When John Elmsley died in 1863, his will included a minor renovation project: Please take my heart from my body and place it in the wall of St. Basil’s Church.There it remains, floating in alcohol, inside a jar, behind a wall. The heart of the man who was involved in one of this city’s biggest religious scandals, the heart of a mercurial but generous guy who changed the fortunes of Catholic Toronto when he made a splashy conversion in 1833.Heart burial was a mortuary practice once trendy among medieval kings, religious men and European nobility, especially during the Catholic Reformation. The practice never took off in North America, and was not a custom of Indigenous people here. Elmsley’s heart burial in St. Basil’s Church is believed to be the only one in Toronto’s history.“It is shocking in today’s somewhat bloodless society,” David Mulroney said a few days before retiring from St. Michael’s College, which was built alongside St. Basil’s Church on land donated by Elmsley. Mulroney has been a parishioner at the downtown church east of Queen’s Park for his entire life, and he remembers being fascinated with the heart as a boy.“I sort of understood that it’s his heart, he must have really loved this place, and when I read about it as an adult I realized he really did love this place.”At a time when rich, powerful Protestants ran the city, Elmsley was an Anglican ensconced in the upper crust. His father, John Elmsley Sr., had been one of the early chief justices of Upper Canada, one of the few university graduates in the colony, with a somewhat pompous habit of dropping quotes in Latin, as per the Dictionary of Canadian Biography. The Elmsleys had been good friends with John Strachan, who would later become the first Anglican bishop of Toronto, and were a prominent family in Toronto (then called York) before they moved to Quebec, when the elder Elmsley took over the chief justice ...
|
