Tacked on the plywood fence keeping intruders away from the long-closed St-Eusèbe-de-Verceil church in Montreal, next to “Free Gaza” and anti-police graffiti, is a poem.
“This church is no more,” begins the unnamed poet. A few lines later, the handwritten verse concludes: “Why is the building moulding too?”
Officials at the once-stately Montreal Catholic church are asking the same question.
After years of neglect, a fire, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines from the city and repeated break-ins from urban explorers and teens seeking TikTok fame, the church has taken the unusual step of taking the City of Montreal to court to have the building demolished.
With the number of parishioners dwindling and as provincial funding to restore religious buildings dries up, underused churches across Quebec are in a race to transform into something more relevant to the times before they slowly fall into pieces like St-Eusèbe-de-Verceil.
Keeping intruders out has become a huge effort for the parish fabrique — the legal entity that owns the church — and for 77-year-old priest Roger Dufresne.
“They use all kinds of tools to break the windows, break the doors, get inside,” he said. “For young people, it’s mostly to make videos, TikTok challenges.”
Inside the church, the floor of the cavernous sanctuary is covered with debris, bird droppings, beer cans and the mangled remnants of the church’s organ, which Dufresne said intruders ripped from the walls. They’ve also broken heads off statues and repeatedly climbed to the roof, trying to ring the church bell.
The paint is gone from the walls, thanks to a 2019 fire, and has been replaced by graffiti, including a message that reads, “the devil was here.” The sound of cooing pigeons and the flapping of wings echoes through the space, which once accommodated some 1,000 worshippers.
Get daily National news
Get the day’s top news, political, economic, and current affairs headlines, delivered to your inbox once a day.
Dufresne and the Montreal Catholic archdiocese believe there is nothing left to save, but they say they are having a difficult time getting a demolition permit from the city. In a court application filed Jan. 7, the St-Eusèbe-de-Verceil parish asked a judge to grant a demolition permit, citing health and security reasons as well as financial limitations.
The court document says the church’s main sanctuary hasn’t been used since 2009. Since then, church officials have tried several times to partner with companies to redevelop the site, but they say the initiatives fell through because of costs or constraints imposed by the city.
The church says it has spent more than $100,000 trying to secure the site since 2017, including by hiring security guards. Despite those efforts, the document states the church has incurred more than $219,000 in fines related to the structural integrity of the building. The City of Montreal declined to comment on the case, and the lawyer representing the parish said no court date had been set as of Thursday.
After the 2019 fire, an engineering firm had estimated the cost of repairing and restoring the church at more than $50 million, the document says. That firm, CIMA+, “concludes that a total demolition of the building is the preferred solution from every point of view, in terms of economic viability … but also in terms of safety,” it reads.
Stefano Marrone, who oversees the Montreal Catholic archdiocese’s real estate arm, says safety is the main reason the church needs to be demolished. Police and fire officials, he said, have expressed reticence to enter the building, which is a problem given frequent intrusions by young people, including some who climb on the roof.
However, he’s also hoping the permit will help move the development project forward. Normally, he said, a demolition request would be presented to the city as part of broader redevelopment plan, but in this case it’s hard to get a developer on board with such a big question mark hanging over the building.
“It’s difficult to get collaborators to come in when there’s uncertainty of what will need to be conserved, what will need to demolished, how that transformation process begins,” he said in a phone interview.
He says the church officials would like to find a partner to redevelop the site as a mixed-use project that would include housing and “community aspects.” He said the church would like to stay involved, including potentially retaining and renovating the presbytery to continue to host services.
“I know that there’s a lot of emotions around churches, regardless of someone’s faith,” he said. “If it’s been in their community for a long time, (citizens) feel a connection to it and we’re very sensitive to that.”
He said any money earned from the sale will be used to renovate other churches — something that’s become more necessary as the province has suspended a key program that granted funding for church renovations.
Solange Lefebvre, who holds the chair of cultural and religious diversity at Université de Montréal’s religious studies department, says Quebec has historically been successful at selling or repurposing churches before demolition is needed.
However, she said costs to renovate have skyrocketed, meaning repurposing has become impractical for some churches, and especially large ones.
“We have too many places of worship in Quebec, so eliminating some of them is a good idea,” she said. “For example, given that land is so valuable, why not build social housing or even completely private housing instead?”
Dufresne, for his part, would also like to see the site become housing. He said fewer than a dozen people regularly attend weekly services, which are held in a corridor attached to the presbytery.
“We have to be realistic these days about the needs we have and the current situation … with a chapel of 100, 200 places, we could easily meet our needs,” he said. After decades as a priest, he’s philosophical about seeing churches close.
“We can’t have ideas of grandeur,” he said.