By Sean Leslie

Retired St. Louis priest turns 100

Apr 8, 2013 | 6:00 AM

Father Paul Côté celebrated his 100th birthday with church-goers and community members at the St. Louis Catholic Parish on Sunday.

Côté retired from the Church in 1989 but remains an important figure in St. Louis, “Father Côté is an integral part of our community here in St. Louis,” said Father Michael Fallman, the current priest at the St. Louis Parish.

On Saturday, April 6 Côté’s actual birthday, he was honoured by several parish priests from the Prince Albert area at St. Joseph’s church. He received a certificate from the papacy at the ceremony, which was believed to be the first 100-year certificate in Saskatchewan from the new Pope.

Despite his advanced age, Côté also still plays an important role at the Parish, “Every Sunday morning he comes and dresses vests for mass and prays with us … he always does the final blessing and for 100 years old he always does such a wonderful job,” Fallman said.

The St. Louis chapter of the Knights of Columbus helped organize the birthday party and financial secretary Gerald Gareau said Côté was a captivating speaker.

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“He was a vibrant priest, you know, when he used to preach people would listen,” Gareau said.

However, Côté was most well-known for a unique style of art he invented. According to a story Coté wrote years ago that was handed out on Sunday, in 1968, he was given an unfamiliar brand of shoe polish, which he decided to test and “dabbed a few strokes on a pad of paper.”

He had to leave for a few hours and after he came back, “The polish had dried on the paper. My thumb happened to touch the hard dried polish as I now went to throw it out. Rubbing it, it became shiny and brought to mind this idea, hard like paint.”

He painted with shoe polish for decades afterwards, amassing a large repertoire of religious works, portraits, landscapes and abstracts. However, roses were his specialty. Gareau, who saw him paint, said he could paint a rose with shoe polish in minutes, “He did that all his life, he’s done beautiful, beautiful pieces, it’s a technique that nobody has mastered,” said Gareau.

His work is displayed in several cities in Europe, New York, Philadelphia, across Canada and all around Saskatchewan.

Côté was born in St. Pierre Jolys, Manitoba and began teaching at Clercs Saint-Viateur in Montreal in 1933. After 32 years he left the school and became an ordained priest in 1968. For the next 22 years, he worked as a pastor at several Saskatchewan churches and continued to create shoe polish art.

Côté suffers from dementia and couldn’t be interviewed for this story.

sleslie@panow.com

On Twitter: @_seanleslie