[URBAN NOTE] "The Heart of the City"

[rfmcdonald]

Over the weekend, Torontoist's Kevin Plummer posted a history of Toronto's Church of the Holy Trinity. The Anglican chapel that may now most famous as the church surrounded by the Eaton Centre has a long and surprisingly radical history.

Tucked beside the Eaton Centre and surrounded by high-rises stands a small church. Since its founding in 1847, the Church of the Holy Trinity’s focus on ministering to an ever-changing urban flock has regularly put it at the forefront of emerging social issues. The church reached out to the homeless and unemployed in the thirties, welcomed Vietnam War resisters and community activists in the 1960s, incubated sentiment for urban reform in the in the 1960s and 1970s, and encouraged the city’s nascent gay community to raise its voice in the 1970s and 1980s. Such stances have, over its century-and-a-half history, regularly created friction between Holy Trinity and the Anglican establishment, municipal officials, and real estate developers.

In the summer of 1845, Bishop John Strachan, head of the Anglican Church in Toronto, received a letter offering 5,000 pound sterling from an anonymous benefactress for the purpose of establishing a church. Among the stipulations attached was that it be named the Church of the Holy Trinity and that its pews be “free and unappropriated forever.” The latter was a radical suggestion at a time when Toronto’s three other Anglican churches, including St. James’ Cathedral, relied upon pew rentals as a major source of revenue. Although the anonymous donor’s intentions had never been to place limitations on the congregation’s composition, Strachan came to refer to Holy Trinity as the “Parochial Church of the Poor of Toronto.”