'What else have we got?': Tiny N.L. outports fearful as Cape Shore churches listed for sale

Henry Careen remembers the trucks rolling into town that day. The workers, all local men, pouring concrete. The horse-drawn wagons carting in gravel and stone.

For the next 66 years, the church he watched rise from the ground up would remain central to his life.

He's painted it countless times. Installed the windows. Built an altar from scratch, by hand, adding to and repairing the building as the decades passed.

He shows off his collection of bronze candlesticks, displayed on shelving in a back office that he, too, constructed. A museum, he explains.

"All the spare time I have," Careen says, his voice breaking, as he stands among the pews. "Here every day since I retired now. Twenty years, roughly."

Sacred Heart Catholic Church in St. Bride's is one of several parishes on the Cape Shore now up for sale to pay a court-ordered settlement to the Mount Cashel orphanage victims.

It's where the outport's 252 residents are baptized, get married and say their final goodbyes to loved ones.

Kevin McGrath, a volunteer on the parish financial committee, points to each pew, naming the families who've sat in those seats for generations, direct descendants of the settlers who landed here from Ireland. Foley. Conway. Dohey.

"It's a gathering place," he says, looking around. "It's a part of our history. It's a part of our culture. What else have we got in these little communities if we haven't got our church?"

The way Careen and McGrath explain it, St. Bride's, with one road in and out of town, unpotable water and no cell signal, is about as far away from Mount Cashel as Rome itself.

Why, they ask, shouldn't the Vatican be paying this bill?

"The money shouldn't come from these little communities," McGrath says, folding his arms. "There's no receipts where the archdiocese sent us money out here. We're operating on our own."

The church is listed for $120,000. The priest's two-bedroom house, nestled behind it, is going for $140,000.

To save all four churches in the region, they'd need $540,000:a thousand dollars from every man, woman and child on the shore, McGrath points out.

It's an incredible sum for an aging population to raise before somebody else steps in, possibly turning the church into a storage unit and the house into a cabin, as McGrath fears.

'Built by free labour'

McGrath says the St. John's archdiocese, which owes over 70 abuse survivors in excess of $50 million, also took most of the money fundraised by parishioners, leaving four churches on the shore with $20,000 in cash.

Weekly collections, he says, go directly to keeping the lights on, with the idea that the parishoners could keep their churches by handing over the money.

That wasn't the case.

"We certainly hope that anyone who purchases any of the churches intend to keep them as churches. Anything else would not be welcome by our communities," the committee wrote in a pamphlet sent out last week.

"It's hard to swallow that we would lose our church. We worked so hard to put it there," Careen says, describing in detail how concrete was carted up ramps to erect the walls, and how each arched window was donatedby a family in town.

"It was built by free labour."

The victims of the orphanage have spoken of prolonged torture inside Mount Cashel. Sexual violence and beatings were common.

Careen wants them compensated. But he doesn't think the communities on the Cape Shore should suffer for the sins of the Christian Brothers, he says, who effectively operated a world away from St. Bride's.

He, too, thinks the riches in Rome should save their church. "Why aren't they responsible for it anymore than we are?" he asks.

McGrath got married here, on the altar behind him, he says. So did his parents, and their parents.

In September if the church remains on the market, still owned by the archdiocese his daughter will carry on the tradition.

"There's no way we want to lose it," he says.

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