In the early 1900's, Sir Henry Pellatt acquired a property in King City
and named it after his wife Mary. Sir Henry was the founder of The
Toronto Electric Light Company in 1883, and also built Casa Loma in
1914.
The Marylake Augustinian Monastery
The Marylake Augustinian Monastery, also known as Marylake Monastery, Marylake Shrine, or simply Marylake, is an Augustinian monastery in King City, Ontario, Canada. The campus is nearly 1,000 acres (4.0 km2), residing on Keele Street, just north of 15th Sideroad (Bloomington).
It is part of the Province of Saint Joseph, the Canadian province of Augustinians which operates under the jurisdiction of the Chicago-based Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel.
Marylake is the chief foundation of the Augustinians in Canada, and is now well known as a spiritual centre for the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto. Marylake generally refers to the complex which includes the property, the monastery and shrine, and which operates a retreat centre.The shrine is named the Our Lady of Grace Shrine, whose title is taken from an Augustinian shrine in Lisbon, Portugal. The monastery motto is One mind and one heart unto God.
In 1999, the mendicant order established a school on the property, St. Thomas of Villanova College. It uses the house system, with houses such as St. Augustine, St. Nicholas, St. Rita, and St. Monica.
Mendicant Orders
Mendicant orders are, primarily, certain Christian religious orders that have adopted a lifestyle of poverty, traveling, and living in urban areas for purposes of preaching, evangelization, and ministry, especially to the poor. At their foundation these orders rejected the previously established monastic model. This foresaw living in one stable, isolated community where members worked at a trade and owned property in common, including land, buildings and other wealth. By contrast, the mendicants avoided owning property at all, did not work at a trade, and embraced a poor, often itinerant lifestyle. They depended for their survival on the goodwill of the people to whom they preached.
The term "mendicant" is also used with reference to some non-Christian religions to denote holy persons committed to an ascetic lifestyle, which may include members of religious orders and individual holy persons.
Originally, the property was the farm and summer home of Sir Henry Pellatt, and it was named for his first wife, Mary.
It has been owned by the Augustinians since 1935.
Henry Mill Pellatt
Major-General Sir Henry Mill Pellatt, CVO (January 6, 1859 – March 8, 1939) was a Canadian financier and soldier.
He is notable for his role in bringing hydro-electricity to Toronto, Ontario, for the first time, and also for his large château in Toronto, called Casa Loma, which was the biggest private residence ever constructed in Canada. Casa Loma would eventually become a well-known landmark of the city. His summer home and farm in King City later became Marylake Augustinian Monastery.
Pellatt was also a noted supporter of the Boy Scouts of Canada. His first wife, Mary, was the first Chief Commissioner of the Girl Guides of Canada.
Pellatt was born in Kingston, Canada West (now Ontario), the son of Henry Pellatt (1830–1909), a Glasgow-born stockbroker in Toronto, and Emma Mary Pellatt (née Holland). His great-grandfather was the famous glassmaker Apsley Pellatt.
Pellatt had three sisters and two brothers, Fred Pellatt (grandfather of Toronto-based freelance writer John Pellatt) and Mill Pellatt (father of Mary Katherine Pellatt).The latter brother was paymaster of the Toronto Electric Light Company, a job obtained for him by Pellatt. His sisters were Mary Kate, Marian Maria and Emily Mountford Pellatt. One of his nieces, Beatrix Hamilton, was married to Canadian economist and humourist Stephen Leacock.
He was educated at Upper Canada College before leaving in 1876 to join his father's stock brokerage company, Pellatt and Osler, as a clerk. In 1882, Pellatt's father and Osler parted ways, and Pellatt completed his apprenticeship and became a full member of the stock exchange. In the following year, Pellatt's father set up a partnership with his son under the name Pellatt and Pellatt.
Pellatt married twice, first to Mary Dodgson in Toronto in 1882 and, after Mary's death in 1924, to Catharine Welland Merritt in Toronto in 1927 (which lasted until her death in 1929). With his first wife, he had one son, Reginald, who was born in 1885. Colonel Reginald Pellatt (1885–1967) married but had no children.
Much of Pellatt's fortune was made through investments in the railway and hydro-electric industries in Canada, including the Toronto Electric Light Company. He also made significant investment in the Cobalt Lake Mining Company during the Cobalt silver rush of 1903. Later in around 1915, using riches from his Cobalt Lake Mining Company, he invested in the fledging McIntyre Mines in Timmins Ontario. However, legislator Adam Beck launched a campaign against the great industrialists of Canada, proclaiming that hydro power "should be as free as air". Through legislative process and by whipping up anti-rich sentiment, Beck was able to successfully appropriate Pellatt's life work and take his electric companies from him. Beck then led a populist revolt to raise Pellatt's taxes on his castle, Casa Loma, from $600 per year to $12,000. The strain of losing all of his income, coupled with the large increase in property taxes for his castle, led him to rely solely on his real estate investments, which were unsuccessful due to the beginning of World War I.
After the province expropriated his electrical power generating business, and his aircraft manufacturing business was appropriated by Beck as part of the war effort during World War I, Pellatt was driven to near-bankruptcy, which forced him and Lady Pellatt to leave Casa Loma in 1923. They therefore moved to their farm at Marylake in King City.
Pellatt later built Bailey House in Mimico, at the bend in Lake Shore near Fleeceline, overlooking the commercial stretch on Lake Shore (the house later became a Legion Hall and was demolished to make way for a roadway). He subsequently moved in with his chauffeur, Thomas Ridgway, and it was in this house that Pellatt died.
After he died on March 8, 1939, thousands of people lined Toronto streets to witness his funeral procession, and he was buried with full military honours. He is interred at Forest Lawn Mausoleum, north of Toronto.
The Agricultural School
An agricultural school was established on the grounds in the 1930s by the Basilian fathers, and in 1942 the Archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal McGuigan, "invited the Augustinians to establish a shrine and to offer a program of weekend retreats for lay people" He expressed that it was his own personal dream that it was his hope that this shrine at the Marylake Center would become not only an important place of pilgrimage in honor of our Blessed Mother Mary in this area, but that one day it would officially become the center of Marian devotion for all Ontario. The success of this program resulted in the construction of the shrine in the 1960s, which was dedicated on November 30, 1978 by Cardinal Carter.
The building consists of split fieldstone native to Marylake, based on designs by J. Stuart Cauley.
Marylake held its first mass in 1945. It is the site for a yearly June pilgrimage by 3,000 Danube Swabians for an open-air mass paying "homage to Germans expelled from Eastern Europe".
In October 2012, the Archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal Thomas Christopher Collins, declared Marylake as one of four official archdiocesan sites of sacred pilgrimage for the Year of Faith. On February 3, 2013, in a Solemn High Mass, the Very Reverend Bernard Scianna, O.S.A., Ph.D., Prior Provincial of the Canadian and Midwest Augustinians, officially blessed and designated the main entrance to the shrine as a holy door open to all who come to Marylake seeking the special graces of the Year of Faith.
The Rosary Path at Marylake The Queen of the Holy Rosary Shrine (Lay Apostolate) gained approval from the Augustinian Friars to place an environmental sculpture of the Rosary at Marylake In 2014, ground was broken to build the largest rosary path in North America. In August 2016, Cardinal Collins blessed and Opened the rosary path. The Corpus of The Great Crucifix which is at the beginning of the rosary path was created by the world-renowned sculptor Timothy Schmaltz. In 2016, Mary's Way of the Cross was added to the pathway, and in 2017, large (7' X 4') glass panels created by Stuart Reid were added to the Way of the Cross.
The rosary path at Marylake was conceived by architect Ted Harasti of Toronto. After receiving a Marian locution on a retreat in 1974, Harasti made it his quest to build the rosary path at the request of the Blessed Mother Mary.
Within Anglicanism, the Rule of St. Augustine is followed only by women, who form several different communities of Augustinian nuns in the Anglican Communion.
Within Roman Catholicism, Augustinians may be members of either one of two separate and distinct types of Order:
As well as telling his disciples to be "of one mind and heart on the way towards God", Augustine of Hippo taught that
Contemporary Augustinian musical foundations include the famous Augustinerkirche in Vienna, where orchestral masses by Mozart and Schubert are performed every week, as well as the boys' choir at Sankt Florian in Austria, a school conducted by Augustinian canons, a choir now over 1,000 years old.
Augustinians have also produced a formidable body of scholarly works.
In the 1940s, when Archbishop McGuigan heard about the work a group of Augustinians were doing in Nova Scotia. He had been interested in opening a spiritual center within the archdiocese, and so he invited the order to start a foundation in King City.
The Augustinians took over an 814 acre estate located on the north-west corner of Keele Street and 15th Sideroad in King City that was originally developed by Sir Henry Pellatt (of Casa Loma fame). The lake on the site, known as Lake Marie, was renamed as Marylake, and the property was dedicated to Our Lady of Grace. The buildings were converted to become a monastery and retreat center. In addition, the Order operated a dairy farm.
On August 15, 1943, 12,000 people attended the dedication of the chapel and blessing of the statue of Our Lady of Grace. On November 11, 1961, the Augustinians were given the care of Sacred Heart Parish in King City. In 1964, a new monastery and shrine were dedicated.
The Marylake Augustinian Monastery
The Marylake Augustinian Monastery, also known as Marylake Monastery, Marylake Shrine, or simply Marylake, is an Augustinian monastery in King City, Ontario, Canada. The campus is nearly 1,000 acres (4.0 km2), residing on Keele Street, just north of 15th Sideroad (Bloomington).
It is part of the Province of Saint Joseph, the Canadian province of Augustinians which operates under the jurisdiction of the Chicago-based Province of Our Mother of Good Counsel.
Marylake is the chief foundation of the Augustinians in Canada, and is now well known as a spiritual centre for the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto. Marylake generally refers to the complex which includes the property, the monastery and shrine, and which operates a retreat centre.The shrine is named the Our Lady of Grace Shrine, whose title is taken from an Augustinian shrine in Lisbon, Portugal. The monastery motto is One mind and one heart unto God.
In 1999, the mendicant order established a school on the property, St. Thomas of Villanova College. It uses the house system, with houses such as St. Augustine, St. Nicholas, St. Rita, and St. Monica.
Mendicant Orders
Mendicant orders are, primarily, certain Christian religious orders that have adopted a lifestyle of poverty, traveling, and living in urban areas for purposes of preaching, evangelization, and ministry, especially to the poor. At their foundation these orders rejected the previously established monastic model. This foresaw living in one stable, isolated community where members worked at a trade and owned property in common, including land, buildings and other wealth. By contrast, the mendicants avoided owning property at all, did not work at a trade, and embraced a poor, often itinerant lifestyle. They depended for their survival on the goodwill of the people to whom they preached.
The term "mendicant" is also used with reference to some non-Christian religions to denote holy persons committed to an ascetic lifestyle, which may include members of religious orders and individual holy persons.
Originally, the property was the farm and summer home of Sir Henry Pellatt, and it was named for his first wife, Mary.
It has been owned by the Augustinians since 1935.
Henry Mill Pellatt
Major-General Sir Henry Mill Pellatt, CVO (January 6, 1859 – March 8, 1939) was a Canadian financier and soldier.
He is notable for his role in bringing hydro-electricity to Toronto, Ontario, for the first time, and also for his large château in Toronto, called Casa Loma, which was the biggest private residence ever constructed in Canada. Casa Loma would eventually become a well-known landmark of the city. His summer home and farm in King City later became Marylake Augustinian Monastery.
Pellatt was also a noted supporter of the Boy Scouts of Canada. His first wife, Mary, was the first Chief Commissioner of the Girl Guides of Canada.
Pellatt was born in Kingston, Canada West (now Ontario), the son of Henry Pellatt (1830–1909), a Glasgow-born stockbroker in Toronto, and Emma Mary Pellatt (née Holland). His great-grandfather was the famous glassmaker Apsley Pellatt.
Pellatt had three sisters and two brothers, Fred Pellatt (grandfather of Toronto-based freelance writer John Pellatt) and Mill Pellatt (father of Mary Katherine Pellatt).The latter brother was paymaster of the Toronto Electric Light Company, a job obtained for him by Pellatt. His sisters were Mary Kate, Marian Maria and Emily Mountford Pellatt. One of his nieces, Beatrix Hamilton, was married to Canadian economist and humourist Stephen Leacock.
He was educated at Upper Canada College before leaving in 1876 to join his father's stock brokerage company, Pellatt and Osler, as a clerk. In 1882, Pellatt's father and Osler parted ways, and Pellatt completed his apprenticeship and became a full member of the stock exchange. In the following year, Pellatt's father set up a partnership with his son under the name Pellatt and Pellatt.
Pellatt married twice, first to Mary Dodgson in Toronto in 1882 and, after Mary's death in 1924, to Catharine Welland Merritt in Toronto in 1927 (which lasted until her death in 1929). With his first wife, he had one son, Reginald, who was born in 1885. Colonel Reginald Pellatt (1885–1967) married but had no children.
Much of Pellatt's fortune was made through investments in the railway and hydro-electric industries in Canada, including the Toronto Electric Light Company. He also made significant investment in the Cobalt Lake Mining Company during the Cobalt silver rush of 1903. Later in around 1915, using riches from his Cobalt Lake Mining Company, he invested in the fledging McIntyre Mines in Timmins Ontario. However, legislator Adam Beck launched a campaign against the great industrialists of Canada, proclaiming that hydro power "should be as free as air". Through legislative process and by whipping up anti-rich sentiment, Beck was able to successfully appropriate Pellatt's life work and take his electric companies from him. Beck then led a populist revolt to raise Pellatt's taxes on his castle, Casa Loma, from $600 per year to $12,000. The strain of losing all of his income, coupled with the large increase in property taxes for his castle, led him to rely solely on his real estate investments, which were unsuccessful due to the beginning of World War I.
After the province expropriated his electrical power generating business, and his aircraft manufacturing business was appropriated by Beck as part of the war effort during World War I, Pellatt was driven to near-bankruptcy, which forced him and Lady Pellatt to leave Casa Loma in 1923. They therefore moved to their farm at Marylake in King City.
Pellatt later built Bailey House in Mimico, at the bend in Lake Shore near Fleeceline, overlooking the commercial stretch on Lake Shore (the house later became a Legion Hall and was demolished to make way for a roadway). He subsequently moved in with his chauffeur, Thomas Ridgway, and it was in this house that Pellatt died.
After he died on March 8, 1939, thousands of people lined Toronto streets to witness his funeral procession, and he was buried with full military honours. He is interred at Forest Lawn Mausoleum, north of Toronto.
The Agricultural School
An agricultural school was established on the grounds in the 1930s by the Basilian fathers, and in 1942 the Archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal McGuigan, "invited the Augustinians to establish a shrine and to offer a program of weekend retreats for lay people" He expressed that it was his own personal dream that it was his hope that this shrine at the Marylake Center would become not only an important place of pilgrimage in honor of our Blessed Mother Mary in this area, but that one day it would officially become the center of Marian devotion for all Ontario. The success of this program resulted in the construction of the shrine in the 1960s, which was dedicated on November 30, 1978 by Cardinal Carter.
The building consists of split fieldstone native to Marylake, based on designs by J. Stuart Cauley.
Marylake held its first mass in 1945. It is the site for a yearly June pilgrimage by 3,000 Danube Swabians for an open-air mass paying "homage to Germans expelled from Eastern Europe".
In October 2012, the Archbishop of Toronto, Cardinal Thomas Christopher Collins, declared Marylake as one of four official archdiocesan sites of sacred pilgrimage for the Year of Faith. On February 3, 2013, in a Solemn High Mass, the Very Reverend Bernard Scianna, O.S.A., Ph.D., Prior Provincial of the Canadian and Midwest Augustinians, officially blessed and designated the main entrance to the shrine as a holy door open to all who come to Marylake seeking the special graces of the Year of Faith.
The Rosary Path at Marylake The Queen of the Holy Rosary Shrine (Lay Apostolate) gained approval from the Augustinian Friars to place an environmental sculpture of the Rosary at Marylake In 2014, ground was broken to build the largest rosary path in North America. In August 2016, Cardinal Collins blessed and Opened the rosary path. The Corpus of The Great Crucifix which is at the beginning of the rosary path was created by the world-renowned sculptor Timothy Schmaltz. In 2016, Mary's Way of the Cross was added to the pathway, and in 2017, large (7' X 4') glass panels created by Stuart Reid were added to the Way of the Cross.
The rosary path at Marylake was conceived by architect Ted Harasti of Toronto. After receiving a Marian locution on a retreat in 1974, Harasti made it his quest to build the rosary path at the request of the Blessed Mother Mary.
Pipe organ
The monastery has a pipe organ built from two 1928 Aeolian-Skinner Duo-Art organs, which were obtained in 1960 from the Eaton estate and Seagram estate.Work to combine the two organs began in 1968 and was completed in 1973; it was first played for midnight mass that year.[It has the original leather work, now cracked and torn, and has over 3000 pipes. Marylake plans to repair the organ and transform it to digital operation at a cost of C$100,000.Filming locations
The 1960s TV series The Forest Rangers used Marylake as a filming location, as it was a good match for lake scenery from Ontario's north.
The Augustinians
The Augustinians, named after Augustine of Hippo (354–430), are members of either of two distinct types of Catholic religious orders, dating back to the first millennium but formally created in the 13th century, and some Anglican religious orders, created in the 19th century, though technically there is no "Order of St. Augustine" in Anglicanism.Within Anglicanism, the Rule of St. Augustine is followed only by women, who form several different communities of Augustinian nuns in the Anglican Communion.
Within Roman Catholicism, Augustinians may be members of either one of two separate and distinct types of Order:
- Several mendicant Orders of friars, who lived a mixed religious life of contemplation and apostolic ministry and follow the Rule of St. Augustine, a brief document providing guidelines for living in a religious community. The largest and most familiar, originally known as the Hermits of St. Augustine (OESA; Ordo Eremitarum sancti Augustini) and also known as the Austin friars in England, is now simply referred to as the Order of St. Augustine (OSA). Two other Orders, the Order of Augustinian Recollects and the Discalced Augustinians, were once part of the Augustinian Order under a single Prior General. The Recollect friars, founded in 1588 as a reform movement of the Augustinian friars in Spain, became autonomous in 1612 with their first Prior General, Enrique de la Sagrada. The Discalced friars became an independent congregation with their own Prior General in 1592, and were raised to the status of a separate mendicant order in 1610.
- Various congregations of clerics known as Canons Regular who also follow the Rule of St. Augustine, embrace the evangelical counsels and lead a semi-monastic life, while remaining committed to pastoral care appropriate to their primary vocation as priests. They generally form one large community which might serve parishes in the vicinity, and are organized into autonomous congregations, which normally are distinct by region.
Charism
In a religious community, "charism" is the particular contribution that each religious order, congregation or family and its individual members embody. The teaching and writing of Augustine, the Augustinian Rule, and the lives and experiences of Augustinians over sixteen centuries help define the ethos (principles) and special charism of the order.As well as telling his disciples to be "of one mind and heart on the way towards God", Augustine of Hippo taught that
- "Nothing conquers except truth and the victory of truth is love" (Victoria veritatis est caritas), and
- the pursuit of truth through learning is key to the Augustinian ethos,
- balanced by the injunction to behave with love towards one another.
- It does not unduly single out the exceptional, especially favour the gifted, nor exclude the poor or marginalised.
- Love is not earned through human merit, but received and given freely by God's free gift of grace, totally undeserved yet generously given.
- These same imperatives of affection and fairness have driven the order in its international missionary outreach.
- This balanced pursuit of love and learning has energised the various branches of the order into building communities founded on mutual affection and intellectual advancement.
- The Augustinian ideal is inclusive.
Contemporary Augustinian musical foundations include the famous Augustinerkirche in Vienna, where orchestral masses by Mozart and Schubert are performed every week, as well as the boys' choir at Sankt Florian in Austria, a school conducted by Augustinian canons, a choir now over 1,000 years old.
Augustinians have also produced a formidable body of scholarly works.
Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marylake_Augustinian_Monastery
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Pellatt
https://www.marylake.com/
Maria Santissima di Canneto
In the valley of Canneto there once stood a temple, near the source of the Melfa, to the pagan divinity,
a few centuries before the birth of Christ. The Italic divinity dispelled evil spirits and many findings
scattered throughout the valley provide evidence that Canneto has been a sacred place for over two
thousand years.
The first reliable document that mentions a church dedicated to the Virgin Mary at Canneto valley
is dated 819 (a papal bull of Pasquale I) and is found in the "Chronicon" of the Monastery of St.
Vincent at Volturno, the great Benedictine abbey that flourished at the beginning of the 8th century
near the springs of Volturno on the Rocchetta plain, just below the great rocky outcropping of Meta
where the abbey still stands. In 1288, the church of Canneto had an annex consisting of a monastery
founded by the Benedictines, with a regular community presided over by an Abbot and endowed with
ecclesiastical benefits.
In 1392, the archives of the abbey listed the members of the community as: the Abbot,
Br. Giacomo di Angelo, Br. Biagio Mecerelle, Br. Nicola and Br. Biagio di Stefano. Actually, at that
time the monks no longer lived at Canneto, but in the small town of Settefrati, from whence they
continued to supervise the Sanctuary.
The Apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Canneto A devout legend details the story of the apparition of the Madonna di Canneto in the area called
“Capodacqua”, in the Canneto valley , to a shepherd girl named Silvana. The child was tending to
her flock, when suddenly, between the green grass and the beautiful flowers of the valley appeared a
Lady all dressed in white emitting radiant streams of bright light and full of celestial beauty. The poor
shepherd girl became dumbfounded and began shaking at this powerful vision. But the beautiful Lady
reassured Silvana and with a gentle voice she said to her: “Go to the pastor of Settefrati and tell him
that the Mother of God asks that a church be built dedicated to Her in this valley”. “But”, the child
answered, “I cannot abandon the sheep and must continue to the plain in order that they may have
water to drink, because there is no water at this place”. The Lady answered “ I will look after the
water and you go and do as I ask”. And with this the Lady lightly touched the cliff with Her fingers
and at the base of the great mass of rocks sprung forth a stream of fresh water. Then the Lady dropped
the ring that She wore on Her finger into the water, and striking a stone the ring disintegrated into
gold powder. The water of this spring is believed to be is source of the river Melfa. And the gold
powder is the “stellucce” (little stars), that until very recently shone brightly in the waters of
“Capodacuqa” and that were coveted by pilgrims to Canneto. The shepherd girl was very eager to do
as the Lady asked of her and brought back to the spot a group of villagers who were eager to see what
the girl described. They were amazed to see that there was water were there had been none before and
in the midst of the rocks they saw a wooden statue which the young girl said was a likeness of the
Madonna that had appeared to her. Not wanting to leave the statue the people decided to carry it to
the village. But after a short distance, the statue became increasingly heavy the bearers were forced
to rest it against the cliff, where, to the amazement of all present there appeared an impression of the
head of the statue against the rocks. The cliff exists to this present day and is called “the Head of the
Madonna”. The villagers then asked the Virgin for a sign indicating where She wanted to be carried.
When the statue was again raised the bearers found that if had become very light. The villagers took
this as a sign that the Virgin wanted to be returned to the place of Her apparition and the Sanctuary
was established at that location.
