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COLUMN: Priest suffered icy death on New Year’s Day

Phil Egan Being the oldest of ten in a big Irish Catholic family, I grew up around priests. I served them as an altar boy, studied under them as a student, and even shared a glass or two of beer with one of them, a friend, during university days.
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Father Michael Moncoq is buried in the cemetery at St. Joseph’s Church in Corunna. Journal file photo

Phil Egan

Being the oldest of ten in a big Irish Catholic family, I grew up around priests. I served them as an altar boy, studied under them as a student, and even shared a glass or two of beer with one of them, a friend, during university days. In my extended family there was a priest, a monsignor, a nun and two monks.

My father’s two old aunts had a brother who was a priest. Brotherly loyalty dictated that he stay with them when he was in town, but he was never comfortable there. His sisters called him “Father” and treated him as if he was the pope. To us, he was Uncle Charlie. He used to come over to my Dad’s house just to relax, take off his collar, have a glass of scotch and share a laugh.

In the very early days of the nineteenth century, being a priest was a much more wrenching task that it is today. With sparse populations scattered over great distances, priests had to travel to tend to their extended flocks. Those travels sometimes took a terrible toll.

Consider the case of Father Michael Moncoq. The initials S.J. followed his signature, for he was a member of the Society of Jesus. The black-robed Jesuits, also known as “God’s soldiers,” were founded in Paris in 1534 by Saint Ignatius Loyola. The Jesuits had come to New France as early as 1611, to save souls and to teach. They became known as the “schoolmasters of the New World.”

In October of 1854, Fr. Michael Moncoq arrived from France to tend to the people who had settled along the St. Clair River. He learned First Nation languages at Oka and Cauhnawaga, Mohawk villages in Quebec and New York.

Fr. Moncoq became the first resident priest at St. Joseph’s Church in Mooretown. He had charge of all missions in the area including Moore and Sarnia, where the first Catholic Church, St. Michael’s, had been built on the present site of Our Lady of Mercy Church. Fr. Moncoq’s responsibilities, however, also included Baby’s Point, Port Lambton, Kettle Point, Grand Bend, Aux Sauble, Bayfield, Plympton and Enniskillen.

On New Year’s Day evening in 1856, at age 27, Fr. Moncoq slipped through the ice on the St. Clair River and was drowned as he returned from administering the last sacraments to a woman dying in Algonac, Michigan.

His body, recovered at Walpole Island the following spring, today rests in the cemetery of St. Joseph’s Church in Corunna.


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