The Sisters of St. Anne is another teaching congregation assisting the Catholic School Commission. It was founded at Vaudreuil in 1850 by Miss Esther Lureau dit Blondin. The order now extends over four provinces of which two are in Canada, with 54 houses of which 21 are at the diocese of Montreal. The convent at Lachine, formerly the residence of Sir George Simpson, governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, is their chief establishment in Montreal; another is the large boarding-house at St. Henri.
OTHER CONGREGATIONS
Among the congregations not primarily teaching organizations, but charitable institutions with schools attached to the Board, the Sisters of Providence conducting the schools of the orphanage of St. Alexis founded in 1864, and schools of St. Vincent de Paul, and of the Jardin de L’Enfance founded in 1881. This congregation accepts a subsidy from the School Commission. It also teaches the School of the Deaf Mutes, but not under the Commission as in the other case.
The Grey Nuns also receive subsidies under the Commission for their instruction in the classes of l’Asyle Bethlehem on Richmond Square, founded by the Hon. C.S. Rodier and “Nazareth” Asylum on St. Catherine Street, founded in 1860, for the blind. The history of these organizations will be found in another section.
MEN’S TEACHING ORGANIZATIONS
The coming of the Brothers of the Christian Schools to Montreal in 1837 must be chronicled at some length since the modern Catholic primary educational system for the boys of the city has been so largely under their hands. The first project of the establishment in Canada of the “Christian” Brothers, as they are now popularly called, dates back as far as the year before the death of the founder of the institute, St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle, 1718, but negotiations were broken off. In 1733 Brothers Denis and Pacificus were sent to Montreal to study the situation, but with no results. Nearly a century later, in 1830, the superior of the seminary and vicar general of the diocese, Abbé Quiblier, made overtures to Brother Anacletus, who then governed the institute, for a settlement for the brothers to teach the boys whose education had never been so systematically organized as that of the girls. Numbers being small, it was not till 1837, on November 7th, that three brothers, the first to visit America, arrived at the seminary, where they were entertained as guests for six months, till they were installed in their first novitiate on St. Francois Xavier Street, the gift of the Sulpicians, in a house adjoining the school. On December 23, 1837, they commenced their classes in the seminary building. Two classes were immediately filled, to be quickly succeeded by a third.
As the scholars grew M. Quiblier acquired for the brothers an old country house of one of the governors of Montreal in Coté Street, which formed a second novitiate and a temporary school. In 1840 there was added, parallel to the novitiate, a new school (St. Lawrence) built in stone and in 1841 there were in the two schools eight classes with 860 scholars who were visited by a Lord Sydenham. In 1842 the brothers began to wear the three cornered caps of their congregation, now so familiar on the streets in Montreal. Up to this they had not been permitted this privilege. The prejudice against the body of religious not priests wearing a religious habit will be remembered by those familiar with the history of the Charron Brothers before the English regime.
Further French classes were opened by them. In 1843 two special classes for the Irish children were begun in the old convent of the Récollets. In 1843, also, the Brothers were invited to Quebec and later to other places in Canada and in America. Again Montreal is seen as the distributing point of influence through education. A French-Canadian journal has said: “Ce grain de senevé, jeté sur les rives du St. Laurent a donné naissance à un arbre magnifique dort les rameaux bienfaisants ombrageat les principaux centres du Canada et des Etats Unis.” The numerous homes of education of this body and the lists of their educational output of school text-books deserve a more prolonged study than space permits here. The Brothers have done for the boys the work that the Congregation of Marguerite Bourgeoys has done for the girls. At present, around Montreal alone, these have over twenty communities presiding over colleges or schools.
Besides their many elementary schools, the Brothers of the Christian Schools have the large “Collège de Mont St. Louis” on Sherbrooke Street, which being divided into three courses, elementary, commercial and scientific, prepares its pupils for the polytechnical schools and the different university courses.
OTHER ORGANIZATIONS