Wood, Edmund, 1830-1909

Edmund Wood was born on February 27, 1830, in London, England.

He was a Church of England priest and educator. He attended Turrell’s School, Brighton, University College School, London, and University College, Durham (B.A., 1854; M.A., 1857). He was ordained deacon in 1855 and served at Houghton-le-Spring until 1858, when he moved to Montreal, Quebec. Wood was appointed junior assistant at the pro-cathedral and assigned to minister to the poor in the southeastern part of the parish. He devoted the rest of his life to a work of worship and service to the poor. The original centre of Wood’s mission work was an old stone mortuary chapel in the Protestant burying ground at what is now Dufferin Square. In 1861, Wood acquired a new building at the corner of Saint-Urbain and Dorchester (Blvd. René-Lévesque) and founded the successful St. John the Evangelist parish. The same year he was ordained a priest. His congregation continued to grow, and, in 1874, a larger building was needed. The new church opened for worship in 1878 and, it still stands as a place of Anglo-Catholic worship at Saint-Urbain and Ontario St. in Montreal. By the 1880s, Wood’s reputation as a spiritual counsellor, a relentless advocate of the use of music and ceremonial to enrich the liturgy was becoming widespread. He became vicar general for Canada of the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament and founded a society for the study of sacred choral music in his parish. Wood saw the education of the young as an important part of his parochial responsibility and organized a small St. John’s School where he served as both teacher and headmaster. By 1895 the school had seventy students and nine teachers. It remained under Wood’s direction until his death when it moved to another location and became Lower Canada College.

He died unmarried on September 26, 1909, in Montreal, Quebec.