The Wilcox Manuscripts

wilcox, saskatchewan—Here are a few things you’ll find in Wilcox, Saskatchewan: one little store, one Olympic-sized hockey rink, one motel, three illuminated manuscripts from medieval France, three grain elevators, and one copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle—published in 1493, written in Latin and illustrated by 1,809 superbly detailed woodcuts.

Wilcox is five streets long and three streets wide; the only red lights are behind the hockey nets. Finance Minister Ralph Goodale, the town’s most powerful native son, evoked the place during his March budget speech. “In the depths of the Depression,” Goodale said, “a unique character named Père Athol Murray founded a remarkable prairie school known as Notre Dame. Murray was tough as nails but he had a simple faith . . . that an education could open doors, expand opportunities, and change lives.”

Thanks to Murray, Wilcox boasts not only an arena but also the manuscripts, the Nuremberg Chronicle, and dozens of ancient books, some of them printed shortly after Gutenberg invented movable type. They belong to the boarding school, Athol Murray College of Notre Dame—the only thing that keeps the town alive. Its 350 students far outnumber the town’s other residents.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” says Terry O’Malley, a three-time member of Canada’s Olympic hockey team and now the school’s president. “The middle of nowhere.”

Into this nowhere, half an hour south of Regina, the hockey legend Patrick Roy sent his goal-tending son Jonathan: “Not a bad player,” O’Malley says judiciously. “But he didn’t make our top team.”

Notre Dame has been hit hard by the decline of family farms and big Catholic families across the west; today the school survives largely as a training ground for athletes. Its top teams have nurtured nhl stars like Vincent Lecavalier, Brad Richards, and Curtis Joseph. They were Hounds (as of Heaven). On the school’s website, the Hounds’ scores are among the lead items.

Athol Murray would have approved—up to a point. He loved competitive sports. But having worked in journalism and law before entering the seminary, he also had a wide range of other interests. Since his death in 1975, a few writers have depicted this irascible, generous, domineering, hard-drinking man as a near-saint. As he would have been quick to say, he was nothing of the kind. When the governing ccf created Canada’s first medicare system in the early 1960s, Murray’s conservative rhetoric grew so inflamed that the rcmp considered jailing him for trying to incite a riot.

He was, as Goodale said, unique. The scion of a rich Toronto family, a grandnephew by marriage of Sir John A. Macdonald, Murray was educated mostly in Quebec. Exposure to the collèges classiques gave him an abiding love for Greek and Latin classics as both the foundation and the pinnacle of our culture.

Sent out to Saskatchewan in 1923, Murray fell in love with the place—and with the opportunities he could create there. Becoming Wilcox’s parish priest in 1927, he also took charge of its tiny Catholic school, expanding it into both a high school and a college. Murray had high ambitions for his charges. To be able to offer young men and women a BA in liberal arts, he persuaded the University of Ottawa to grant Notre Dame status as an affiliate. Still, Notre Dame’s public emphasis was on the body, not the mind. Its football teams took on squads from American universities; its hockey players would battle for Canadian junior championships. “Battle” was not always just a metaphor.

Whatever the students could afford, they paid. If a farmer’s son could provide only oats and potatoes, so be it. Murray refused to seek help from governments. As late as 1957, the Star Weekly called Notre Dame “Saskatchewan’s shack college.” Its low brick buildings are relatively recent; for decades the students lived in shabby cabins free of indoor plumbing. Murray’s students grew intimate with hunger—they would kneel to pray for food. Occasionally, with Murray’s tacit approval, they stole milk and chickens from neighbouring farms.