“Pour nous, ça va toujours rester la Maison Mère. Un petit village.”
“To us, it will always be the Mother House: a little village.”

In 2004, an historic building and an important part of Montreal’s religious and architectural heritage changed hands when Concordia University announced that it would purchase the Grey Nuns Mother House, located north of Réné-Lévesque Boulevard between Guy and St. Mathieu streets. The Sisters of Charity of Montreal (“Grey Nuns”), a religious congregation founded by St. Marguerite D’Youville in 1738, originally purchased the land in 1861 and opened the Mother House ten years later. At the time, the Mother House was a rural summer retreat from the bustle of the old port. Since then, the building housed the Sisters while also being the site of some of their social initiatives, including a hospital and an orphanage. The Mother House was named a historic site in 1976. This past March, the last remaining Sisters left the Mother House and moved to a retirement home in the Rosemont borough of Montreal

Though several existing projects present the history of the Grey Nuns and explore the architecture of the Mother House building, this is the first project to record and preserve the personal stories of the Sisters who lived in the Mother House. For many Concordia students, knowledge about the Mother House and the Grey Nuns who lived there has been acquired secondhand. This project is intended to allow the Sisters to speak for themselves, using their own voices to tell their stories. In the wake of their recent move, we were lucky to receive the opportunity to talk with several Grey Nuns Sisters about their lives at the Mother House and their experiences adapting to life at their new home. These conversations provide insight into the transformations occurring to both religious places and communities in Montreal today.

“Qu’est-ce qui nous manque aussi, c’est les fêtes qu’on avait à la Maison Mère.”
“What we also miss are the celebrations that we had at the Motherhouse.”

“J’aime beaucoup la Maison Mère, mais j’aime prier ici comme à la Maison Mère.”
“I really do love the Mother House, but I can pray here as well as I can there.”

Discussion 

We conceived of this project in the context of some concepts that were introduced to us in our course, “Religion and the Public Sphere”. In Robert Orsi’s introduction to his work Gods of the City: Religion and the American Urban Landscape, he describes how sacred places and congregations have increasingly been displaced in North American cities to make room for urban renewal projects. The Sisters of Charity of Montreal have always been associated with urban life and as such have experienced multiple displacements, their move out of the Motherhouse being their most recent and, presumably, their final displacement. Orsi also writes about the “Garden City ideal” movement that emerged in the late 19th century, in which the cultivation of urban green spaces “would provide city people with the salubrious physical, moral, and spiritual benefits of regular contact with the natural world.” We were interested to see how the Sisters’ narratives would fit into such discussions of the benefits of gardens and nature within the city, given the differences between the environment surrounding the Motherhouse and that of the Square Angus retirement home.


We also considered the shifting ownership of the Motherhouse building in the context of the larger trend of repurposing both secular and religious spaces. In Montreal, one can witness previously secular spaces being used for religious purposes (ie. storefront churches), but it is becoming increasingly common for historically religious spaces to be used for the purposes of secular institutions. The transformation of the Motherhouse from a religious to secular space also speaks to contemporary discourses on secularism in Quebec, and the irony of preserving the facades of historically religious buildings.
Lastly, in conducting our interviews with the Grey Nuns Sisters, we wished to explore the notion of topophilia – a strong attachment to place – and the distinctions made between space and place by geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in his article “Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience”. We wondered whether the Sisters would exhibit a strong sense of attachment to the Motherhouse, or if their sense of “place” and community would be transplanted to their new home. According to Tuan, humans wish to turn “spaces” into “places” by attaching meaning to them, but there is always an ambivalence towards “places” as they can be contested, people can be displaced from them, and they are always in flux. With our project, we sought to pursue these ideas of displacement and attachment, given the Grey Nuns’ relatively long history of living in the Motherhouse.

Further Resources

About the Grey Nuns, About the Mother House, About Concordia’s New Residence, Grey Nuns Project(Fine Arts Department, Concordia University), Virtual Preservation Initiative, Preoccupations Photographic Explorations, Sister Constance McMullen in the Motherhouse: A one-act play 

The Motherhouse in the media: CBC, Globe & Mail, Montreal Gazette

*** This project was for a Graduate Seminar held by Prof. Hillary Kaell and TA Eleni Prsarudis. The project was completed by myself, Andrea Aarsen and Virginia Noel Hodge.