History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 260

reform monastic rules, eradicate the brandy traffic with natives, and raise educational
standards.
In 1821 Abbé Charles Nerinckx recruited nine candidates at Mechelen for missions in
the northwest, among them Pierre-Jean De Smet, a Jesuit who in 1845–46 undertook
missionary journeys into the Kootenay region and as far north as Fort Edmonton and
Jasper House. Another pioneer missionary was Auguste-Joseph Brabant. After
learning the Wakashan tongue of the Hesquiat, who lived on northern Vancouver
Island, he established a mission among them in the 1870s. During his many years of
labour, he became an authority on the history and customs of these people.
Among the Belgian and Dutch priests brought out by the first bishop of Vancouver
Island, Modeste Demers, was Charles-John Seghers of Gent, who became diocesan
administrator in 1871 and succeeded Demers as bishop two years later. He extended
the Church’s work to native communities as far north as Yukon and established
educational and charitable institutions for the diocese. Seghers was succeeded at
Victoria by Jean-Baptiste Brondel from Mechelen, who is remembered for having
decreed that all missionary work, whether with natives or Europeans, would be
conducted in English. These bishops laid the foundations of an enduring Catholic
presence on the Pacific coast. Their present-day successor, Remi DeRoo, who comes
from a Flemish community in Manitoba, is well known as one of the most progressive
voices in the Canadian Catholic Church.
The first Belgian members of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate arrived at Lac La Biche
in present-day Alberta in 1874. A decade later Leonard Van Tighem began teaching
the Blackfoot at a residential school south of Calgary as well as serving three pioneer
communities. Transferred to Lethbridge in 1888, he later served at Taber, where he
laid the foundations of a school of agriculture and showed ranchers how to grow fruits
and vegetables. During the next century, at least forty-six other Belgian Oblates
devoted their lives to native and isolated European communities. They taught in
boarding-schools for native children, composed dictionaries and grammars of native
languages, and evangelized over a vast territory. Charles Choque, a Walloon, worked
for many years among the Inuit and wrote two books about his heroic confrères,
Kajualuk and Joseph Béliard, pêcheur d’hommes.
Other religious orders from Belgium, such as the Priests of the Sacred Heart, the La
Salette Congregation, and the Congregation of the Brothers of Good Works, came to
work among their compatriots or in new fields of church activity, but they found an
undercurrent of opposition to “foreign intrusion.” As early as 1899, British Columbians
had indicated that they did not want another Belgian prelate, and the Quebec
hierarchy in 1903 informed Rome that it did not wish to have French or Belgian
bishops. Belgian missionaries concluded that Anglo-Saxon racism and FrenchCanadian nationalism were unwitting allies in excluding them.
In 1879 Belgian Redemptorists took over the healing centre and shrine at SainteAnne-de-Beaupré from their American co-religionists. They conducted Advent and
Lenten preaching missions throughout Quebec and soon extended their activities to
other communities in western Canada in response to an invitation from the archbishop
of Saint-Boniface. Father Achille Delaere arrived from Flanders to minister to the
Ukrainians, a task that he realized would eventually lead to the Catholic Eastern Rite
and Church Slavonic rather than Latin. In 1901 he and four companions were

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