Much change has occurred in the make-up of Ottawa’s traditional Mass community since it came together in the chapel of the Monastery of the Sisters Adorers of the Precious Blood, 774 Echo Drive, for the first time on the first Sunday of Lent 30 years ago. Yet there is an essential thread linking that historic moment to what continues to unfold in Saint Clement Parish today, and that is the ritual of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the perennial liturgical form of the ages. Nor is it mere coincidence that the Sacrifice occurs today on the very same alter as it did 30 years ago, despite the fact that in the interim the Sisters Adorers have been dispersed and their Monastery turned over to a secular organization.

Over the years of its formation, Saint Clement Parish has gathered into its fold numerous gifted, adventurous, lively and exciting personalities, and not a few eccentrics as well. The most commendable Catholic virtues—truly heroic courage and resignation to God’s will, prudence, patience, perseverance and fortitude—have been quietly and unobtrusively in evidence in its midst from the very start. Saint Clement Parish has been he spiritual home of the learned and the ordinary, the serene and the struggling, and numerous modern scribes, writers of letters to editors, and apologists fearless in their defence of Catholic teaching and the gospel of life, the Papacy and the Magisterium. To its members, Saint Clement is a very special parish indeed.

An excerpt from The Continual Sacrifice: A History of the Origins of Saint Clement Parish, Ottawa 1968 – 1998 by Bernard Pothier