Saint-Germain Cathedral

About

Saint Germain Cathedral, in French the Cathedrale Saint-Germain de Rimouski, stands as the mother church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Rimouski in the Bas-Saint-Laurent region of Quebec. Its history binds the spiritual life of the lower St. Lawrence valley to the worship and pastoral care of generations of the Catholic faithful in the maritime east of the province.

The church was consecrated on 28 May 1853 and was raised to the status of cathedral on 15 January 1867 by Jean Langevin, the first bishop of Rimouski. Around it the Bishop's Palace was designed by Joseph J. B. Verret for Monseigneur A. A. Blais and completed in 1901.

Neo-Gothic in its outward style, the cathedral carries pointed arch windows filled with stained glass and is buttressed by stone pinnacles, the whole built in the grey stone of the region. The interior follows the Gothic mode with a ceiling shaped like a diagonal rib vault, the main vault rising to twenty-eight metres and the interior vault to eighteen. Three bells, together weighing 1,641 kilograms, were installed in 1891, and the cathedral is celebrated for its Casavant Freres organ.

Local memory recalls that on 6 May 1950, during the nuit rouge that consumed nearly half the town in a fire begun at the Price Brothers Company sawmill, the cathedral was spared. The legend remembers that a priest sprinkled holy water around the perimeter of the church, and that the flames stopped at the line he had traced.

Significance

As the mother church of the Archdiocese of Rimouski, the cathedral remains the principal site of episcopal liturgy for Catholic life in the lower St. Lawrence valley. Its survival in the nuit rouge of 1950 holds a particular place in the memory of the city.