“Your brain is pounding and every part of your body aches. You want to rise from the cold concrete sidewalk, but your attempts induce vertigo and you sink back to the ground. Crowds of people stream past you… but most stare straight ahead when they approach you, some even move away, afraid that something might happen if they get too close. Meanwhile the acid in your stomach causes you to groan. It has no food to break down. You never eat regular meals. Then an older man stops and asks your name. He has short, graying hair and kind, tired eyes. His name is Claude Paradis. Claude is a Catholic priest in the archdiocese of Montreal, Canada”.
This is how Peter Rajchert begins his article on this extraordinary Canadian priest in Messenger of St. Anthony (September 2022).
Fr. Claude understands homelessness – all the sufferings and indignities people who live on the streets face, because he has experienced them all.
Born and brought up in the Gaspé region of Canada, he worked in Cowansville as a nurse. Wanting to experience life in a big city, he came to Montreal as a young man. Unable to find a job for months, he was forced to live on the street. “Isolation and despair took hold of me,” he says. He became an alcoholic and a drug addict. In a city of more than a million people, Claude felt he was all alone and that he did not belong. He decided to commit suicide and attempted to end his life three times.
Doctors saved his life and decided to send him to a psychiatric institution. But after he was discharged, he roamed the streets of Montreal, as he had nowhere to go. One night he saw the glowing lights and the open doors of an old chapel, called Notre Dame de Lourdes (Our Lady of Lourdes). An encounter happened that night in the chapel. Claude entered and knelt down and asked God to give him a purpose to live or just end his life.
Our God is a God of life, isn’t he? So God gave him a purpose to live – to become a priest and serve his people. Claude joined the seminary and, after several years of priestly formation, was ordained a priest in 1997. After his ordination he could have asked to serve in a parish in the vast archdiocese of Montreal. But he did not. He joined Fr Emmett Johns, the founder of ‘Dans la Rue’ – a programme to reach out to homeless youth and give them a shelter.
Fr. M.A. Joe Antony, SJ
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