Glad to hear that you had a positive experience, unlike the thousands of Indigenous children buried in Catholic Residential Schools as part of the Genocide.

I believe the City of Montreal now owns these buildings. I would contact them for permission!

Best,
Lydia Jaqua

I only found out about Haunted Montreal – and about the circumstances of the Hôpital de la Miséricorde – today, and I found it fascinating reading. So much so, in fact, that I would jump at the chance to tour it, should the opportunity ever present itself again (and I live in Quebec City).

But not ALL babies born there were from unwed mothers. I was born there in 1954. My parents were middle class, married Catholics, and I never heard any stories that were negative in any way, though knowing what I know now, I would certainly have asked a lot of questions of my parents when they were alive.

So here’s my question: was there also a standard, ‘normal’ service proviced to the average married Catholic mother? There must have been, or else my parents kept dark secrets from me all their lives.

I fully endorse the Haunted Montreal initiative. Unfortunately, I have been so far unable to participate in your guided tours. even though I was planning to , last year, but I had to postpone it for personal engagements. I’ll catch up next year.

I am an educated person with two university degrees .Even though I consider myself fully rational, I am also an open minded person, ever mindful that humankind’s history has been a continuous voyage of discovery and a constant shifting of frontiers from the impossible to the possible. .

My reflexions and experiences lead me to believe that there is a spiritual, or non material reality.
Within my family, I had a relative who, in spite of being himself a very educated person with a university degree in chemistry, was deeply involved in spiritism .
He claimed to be constantly in touch with a guide spirit, who counselled him about his personal life and his spiritual duties.

This uncle, at the time an elderly person, now long dead, claimed to have been able since youth to summon spirits while in trance, until he decided to abandon his spiritual pursuit, under pressure from his deeply catholic family, who believed that spiritism was an instrument of the..devil.

This uncle recounted that his guide spirit warned him that ” THEY” would take away from him his : gift” of mediumship if he were to yield to the family’s pressure. and this is exactly what happened : sadly, he lost his gift forever. Somewhat intriguing..

Anybody who didn’t know him, would have dismissed his story as a figment of a sick mind, but I know he was not mentally ill..

Neither was I mentally ill when, as a young student in my teens growing up in Italy, I witnessed myself an exorcism being performed by a friar on an allegedly possessed elderly woman .
I must say that, but for my ” rational” belief that she may have been only mentally ill, what I saw would have given me the creeps, if I truly believed to be in the presence of the devil. t still vividly remember how the woman pounced at the friar like a rabid animal every time the exorcist would sprinkle her with ” holy” water, brandishing the Holy Cross and pronouncing the name ” Deus” or God in Latin ( in those days , before the Vatican II Council, the exorcisms and the whole Catholic liturgy were in Latin)

Your blog, which I read with the utmost interest and pleasure, especially the historical background of the infamous Hôpital de la Misericorde, cites Thomas Aquinas as a bigot holding the degrading view that women are no more than misshaped or imperfect men..( worse, he even said that women are an ” Accidens in utero” ( Latin for a mishap or accident in the uterus)

One can only deplore such retrograde and degrading views under the Catholic banner, but this was perhaps an inevitable part of the ” Zeitgeist” or the ” spirit of the times” and as such it shouldn’t entail an overall condemnation of the Catholic religion., just as we don’t normally hold the Greco-Roman civilization of which we are tributaries any less great because it was based on slavery and a different concept of women that is repugnant to our values. .

I am not here to defend the Catholic Church. I’ll only remind that it has always engaged also in commendable social work, through a variety of institutions and organisations, not only the infamous Hôpital de la Misericorde, but through countless other organizations devoted to helping the sick , the poor and the oppressed, across the world, through missionary work or other..

Here in Montreal, Jeanne Mance, Les Soeurs de la Charité and l’Hôpital Dieu will always be remembered. ,. I..

I don’t know whether for the organizers of Haunted Montreal the question of ghosts and their hauntings is just one of curiosity and folklore, or if there are some who really believe and perhaps experienced these phenomena, even your guide who hosts the tours…. Interesting to know..

The question of whether ghosts really exist or not, must be plotted against the broader context of the debate between faith and reason, a debate that has engaged thousands of intellectuals in both camps : the believers and the non-believers.
Ghosts and possessed people may well be the figments of misguided, perhaps sick minds. This is one explanation and it probably applies to most of those who report these phenomena.., but there are cases where the ” supernatural” may well be at work.

There are members of the Catholic clergy who, while routinely performing exorcisms, are at the same time psychologists and/or psychiatrists.

While admitting mental health problems in many cases, they are also able as exorcists to clearly discern the signs of the supernatural and true possession.
While witnessing myself the above mentioned exorcism, it was difficult not to think ( or, better, feel) that something truly extra-ordinary was at work. I’ll never know .

I’ll conclude by saying that the Catholic Church, for all its wrong views and deeds, also had the insight to remind man that when it comes to faith . the existence of God and the spiritual dimension, reason cannot be the gateway to these realities, because if they exist, they would be in a dimension which is qualitatively different from the material world . Ultimately they are beyond reason and reason, as they transcend it .

The medievals paradoxically said d that it is Faith that enlightens Reason and not viceversa..Their motto was ” I believe because it is absurd “, implying that if God existed, by definition he would be beyond the grasp of reason and as such it would look absurd to us. ..

By the same token, we cannot rule out the existence of ghosts by applying a strictly rational, scientific approach..If they exist, they belong to an immaterial dimension from which we are excluded, even though some may at time, inexplicably, catch glimpses..

I’d really like to be one of them, just as I’d like to deambulate at night inside the Hôpital de la Misericorde or the Allen.. ( not before taking a good dose of betablocker, to avoid having the creeps, which at my age would facilitate my transition into the nether world., something for which I am not prepared yet…

Take care

Franco Vivona
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