Exploring Niagara-on-the-Lake

St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church

A plaque at the front of the church, located at 93 Picton Street reads:

"ST. VINCENT DE PAUL CHURCH, 1835

The Parish of St. Vincent de Paul is the direct successor of the many and often interrupted missionary endeavours in the Niagara area since 1826. At first concerned with the native peoples, later French and then English-speaking priests came as chaplains for the troops stationed at Fort Niagara and Fort George.

The first permanent parish with a resident priest was established here in 1826 to serve the pastoral needs of the growing number of Catholics in the Niagara Peninsula and the west-central part of the Province. Though the area of its pastoral jurisdiction was soon reduced, St. Vincent de Paul remained very much a spiritual home to Catholics from both sides of the Niagara River for many years.

Bishop Alexander Macdonell of Kingston blessed the frame church with its Gothic windows on November 9, 1835. The Most Reverend Thomas J. McCarthy, Bishop of St. Catharines, blessed the restoration of the original church and the polygon-shaped addition to the front of the building on July 25, 1965. Today St. Vincent de Paul, an example of early church architecture in Canada, remains the oldest surviving Catholic Church still used for regular worship in the Province of Ontario."

As early as 1793 services were held in the Indian Council House located on the commons. Father Edmund Burke was appointed military chaplain there in 1798. Built in 1824, the four acres the church sits on was taken from the Military Reserve and deeded to Bishop McDonnell for the church. Pews were not added until 1844.

In the adjoining cemetery is the Polish Soldiers Burial Plot. Many of these polish soldiers, while training at Camp Niagara during the First World War died after the area suffered an influenza epidemic.