Hands and hearts at work: Renewal opportunity for St. Mary's Parish in Banff

It is Saturday morning, around 8:30 am. I am crossing the Banff Avenue Bridge heading northwards. The air is crisp and clean, there are a few pedestrians ambling along, the Bow River floats, and Cascade Mountain glints enticingly off at the end of the main strip, a postcard of serenity.

It is the calm before the storm. In a few hours’ time, Banff Avenue will be an anthill of tourists, and the streets will be clogged with cars going this way and that way, only to find the parking lots full…  The restaurants and the shops will be busy; later in the afternoon, the check-in desks in the hotels will be too. This is the rhythm of Banff: she puts her best foot forward with the 3am shuttles to Lake Louise, and can finally put her feet up when the last nightclubber departs from the Dancing Sasquatch at 2am. A good analogy would be the waterfowl that nest in the marsh near my work at the Cave and Basin — serenely floating along above water, paddling madly underneath to keep it all going.

And in the middle of all of this is the beautiful church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, fondly known as St. Mary’s, led by their pastor, Fr. Daniel Stevenot. Established by the Oblate Fathers in 1888 as an outreach to both the Îyârhe Nakoda (who historically had more ties with the Methodist Church) and the tourists that were beginning to come to Canada’s first national parks, the present church was built in 1951 in a modestly sumptuous Romanesque revival style by Fr. Robert McGuinness. It features bespoke Austrian windows, detailed mosaics of church history, and beautiful limestone and marble altar furnishings. Each detail was carefully saved for and crafted by generations of Banffites, who have been proud to say that St. Mary’s is their spiritual home.

The Diocesan Renewal will have to look quite different here in Banff than in other parishes. Not only is St. Mary’s one of the smallest in the Diocese, its unique situation as a congregation which both sustains and is sustained by the hospitality industry means that renewal must take the accompanying challenges into consideration. I am one of a very fortunate few here in Banff who has a Saturday/Sunday weekend. Historically, most have had days off in the middle of the week, when we have fewer visitors. This means that often, parishioners cannot always make a Saturday or Sunday Mass, try as they might. Instead, they dutifully come to a mid-week Mass, which then becomes the Lord’s Day to them.

Visitation to Banff National Park is at an all-time high — 4.1 million visitors last year and demand is still growing. On the supply side, Banff still only has a population of about ten thousand. Work is plentiful, but houses are few, and people in Banff often work two jobs to keep the town running, to support loved ones overseas, and to keep up with the high price of living here in the Bow Valley. Banffites are naturally people of action, and so the renewal in Banff needs to be active, not a series of talks or meetings, but rather something that is accomplished by prayer and communal activity.

So, for the inaugural renewal gathering in Banff, we spent a Saturday morning cleaning house. The people of St. Mary’s have an unparalleled opportunity to be missionary disciples, to be the face, arms, legs, and hands of Jesus in a town whose arms are open to receive the whole world, and part of that is to have a church that is freshly vacuumed, with the lawn is tidied up, the hymnals straightened and the oil candles freshly refilled. We spent the morning caring for our little St. Mary’s, and then had a pizza lunch together, at which we sang a few hymns, including “You are Called,” written by the music director at St. James’, Calgary for the renewal. Nothing particularly grandiose, but for busy St. Mary’s, simple can be best.

And so, we went to work with our paraffin bottles and dust rags. At the end of the morning, someone remarked that the couple getting married that afternoon would have such a nice clean church to be married in. Upon further thought, it really is a Banff comment, one born in a town that exists for the service of others. We prepared a church for worship as an act of missionary discipleship, making her ready to receive the people of God, from the four corners of the world. In this little corner of the world, where parish life can often feel fragmented due to the demands of the wider social situation, our work of renewal goes on, building up the Church in a town that never sleeps.

Fr. Daniel Stevenot (right) during a visit from Archbishop Prendergast

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Written by Solomon Ip, seminarian. Solomon is a born and raised Calgarian. He studied music history in Lethbridge, and is now a seminarian in his pre-theology studies at St. Joseph's Seminary in Edmonton. He has been worshipping most recently with Canadian Martyrs Parish in Calgary, and with St. Mary's Parish in Banff where he has been working as a heritage interpreter with Parks Canada. He is an oboist by training, a chorister by grace, hobby wordsmith, amateur calligrapher, and museum enthusiast.

Photos courtesy of Elaine Tessolini, Solomon Ip, and Archbishop Prendergast.