Temple Pastures — Deanery of West Quebec

This 1970s photograph is a reminder of a man who was not your standard Anglican, yet who for a generation operated a facility that helped define Anglican spirituality and Anglican outreach in the Diocese of Ottawa.

Frank Uhlir in 1954 was a recent immigrant to Canada from what then was known as Czechoslovakia. He already had had a career as a freedom fighter against the Nazis during the 1940s. Many Czech immigrants would leave their mark on Canada. There was for example, Thomas John Bata, owner of the world’s largest shoe manufacturing company, who fled the Nazis in 1939 and re-established himself at Batawa in Canada. And there was Peter C. Newman, the controversial chronicler of Canadian politicians and the Canadian establishment, who in his spare time headed an orchestra called ‘Peter Newman and his Bouncing Czechs.’

Frank Uhlir was a very different immigrant from a country first liberated from Nazi oppression, only to find itself placed under the heel of Soviet domination. When he arrived in Canada in 1954, Uhlir was amazed at the immensity of his adopted country. As he later recounted in his autobiography, Call of the Cross, acting on a vision he felt had come from God, he purchased fifty acres of land with a farmhouse on it in West Templeton, Quebec in the far reaches of the Diocese of Montreal for the purpose of establishing an ecumenical Christian teaching mission near Canada’s capital.

Although his rural property was in the Diocese of Montreal, Uhlir, raised a Roman Catholic, attended Anglican services in nearby Ottawa. In 1956, he was ordained a priest by Bishop Ernest S. Reed. Even before Uhlir purchased his rural property in West Templeton, talks were well underway for transferring Clarendon (later West Quebec) Deanery from the Diocese of Montreal to the Diocese of Ottawa—a move that eventually took place in 1966.

It was on two counts, then, that Temple Pastures Mission originated outside the Diocese of Ottawa, first as a private initiative, and second, as one first emerging in the Diocese of Montreal. The Templeton farmhouse became an office, and a frame barn was renovated and extended to become a house of worship. Eventually, a large residence with meeting rooms, suites of bedrooms and bathrooms became known as the Temple Pastures retreat centre.

Frank Uhlir married Joan Moresby in 1960, a scholar who for a time was head of Elmwood School for girls in Ottawa. Summer missions began at Temple Pastures in 1961. In 1966, a full-time School of Christian Life was started. By 1977, more than 17,000 people visited Temple Pastures Mission for spiritual renewal, teaching and on occasion for spiritual healing.  Uhlir published a number of tracts and newsletters that emanated from Temple Pastures.

In 1980, the Rev. Frank Uhlir died. Joan Uhlir was in charge of Temple Pastures for four years. In 1986, the diocese accepted responsibility, and it continued for a generation to be a retreat, teaching and spiritual centre for all religious groups. With dwindling attendance, it closed in the 2010s.  A Czech translation of The Call of the Cross was published by a university press in the Czech Republic where Uhlir’s work as a freedom fighter is now recognized.

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