St. Paul's Cathedral (Regina)

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St Paul's Anglican Cathedral, Regina, a pro-cathedral from 1944 until 1973, is a modest parish church building on the outskirts of Regina's central business district.

The church seats approximately 300 people. It is in the approved Cambridge Camden Society configuration with gable roof in keeping with the moderately high church sensibilities of the diocese of Qu'Appelle, albeit of extremely modest appearance both inside and out, reflecting the extreme numerical and financial minority status of Anglicanism in Western Canada and the tendency for moneyed benefactors to be of more mainstream denominational allegiance.

There is a Lady Chapel to the liturgical south of the chancel and a columbarium in the crypt.

St Paul's, Regina, circa 1895

The parish dates from the original establishment of the town of Regina in 1882 when the current church site was purchased. In 1883 a wooden frame building, measuring 50 by 24 feet, was opened and in 1894-1895 the present brick and fieldstone church was built. A chancel and transepts were added in 1905-06. It is the oldest church building in Regina still in use.^[1]

St Paul's supplanted the original pro-cathedral of the Anglican Diocese of Qu'Appelle, St Peter's in the eponymous original see city of Qu'Appelle, some 30 miles east of Regina on the Trans-Canada Highway. Obviously for the sake of convenience it made more sense for the cathedral city to be the capital city of the civil province, though cathedral "cities" that are actually mere villages or towns are far from a rarity: see Our Lady of Assumption Co-Cathedral (Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan) and for that matter, say, Rochester Cathedral in England.

(The diocese in fact corresponds to the original District of Assiniboia of the Northwest Territories, though in the 1970s a strip of the diocese which lay over the Alberta provincial boundary was ceded to the diocese of Calgary.)

The diocese owned a substantial property on College Avenue east of Broad Street which has now been sold to the civil province of Saskatchewan in order that the diocese finally achieve financial independence; the diocesan offices, the former St Chad's Qu'Appelle Diocesan School, an old people's home, the former bishop's palace and other diocesan structures dating from a time when the Anglican Church had ambitions for the prairies which now seem unrealistic, remain on the site, some still in use by the Diocese, and rented back from the provincial crown. Of some historical interest is the ambitious cathedral site laid out diagonally at the corner of Broad Street and College Avenue, still clearly outlined in caragana hedges.

By 1973 it was apparent that the diocese could never be self-supporting other than by alienating its only substantial real estate and that the original ambition to build a sizeable cathedral in Regina could never be realised. St Paul's was then formally upgraded to cathedral status and a satisfactory 2-manual Casavant Frères organ built under then-organist Donald M. Kendrick and Dean James Allan, a gift of the Whitmore family of $20,000. The previous organ pipes had been located north of the chancel with the console on the south within the chancel; the organ pipes are now over the north transcept and the console has been variously positioned in the north and south transcepts. The original organ chamber has been converted to a sacristy.

The Cathedral has been something of a launching pad for episcopal and other ecclesiastical careers: Michael Coleman, Fredric Jackson and Duncan Wallace, past bishops of Qu'Appelle, had previously been deans of Qu'Appelle and rectors of St Paul's; James Allan was dean of Qu'Appelle before his election as bishop of Keewatin; Michael Peers, later bishop and archbishop of Qu'Appelle (1977-86) and primate of Canada (1986-2004) was dean from 1974 to 1977. Donald M. Kendrick was organist and choirmaster during the mid-1970s; during his tenure at St Paul's and the then-University of Saskatchewan, Regina Campus, St Paul's was the centre of liturgical music in Regina and a generation of Canadian choral and keyboard musicians was trained and continue to contribute to Canadian and world music.

[edit] Notes and references

^ Regina Leader-Post, August 1, 1970. Historic Architecture of Saskatchewan. Regina: Focus Publishing, Saskatchewan Association of Architects, 1986.

Powell, Trevor. From Tent to Cathedral: A History of St. Paul's Cathedral, Regina. Regina: St Paul's Cathedral, 1995 ISBN:0-9699230-0-7