1Examined here is the role of places of worship in helping immigrants to integrate into Canadian life. Particular attention is focused on newcomers arriving after the Second World War from Central and Eastern Europe and their interaction with churches of varied denominational affiliation situated in the west end of the old city of Toronto, the primary immigrant reception area during most of the twentieth century. Research for this paper revealed that, despite their ethnic and religious diversity, churches fulfilled a common mission and that the range of services offered depended more on the size of a particular congregation than on its beliefs or polity. Whatever their size, churches came to be seen by immigrants as vital community institutions providing them with assistance that was not only spiritual and moral, but practical as well. Such establishments not only facilitated their settlement, but were useful instruments in helping them to achieve their goals. Consequently, immigrants took a leading part in their own integration into Canadian life, often assuming active roles in accordance with the very gendered expectations of the postwar era.

2Immigration after the Second World War had a considerable impact on Toronto, the Canadian city that received the largest number of new arrivals. By 1971 forty per cent of its population was born abroad, the highest level in a century. Toronto was on the verge of displacing Montréal as Canada’s most populous urban centre and had already become its economic metropolis. Although not solely responsible for these transformations, immigration certainly did alter Toronto’s religious and ethnic makeup. The Belfast of the New World was still solidly Protestant in 1941. Fully two-thirds of its population belonged to the Anglican, United, and Presbyterian Churches, while Catholics made up a meagre fifteen per cent. By 1971 the tables had turned as Catholicism became the city’s leading denomination, claiming forty per cent of the city’s inhabitants. While in 1941 people of British origin comprised four out of five Torontonians, thirty years later they were slightly less than one in two, their share of the population having in fact fallen to forty-six per cent.

3When they arrived in Toronto, immigrants were met at the train station by family members and often too by representatives of the local church which offered them help in securing jobs and housing.1 The influx of newcomers had a powerful impact on the immigrant groups already settled in Toronto. The case of the 5,000 Lithuanian refugees who totally overwhelmed their previously established compatriots numbering no more than a thousand represents perhaps one of the more extreme examples of this reality. According to historian Milda Danys they “quickly constituted a majority whose interests and aims superseded the traditions of the older community.”2 But even newly arrived Hungarians, Poles, and Ukrainians were at least as numerous as earlier settlers. The scale of this change at the parish level can be grasped by comparing the combined totals of baptisms and weddings performed in peak years during the interwar and postwar periods at St. Patrick’s, an English language Catholic parish serving German-speaking immigrants since 1929: 111 in 1933 as against 673 in 1959.3 But the impact was not only demographic it was also political. In this new immigrant cohort there were large numbers of articulate professionals whose nationalist sentiments had been heightened by the foreign occupation of their homeland and by their stay in refugee camps. They impatiently claimed leadership positions in their communities, dismissing their prewar predecessors as ignorant, unpatriotic, and pro-communist. Their deeply held anti-Soviet views were enthusiastically welcomed by supporters of the Cold War in Canada. But these newcomers often caused discord within their immigrant group and between it and a growing segment of Canadian opinion sympathetic to the cause of world peace and disarmament.4

4Postwar immigrants breathed new life into churches already catering to compatriots who had come to Canada earlier in the century. As a result of expanding numbers, parishioners at St. John the Baptist Lithuanian and St. Elizabeth of Hungary finally obtained pastors from their countries of origin. St. Elizabeth’s pastoral needs were firmly secured when Jesuits who left Hungary after the Communists came to power in 1947 took charge of the parish. The influx of newcomers made Toronto the seat of four new dioceses: Ukrainian Catholic (1948), Ukrainian Orthodox (1951), and Russian Orthodox (1953), and Polish National Catholic (1968). Consequently, St. Josaphat, St. Wolodymyr, Christ the Saviour, and St. John were all raised to the status of cathedrals. The congregation of St. John’s moved in 1954 from a commercial-residential site to a solid brick church erected by Methodists in 1886 and previously occupied by the Nazarenes. St. Wolodymyr’s membership continued to rise in the fifties and early sixties, reaching a peak of 1,000 families and requiring the appointment of a second priest in 1965. At Christ the Saviour, it was becoming ever more difficult to accommodate parishioners in the existing structure. As a result, the cathedral was relocated in 1966 after St. Cyprian’s Anglican church was bought and renovated. At St. Patrick’s, growth in membership led in 1951 to the enlargement of the church thanks to the money and labour donated by four hundred parishioners. By 1957 Sunday masses for German speakers had risen from one to three. Annual events and festivities suppressed during the war such as passion plays, pilgrimages to Midland, and Katholikentagen (literally Catholic Days) that brought together German Catholics from southwestern Ontario around a particular religious theme, were restored.5

5Within a few short years, immigrants also founded thirty new parishes and congregations in the west end of Toronto, many of them led by postwar or refugee clergy. The size of these congregations ranged widely.6 In general, the largest were Catholic parishes with hundreds and even thousands of families. The smallest tended to be evangelical or Pentecostal congregations catering to a few dozen families.7 Building new churches or buying old ones to accommodate these new congregations entailed significant collective indebtedness at a time when immigrant families were trying to get themselves established. Often for political motives, immigrants created parishes and congregations even when establishments already existed to serve their particular group. Appalled by the leftist sympathies that apparently found expression at St. John the Baptist Lithuanian, postwar immigrants wasted no time in forming Resurrection parish in 1953 under Lithuanian Franciscans from the United States. Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox church was created in 1949 by refugees who viewed the existing parish, Christ the Saviour, as both too Russian and not Russian enough. Compatriots from the earlier wave of immigration were seen as too anglicized in their speech and spirituality, while the parish’s support for the Soviet Union’s war effort was equated with collaboration with Stalinism. As a result, the faithful at Holy Trinity associated their church with the European-based Orthodox Church Abroad created a few years after the Russian Revolution. Meanwhile Ukrainian Pentecostals and Baptists who had joined mixed Russian-Ukrainian congregations when they arrived after the war established ethnically exclusive congregations in 1953 in accordance with their nationalist sensibilities.8

6Analogous jurisdictional divisions occurred even among postwar immigrant groups. In 1952 Belarusans were split over support for the government in exile judged by some to be too close to the Vatican and the Polish government in exile. As a result two rival parishes, St. Euphrasinia and St. Cyril of Turov, joined to separate Orthodox synods, were founded within blocks of each other. Similarly in 1962 a rift between the Belgrade Patriarchate and its North American diocese led to the creation on this continent of the Free Serbian Church, prompting its fiercely anti-communist supporters in Toronto to leave St. Sava church in order to establish St. Michael the Archangel parish. Among Baltic Lutherans, competition between the conservative Missouri Synod and the Canada Synod led to the creation of separate parishes.9

7In some cases the influx of postwar immigrants provided the critical mass that allowed previously existing but tiny congregations that rented space in older churches to strike out on their own. Because of its central location and dwindling membership early in the twentieth century, Beverley Street Baptist was made responsible for outreach to non-English-speaking immigrants. Missions to various groups were instituted and resulted in the interwar years in the founding of recognized congregations all housed under its roof. Eventually Poles (1962), Estonians (1963), Russians (1969), and Czechs (1976) moved into their own facilities.10 For the same reasons, in 1928 the United Church of Canada turned Queen Street United into the Church of All Nations. While its Czech and Ukrainian congregations disbanded after the war because of shrinking membership, the Hungarians took over the entire building in 1971, renaming it the Hungarian Free Reformed church.11 St. Paul Slovak Lutheran had a resident pastor after 1940, but remained a mission of Trinity German Lutheran until it acquired its own facilities ten years later.12

8Whether in previously established or newly created parishes and congregations, immigrants eagerly joined associations, often taking over existing ones or founding new ones to reflect their specific interests. These groups fulfilled a primary need for social interaction. Faithful to traditionally conceived gender roles, women were the backbone of social life in every place of worship. They organized bazaars and banquets to raise funds for the church and wider immigrant group, as well as to bring parishioners or congregants together. In many instances they arranged exhibitions, lectures, and concerts highlighting the folk culture of their land of origin. These events often entailed the formation of choirs, lyric and theatrical groups, and musical ensembles connected with the church. In many Catholic and Orthodox churches women were also the mainstay of devotional associations that were structured according to gender and age. At St. Elizabeth, first the Catholic Youth Organization and later, as the age profile of the parish rose, the Married Couples Club hosted dances every Sunday evening usually featuring the music of a Gypsy ensemble. After its establishment at St. Patrick’s in 1955, the Kolping Society, a mutual aid group set up to help skilled workers and tradesmen integrate into Canadian life, sponsored picnics in the summer season as well as a series of seasonal festivities such as carnival and winefest that often ended with dances. These activities would have been unthinkable without the unpaid and perhaps unacknowledged labour of women.

9Men, too, satisfied prevailing gender roles, creating sports clubs in many Catholic parishes that at times played to broader audiences. They also established political lobby groups associated with the church. St. Wolodymyr’s could have been described as the Ukrainian Self-Reliance League at prayer in light of its close connection with the liberal nationalist movement that called for the independence of their homeland in the interwar years.13 Although under wartime exigencies the Canadian government had pressured the League to amalgamate with other groups to form a broad non-communist umbrella organization, the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, its woman and youth wings survived intact. After the war, new nationalist organizations sprang up at the church. Created in 1952, a local branch of the Ukrainian National Democratic League aspired to organize the diaspora into an effective political alternative to the representative institutions in the Communist homeland. A Volhynia regional club was founded to disseminate and publish material because “contemporary works about Ukraine, printed under Soviet control, are falsified by Communist doctrinaires.” At St. Patrick, Danube Swabians, German-speaking immigrants from the region of Vojvodina in presentday Serbia, formed the St. Michaelswerk Verband in 1949, a lobby group seeking compensation from the West German government for the confiscation of their properties. Meanwhile the Lutheran Church encouraged the formation of the Latvian Democratic Party that lobbied for the restoration of democracy in that country.14

10At a time in Canada when married women were entering the paid workforce in unprecedented numbers, the assortment of childcare programmes provided by churches was of great help to working parents. Not only did such programmes provide the religious and cultural setting that parents were seeking for their offspring, it facilitated the achievement of their economic objectives as well. Childcare services run by female religious communities were available at St. Patrick’s, Resurrection, and Our Lady Help of Christians.15 A kindergarten was in operation for a dozen years at St. Wolodymyr before the more stringent provisions of the Ontario Nurseries Act closed it down in 1964. Eight years later, however, the parish offered limited childcare to parents on Saturday mornings.16

11Schools of heritage culture were a common feature of most parishes. Operating on Saturdays or on weekday afternoons or evenings, they offered young people a range of courses in language, history, geography, and culture at the primary and at times secondary levels. Some schools, such as the ones at St. Patrick’s and St. John the Baptist, were revived after being closed down during the war. The latter hired a Lithuanian refugee who had taught in the camps before coming to Canada. Others were established soon after the immigrants’ arrival. For example, Estonians, Latvians, the Russians of Holy Trinity, and Slovenians opened theirs between 1949 and 1953.17 Ukrainian Catholics differentiated themselves from other groups by creating regular day schools, run by a Ukrainian order, the Sisters Servants of Mary Immaculate, under the Metropolitan Toronto Separate School Board.18 Often staffed by teachers who were themselves postwar immigrants, these institutions all capitalized on rapidly expanding enrolments in the 1950s and 1960s, a reflection of the demographic weight of young immigrant parents and their contribution to the baby boom. For example, the number of students at the Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian School at St. Wolodymyr’s peaked at 255 in 1964, rising steadily from 84 in 1953. Meanwhile the parish’s Sunday school which imparted religious instruction boasted 430 enrolments in the mid-sixties.19

12The larger churches offered young people facilities that encouraged them to spend their leisure time there. The parish hall at St. Patrick’s staged films, dances, plays by its own theatrical troupes, and musical events by its choirs and bands. It was also equipped for table tennis, billiards, and bowling. In the winter months, boys played hockey on church grounds. St. Elizabeth of Hungary’s hall had card tables and a swimming pool. The parish’s Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) organized sporting activities, including volleyball, fencing, boxing, and gymnastics, which in the forties usually ended with dances featuring the music of the big bands. In Slavic churches youth tended to be involved in folk dancing and music groups, as well as in plays and literary recitals with folk or national themes. Before television and other forms of mass entertainment captured the immigrant generation’s attention, such events drew large and enthusiastic crowds. Many parishes also had Boy Scout and Girl Guide troupes.20

13In the fifties a number of churches purchased land in the countryside around Toronto and established camps that gave working parents the opportunity to place their children in a structured environment during part of the summer holidays. Once again leisure was associated with the inculcation of particular religious and cultural values. With the help of the Missouri Synod, Estonians rented a farm on the Nottawasaga River for inner-city children. Latvians bought a three-hundred-acre site in the Hockley Hills, while Lithuanians acquired twenty-five acres of land on Georgian Bay at New Wasaga. Hungarian Catholics purchased property near Streetsville, later called Mindszenty Park (after the Primate of Hungary who was imprisoned by the Communist government), where the nearby riverbed was excavated to create a safe swimming area for children. Slovenes bought eight acres of land between Alliston and Bolton where they built a camping ground for family use that included cottages, a pool, and a pavilion. This property was then sold to the Vincentians, the order of priests in charge of Our Lady Help of Christians, who expanded its size and facilities. The Russians of Holy Trinity established a summer colony at Jackson’s Point near Lake Simcoe. For its part, St. Wolodymyr acquired a 100-acre farm near Oakville, called Camp Kiev, where in time a swimming pool, dining hall, kitchen, and sewage System were installed for a total cost of $81,000. Parents could send their children there for up to one month and in some years as many as three hundred were enrolled. Finally, during the war St. Patrick’s bought land in Richmond Hill where later “a lodge, swimming pool, dance pavilion, tennis-court and baseball diamond were constructed in order to ensure that outings by young people were still contained within the parish and they (sic) would not be ‘lost to Communist clubs and to inter-marriage with non-Catholics.’”21

14Credit unions were another parish-based service facilitating the integration of immigrants. Almost all of these financial institutions were founded after the war and their growth was exponential, reflecting both the rapid insertion of most immigrants into the workforce at a time of sustained economic expansion and their need to obtain credit in order to consolidate their settlement in Toronto.22 Because of their recent arrival, newcomers found it virtually impossible to obtain loans from commercial banks. Trust built on personal contact was more easily secured within immigrant-based institutions. In contrast to the rigid operating hours of banks, credit unions adjusted to the busy schedules of working immigrant parents by being open during evenings and weekends, even Sundays. Such institutions also provided a culturally and linguistically familiar environment. Within a decade membership swelled from a few dozen or less to several hundred or more. In 1959 the largest parish-based credit unions, St. Stanislaus-St. Casimir, So-use (St. Wolodymyr), and St. Mary’s all had thousands of members.23 Founded later than its Ukrainian counterparts, Our Lady Help of Christians (Slovenian) reached 2,000 members in 1968, while in the same year the Czechoslovak credit union counted 1,300 shareholders.24 In 1965 one third of Toronto’s Ukrainians were members of credit unions as compared to a little more than one tenth of Ontario’s population.25 This figure is even more significant in light of the fact that native-born urban Canadians who had greater access to commercial banks than rural dwellers were less inclined to join credit unions.

15Fragmentary evidence suggests that immigrants borrowed twice as much per capita from credit unions as their native-born counterparts and Ukrainians three times more.26 They also made different use of this money. In contrast to the short-term personal loans taken out by most native-born members, those by immigrants were more likely to be longer term with the aim of buying or renovating a home, purchasing a car, or setting up a business. In 1957 seven parish-and non-parish-based Ukrainian credit unions in Toronto released figures showing that 71% of their loans were made for the purchase or payment of a home, 14% for the building or buying of a new home, 5% for home repairs, and 5% for buying a car. Ten years later, mortgage loans still accounted for eighty per cent of the total advanced by ten Ukrainian credit unions in Toronto.27 These institutions treated borrowers differently than did the banks. A review conducted in 1965 by an independent auditing firm noted that credit unions were slow in pursuing members who were behind or delinquent in their payments, some of which had been made on terms different from those explicitly stated in official loan documents. Another firm observed that in 1967 23% of personal loans were delinquent at Our Lady Help of Christians.28

16While not all immigrants who came to Canada after the Second World War were religious or churchgoing, a majority of them clearly did establish a close relationship with the church. In part they were reflecting what historian of religion John Webster Grant termed a yearning for normalcy that sustained a significant rise in church attendance among Canadian families as a whole in the 1950s.29 More especially, however, they were expressing their own need to create a familiar environment in an unfamiliar land of adoption. More than a place of worship, the church became a focus of community life and an instrument to help immigrants re-establish a collective sense of social ease and self-confidence.

17The church served a number of their needs. While worship was undoubtedly what bound congregations together and devotional associations and practices helped to strengthen such bonds; before the era of mass consumption entertainment, churches were also important vehicles of social interaction and integration. Since for most working immigrant parents Saturday was devoted to gender specific domestic tasks, Sunday was their only day of rest. Their need for leisure, however, was at odds with Ontario’s laws on the observance of the Lord’s Day, whose popularity, in light of the local plebiscites held in the 1950s, was still strong.30 The church was therefore able to provide a sanction for pastimes stigmatized by both the law and the wider community.

18Places of worship also offered immigrants a set of specific services that helped them fulfill their economic goals by allowing them fully to exploit the postwar boom. In households where both parents frequently had paid employment outside the home, there was a pressing need for childcare. The larger churches established a wide range of services and activities. While not immune from the all-pervasive influence of the English language and Canadian culture, such activities helped to reinforce the language of the home. They also promoted moral, social, political, and religious values that working parents often felt they could not inculcate in their children on their own. Parental concerns over the generation gap were thereby lessened.

19One normally does not think of immigrant churches as helping to promote integration. On the contrary, whether one adheres to a melting-pot or multicultural model in relation to the immigrant experience, one tends to see them, either positively or negatively, as helping to retain and transmit the language of origin, as well as perpetuate old-world traditions, causes, and identities. Certainly the host society has perceived them as bulwarks ensuring the survival of the culture of origin. Such a view, however, ignores the North American context in which congregants and especially their children lived their lives. Most central and eastern European immigrants grew up in the interwar period under authoritarian regimes whose tolerance of civil society was at best very limited. The ability of men and women to join or organize a wide range of associations, take up leadership positions in them, discuss issues publicly, was a significant departure from their culture of origin. They and their children participated in leisure activities with a decidedly North American content: picnics, dances where North American and European music mixed, and sporting events including baseball, hockey, and bowling. Parish-based services such as childcare and credit unions facilitated their achievement of the dreams that they shared with all postwar Canadians: the ownership of a single-family dwelling and a car, as well as the education of their offspring.

20The very language, identity, and traditions that churches were striving to perpetuate were subtly changing in contact with the North American environment. Old-world languages were forced to integrate English words and expressions to convey the new realities of work, home, community, consumption, and leisure. Traditions acquired different meanings in the climate of pluralism. Identities became hybrid. Within one short generation, immigrant churches were confronted with a harsh choice: respond to change or face rapid decline. The children of immigrants demanded greater use of English in church life, clergymen with a North American mentality, and religious practices more in tune with North American cultural norms. The irony is that immigrant churches had become victims of their own success.