MCDONALD, JOHN LAWSON (1851-1903)

MCDONALD, JOHN LAWSON, Catholic teacher, and missionary, Loggieville, 1898-1903; b. Dalhousie, N.B., 8 May c1851, s/o David McDonald, formerly of Tracadie, P.E.I., and Joanna McDonald; ordained 1879; d. Chatham, 19 Jun 1903.

When John L. McDonald was a child his father was drowned, and he grew up in the home of his mother and her second husband, James Devereaux, a farmer at Petit Rocher, N.B. With the help of an uncle, who was a physician in Boston, he attended St Dunstan's College (1871-74) and Nicolet College in Quebec and was trained for the priesthood in Quebec City. After his ordination he taught for two years at St Michael's male academy in Chatham. In 1881 he was appointed priest of the Restigouche missions. He made his residence at Dalhousie until 1886 and then at Campbellton. He was an audacious church builder but lacked sound financial judgment. Problems with creditors involved him in elaborate money-raising schemes which in turn led to quarrelsome relations with parishioners, and to his eventual emotional collapse. When he resigned under extreme pressure in 1894 Bishop James Rogers offered him a less taxing assignment elsewhere in the diocese, but he requested a year's leave of absence instead. He stayed away for four years, living for part of the time at least, in a hotel room in Toronto.

After McDonald completed a retreat with the Oblate fathers in Quebec in 1898 Bishop Rogers wrote him a lengthy letter in which he welcomed him back to the Chatham diocese and announced that he was creating a new residential mission at Loggieville especially for him. It seemed at first that he may have made a successful recovery, but by 1901 angry complaints were being voiced about his personal conduct, and attendance at his church was rapidly declining. When he died in 1903, at age fifty-four, Loggieville reverted to being a mission of Chatham.