building it differed from that to which they had been accustomed in their motherlands was determined partly by the materials for building available in Nova Scotia and partly by local differences in climate and social conditions. Thus when the earliest still-standing church building in Nova Scotia, St. Paul’s in Halifax, was built in the neo-Classical Style in imitation of St. Peter’s, Vere Street, in London, it was unlike St. Peter’s in that it was made of wood rather than of brick and stone. Its timbers were prefabricated in Boston, Massachusetts, and shipped to Nova Scotia for assembly in Halifax.
In England, there was a sharp social distinction between the established Church of England and the so-called free or nonconformist or dissenting places of worship. The nonconformist buildings were called chapels rather than churches, and — like the early Christian basilicas — were built to look like secular rather than religious buildings. Indeed, the Reverend John Wesley, founder of the Methodists, who was a priest of the Church of England, was careful to design his movement as a society within the church, rather than as a church in competition with the Church of England. This was reflected in the architecture of Methodism’s chapels, which looked much more like village meeting halls than they did like churches. It was not until after Wesley’s death in 1791 that the Methodists, in 1795, took the step of authorizing their preachers to perform ministerial functions even though they were without any form of ordination. But Wesley and his associates many years before had been rebuffed by the bishops and denied the use of the parish churches for their meetings. In this the bishops — largely latitudinarian (or as we would say today, liberal) in their theology — proved to be far less imaginative and open-minded than Pope Innocent III was in the thirteenth century when he welcomed that era’s equivalent of John Wesley, Saint Francis of Assisi, and gave him his blessing, guidance, and support. So it was that in the early colonial period in Nova Scotia, as elsewhere across the English-speaking world, the established church tended to be left high and dry while the Holy Spirit moved outside its boundaries to win souls to Christ. In Nova Scotia we see this difference between church and chapel expressed in the architectural differences between St. Paul’s Church and the Inglis-era churches on the one hand, and buildings like the Barrington Meeting House and the Grand Pré Covenanters’ Church on the other — although we must be clear that these particular buildings predate Methodism, and their lineage is Congregationalist. But it did not last long, and just as the Methodists in England started ordaining ministers with the laying on of hands in 1836, so too over time the meeting houses of Methodists and other nonconformist bodies became churches with ecclesiastical appurtenances like steeples that made them almost indistinguishable from Anglican buildings, at least in their exterior appearance. An example of this process is the Covenanter Church at Grand Pré, a meeting-house-style building erected in 1804. It was built by the mostly Congregationalist New England planters — under Scottish Presbyterian leadership — who had been settled on the Grand Pré lands vacated by Acadians expelled by the British military in 1755. Architecturally, it was transformed into a church, at least in its exterior appearance, by the addition of a steeple in 1818.
The situation of the Roman Catholic churches was different. The Roman Catholics in British-ruled territories like Nova Scotia were similar to the New England Congregationalists and the old-country Methodists in that they were religious nonconformists who did not accept the church established by law, the United Church of England and Ireland. Just as Roman Catholic clergy were inhibited by law from appearing in public in clerical garb, so too their chapels tended to look unlike churches in their exterior appearance, often lacking steeples, for example. But if the Catholics were Acadian French who had evaded expulsion, or Highland Scots who had not been embraced by Presbyterianism, or newly arrived immigrant Irish, they represented the pre-Reformation or Counter-Reformation Catholic religious tradition that Protestantism sought to reform. The British had been at war, on and off, with the French for centuries, but this was only part of the reason why, at the time Nova Scotia was founded, and for almost two hundred years before that, Roman Catholics in places under British rule were severely restricted in respect to the free exercise of not only their religion but also their civil rights. These disabilities had their origins in the unresolved religious conflicts of the sixteenth century that divided Europeans into Reformation and Counter-Reformation camps. In 1570, Pope Pius V had excommunicated the Queen of England, Elizabeth I, and absolved her subjects of their allegiance to her. This had the unfortunate effect of making Roman Catholicism equivalent to treason in places where the English crown was sovereign, and in England after 1570 the persecution of Catholics began to approach in severity that of an earlier persecution of Protestants by Elizabeth’s half sister, the Roman Catholic Queen Mary, who burned more than three hundred Protestants alive in the six years she was Queen of England, from 1552 to 1558. The crucial role played by Mary in the creation of anti-Catholic sentiment in the Anglo-Saxon world often goes unnoticed because the attention of historical memory has been much more focussed on the colourful but brutal father she shared with Elizabeth, King Henry VIII. When Mary became Queen on the death of their half brother, Edward VI, most people in England had been alienated from Protestant reform by the vandalism and bigotry that had accompanied its imposition by Edward’s ministers, and they
