Home page

Text size

E-mail this page

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
There are no fears of boredom in retired life for Bishop Emeritus Denis Croteau after 21 years serving as a bishop for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Mackenzie-Fort Smith.

Bishop Emeritus Denis Croteau stands before the main building at the Trappers Lake Spirituality Centre he founded in the late 1980s. The centre is one of Croteau's crowning achievements during his 21 years as bishop. - Lyndsay Herman/NNSL

Though retired as a bishop, Croteau still maintains his duties as a priest. Between weekly flights to one of the four missions he still oversees and the hours spent developing television programs on Catholic doctrine, Croteau said he still finds time to contemplate his 80 years of life and its meaning.

"Well, now that I'm retired, I'm learning to die," he said, laughing.

"That's the way I put it anyway. It doesn't keep me from living but I know that the end of the journey is not that far off, even if I have a few years left. When you get to be 80, it comes quick."

Every Friday Croteau flies from Yellowknife to one of the church's four missions in Gameti, Whati, Wekweeti, or Dettah and returns to his cabin at the Trapper's Lake Spirituality Centre Sunday night.

In his spare time over the six years since his retirement, Croteau has developed 30 videos, each a half hour long, designed to appeal to and educate a dwindling religious community.

"In the past we always used books but today we have the media so I use modern music, singing, excerpts from films, and I put that all together with scripts and voices," he said.

"The purpose of it is ... to show what religion can mean in the life of a person."

"The weakness of the Catholic Church in the North to me is the fact that the Catholics do not really know their faith deeply."

He presents the videos as part of faith workshops he gives in the territory and down south.

"It's been my main occupation in the past six years," he said. "Building up those programs and giving them to different (audiences)."

Croteau first came to the NWT on Aug. 28, 1960, two years after he was ordained as a priest.

"When I was studying in the seminary to become a priest I asked to come North and I've been here ever since," he said.

"I had read all the books about missionary life. We had missionaries coming to give us talks about life in the North and I felt attracted by that type of life."

The lifestyle was physically more challenging when he arrived, first in Behchoko, than it is these days, he said. The people he would visit lived in camps along trap lines in the winter, accessible only by dog team. The town's telephone system had only four local lines which connected the church, hospital, RCMP and the Hudson Bay Company store, but not to the world outside. Mail, he said, came only 10 times per year until the Mackenzie Highway was completed and bumped mail delivery up to three times per week.

"Physically, materially, it's easy because today you have communications, radios, all those gadgets are all over the North," he said. "Transportation, you have Ski-Doos, planes, 4x4, you have roads, winter roads.

"But mentally there is more pressure because when we live on the land, life is more local, more contained."

Croteau said he does not think he'll complete the 12 remaining videos he had planned as part of the "Faith Journey" program since each video takes hundreds of hours to complete. Instead, he takes great pride in the Trapper's Lake Spirituality Centre he founded and spends his weekends at one of the four missions he oversees.

"(My) main activity is to be of service to the church, as long as I'm healthy that's OK," said Croteau.

"But the main reality when you reach this stage in your life ... you give much more time to the contemplation of death, the meaning of your life and of the thereafter."

We welcome your opinions. Click here to e-mail a letter to the editor.