Over the course of the past three years, St. Matthias’ has been upgrading its audiovisual equipment, which now includes three cameras, a laptop, and a flat-screen TV. These new additions…
Read MoreIn April 1912, Matthians celebrated the culmination of more than twenty years of dreaming (and fundraising), and almost two years of building with the first Eucharist in their new building…
Read MoreExactly 50 years ago today, St. Matthias’ welcomed the newest – and largest – member of its pastoral team: a gorgeous tracker organ built by German organ-maker Karl Wilhelm…
Read MoreAs many of our stained-glass windows were installed in the years immediately before and after WWII, it was only natural that they should have begun needing repairs as they turned 50 in the 1980s and 1990s…
Read MoreBefore the War Memorial was moved to the Memorial Chapel in the North Transept, there was a much less military bent to the chapel’s overall décor. But the differences are not really all that major…
Read MoreOne of the delights of our archives is just how many stories are contained even in non-narrative documents. Today, we dive deeply into the first seventy-five years of insurance…
Read MoreIn the 1880s, Montreal (population: 217,000 by 1891) faced the harshness of winter in a quintessentially Victorian English way: by building vast architectural confections out of snow…
Read MoreSt. Matthias’, like many Protestant churches in Canada, is covered in memorials to dead soldiers, many in their late teens or early twenties. Whether you’ve read a plaque, looked up at a stained-glass window, or taken a moment to peruse the honour roll in the Memorial Chapel, it’s hard to avoid the reminders of what, and whom, this parish lost during the World Wars. The desire to memorialise these boys coincided with two important aspects of St. Matthias’ life from the 1920s through the 1960s…
Read MoreWhen we look into the past, an important question is whose eyes we are seeing through. In the case of documents like letters and annual reports, often we know the author and in many cases we can put together some salient facts about their lives that allow us to understand their perspective. With art, we are somewhere in between: we often know the artist’s identity and can make educated guesses about their perspective, but it is easy to think of visual representations as somewhat objective …
Read MoreThe morning of April 28th, 1912 dawned cold and clear after an unseasonably warm but cloudy Saturday. Matthians on their way to church would have donned their hats and gloves, made sure their prayerbooks were in hand, and then set foot for the first time into a service held in the building they’d been dreaming about for over twenty years. Their service of morning prayer would have been rather different than ours…
Read MoreIt took a lot of people a lot of dreaming to get to this moment in 1910. The original church, built in 1875, was no longer big enough to fit the approximately 80 families who were members of the church by 1892, nor did it have electric lights or a suitable organ…
Read MoreIn an October 1973 letter to Archdeacon Jack Doidge, someone who signs himself only “John” chides the Archdeacon for misrepresenting St. Matthias’ history to the Montreal Gazette. “You are not correct,” he writes, “when you say that it [the old bell] is all that is left from the old church.” John, who was a member of the 1962 committee organising the 50th anniversary celebrations of the new building and who had been one of the last baptisms in the old building in 1910…
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