MONTREAL — It seems that even sainthood is no protection these days against the demands of the real estate market.
In Montreal, deep inside the hushed and sprawling corridors of the Grey Nuns Motherhouse, snow-haired sisters who have devoted their lives to God are focusing on a more profane task.
The nuns have sold their property and must prepare to move. Packing is tough enough for any homeowner, but it's all the more delicate given one of the nun's belongings: the remains of their holy founder, Ste. Marguerite d'Youville.
The first Canadian elevated to sainthood lies beneath a mahogany altar inside the soaring motherhouse chapel.
Grey Nuns sisters pray recently at the altar containing remains of Ste. Marguerite d’Youville in their Montreal chapel. (Christinne Muschi for The Globe and Mail)
But even saints can't rest in peace.
The sisters are going to cart off Ste. Marguerite, escorting her back to her birthplace in Varennes, Que., as they leave their historic stone convent.
Their exit stands as a vivid symbol of the slow and inexorable fadeout of Quebec's religious communities from the public life of Montreal.
"We never thought we would see this day," said Gabriel Collard, director general of the motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity, as the nuns are formally known.
"It's dramatic - a congregation that did so much through hospitals, charity work, with the poor. Now there is no one new to replace them. They are heading toward extinction."
Once the pillars of Quebec's health and education systems, nuns are dying off. The average age of the sisters shuffling along on walkers at the Grey Nuns Motherhouse is 82; the youngest is 61.
Their motherhouse, on prime downtown property at Guy Street and René Lévesque Boulevard, has been sold to Concordia University.
"We wouldn't have wanted to leave Marguerite d'Youville here," said the 79-year-old Mother Superior, Sister Cécile Castonguay, who has reluctantly accepted to say goodbye to the convent she'd first entered as a student in 1945.
Other saints in Montreal have been on the move too, driven by the harsh reality of dwindling congregations hard pressed to care for their prominent properties.
After members of the Congregation of Notre Dame sold their motherhouse on the upper reaches of Westmount, the bones of their founder, Ste. Marguerite Bourgeoys, were also relocated. The saint was ceremonially transported in 2005 to a chapel in Old Montreal.
It has not been a long and quiet repose for Ste. Marguerite d'Youville either, whose remains have moved six times since her death in 1771. She was first interred at the Grey Nuns' original premises in Old Montreal; when the sisters moved uptown to escape flooding in 1871, they brought their founder with them.
Ste. Marguerite's body was shifted from place to place within the motherhouse until it came to rest in the Romanesque chapel in 1996, six years after her canonization by Pope John Paul II.
She remains a figure of adoration for the remaining nuns who pad along creaking floorboards in the motherhouse, a sanctuary of silence in a thronging corner of downtown Montreal. A property that once bustled with more than 1,000 occupants now holds a mere 159 nuns. Half are in the infirmary.
"I never could have imagined the day we would be selling the motherhouse," said Sister Nicole Fournier, secretary of the order. "It's like we're in mourning - a piece of our past is vanishing."
While Ste. Marguerite will be going, the bodies of 276 other Grey Nuns will stay behind. They're interred in a low-ceilinged crypt in the basement, buried in neat rows of gravel-covered plots.
After the sisters sold the property to Concordia, they had wanted to exhume the bodies and transfer them to a congregation cemetery in suburban Châteauguay. But provincial public-health authorities nixed the idea for fear of spreading disease; the women had cared for patients during typhus and smallpox epidemics in the 1800s.
"We would have liked them all to be reunited in Châteauguay, but we were told the viruses are so strong they remain alive underground," Sister Castonguay said. "We accepted it. We are used to accepting change."
Still, in 2010, the nuns will organize a formal ceremony and move out Ste. Marguerite, whose bones are now held in a stainless steel box.
The chapel where she resides will be deconsecrated. The sisters, devoted to service for 271 years, will bequeath a monument whose fate tells the story of the decline of the Catholic Church in Quebec.
"A part of our history is going," Sister Fournier said. "The Golden Age of Quebec congregations is over. And we have to let it go."