After Reverend Father Stanley MacDonald passed away on May 11, 2025, at the age of 92, the university community initiated plans to erect a memorial bust in his honour. But the proposed location for this permanent monument is not the university chapel or a designated sacred space. Instead, the proposed home for the bust is the Amelia Saputo Centre for Healthy Living, the epicentre of the university’s athletic, recreational, and physical wellness life. I was asked what I thought of the “secularizing” of a Catholic priest’s legacy. After all, “Father Stan” served as an ordained Catholic priest for over four decades before returning to his alma mater to serve as a Priest-in-Residence. Why the Saputo Centre? Shouldn’t his lifelong religious vocation take priority when selecting a memorial site? But the public persona by which he is better known is that of the “ultimate StFX Super Fan,” with his booming “Go X Go!” chant, his presence at varsity sporting events, and his relationships with students and athletes.
Since we’re a university, let’s investigate whether this community-driven memorial project to place a Catholic priest’s memorial inside a secular athletic facility constitutes an erasure of Father Stan’s religious vocation (a literal “secularization” of his legacy). The proposition to erect a memorial bust of the late Reverend Father Stanley MacDonald within the Amelia Saputo Centre for Healthy Living at St. Francis Xavier University serves as a classic sociological case study in the dynamics of memory, spatial geography, and secularization in modern higher education. Where I end up on this question is that this project reflects a post-secular integration of faith, presence, and community identity.
The concept of secularization has been a foundational pillar of classical sociological theory for over a century. Theoretical frameworks influenced by early twentieth-century thinker Max Weber posit that modernization, rationalization, and the rise of scientific paradigms inevitably lead to the decline of religious authority and practice. Weber’s analysis of the “Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” famously explored how the secularization of Christian asceticism laid the foundation for modern capitalist structures and rationalized bureaucracies. This is the traditional, zero-sum view (referred to as the “subtraction narrative”), in which the sacred and the secular operate in direct opposition. As secular institutions (e.g., state-funded universities, scientific laboratories, and public athletic programs) grow in prominence and operational scale, religious institutions are forced to retreat to the private sphere.
Under this classical framework, placing a priest’s bust in a secular sports facility would be the final stage of institutional secularization. It would be the triumph of the secular arena over the sacred chapel, reducing a lifetime of sacramental and theological devotion to a mere cultural artifact or a secular mascot designed to boost athletic morale.
But more recent scholars of religion and sociology in post-secular Europe and North America tend to see secularization not as the subtraction or death of religion, but as the transformation, translation, and relocation of the sacred. Sacred spaces and religious figures are repurposed to serve broader civic, psychological, or community functions without losing their transcendent resonance.
Mircea Eliade noted in his explorations of the sacred and the profane that humans can’t stop constructing sacred spaces, even in settings that are ostensibly secular. Edward Linenthal has studied exactly this: modern public monuments operating as sacred civic spaces. So when a Catholic priest is memorialized in a university sports complex, it’s a prime example of this kind of spatial and symbolic translation. The community still needs sacred focal points, but we look for them in the new version of sacred spaces: areas of collective effervescence, of which sports arenas are a classic instance.
During the early to mid-twentieth century, the institutional identity of StFX was characterized by “priest-professors.” This was the situation long before he became “Father” Stan; I mean when he was a varsity athlete. Stan MacDonald competed for both the X-Men varsity hockey and rugby teams. He was captain of the very last varsity men’s rugby team to play on the StFX campus in 1953. He understood the psychological pressures, the intense physical demands, the necessity of teamwork, and the communal bonding inherent in collegiate sports. His lived experience as an athlete provided the empathy and environmental understanding that would later define his campus ministry.
Only after his graduation from StFX in 1954, of course, did MacDonald enrol at the Holy Heart Seminary in Halifax to complete his theological formation. On May 23, 1959, he was ordained to the priesthood. For nearly forty years, Father Stan served in Cape Breton and Antigonish as Assistant Pastor and Pastor. So it is true that to suggest that Father Stan lacked a deep, formal commitment to the institutional Church would be a historical fallacy; his life was entirely defined by his ecclesial vows.
But over the twentieth century, the university shifted. The number of ordained priests as faculty members dwindled, and the university transitioned toward what we have now: a secular, lay faculty and administration. And at the age of 65, Father Stan officially retired from active parish ministry; this was in 1998. Yet his most highly publicized, culturally impactful, and institutionally defining phase of ministry was still to come: a decade later, in 2008, he returned to his alma mater, serving as Priest-in-Residence at StFX.
Father Stan’s M.O. as Priest-in-Residence was to be a visible presence across the secular spaces of the campus. He became the iconic figure loved by all, instantly recognizable by his gregarious smile, his booming voice, and his signature greeting: fist-bumps. He met students exactly where they were; there were chats outside the meal hall, conversations over coffee at The Tall and Small, and, of course, his faithful attendance at athletic events. He is the epitome of a bridge between the university’s historic Catholic identity and its modern, heavily secularized student body.
Traditional religious gatherings no longer are the primary locus where community cohesion happens, especially among Canadian university students. For the vast majority of the student body these days, the campus chapel is physically and culturally peripheral. Instead, the athletic stadium, the hockey arena, and the gymnasium take over that function as the modern forges of collective identity. It is in these highly charged physical spaces that the student body gathers to participate in shared “rituals,” chant “litanies” in unison, and experience what sociologist Émile Durkheim termed “collective effervescence,” that is, the profound sense of energy and harmony that emerges when a group of people gather for a shared, synchronized purpose.
Father Stan understood the intense sociology and psychology of these spaces. He recognized that to pastor effectively to the modern university student, he had to enter their sanctuaries. So he became a permanent fixture in the crowd for all varsity sports over a span of fifteen years, providing unwavering support for both the X-Men and X-Women teams, whether football, soccer, rugby, hockey, basketball, or cross country.
The renaming of the building to the Amelia Saputo Centre for Healthy Living points to a philosophical shift that the facility’s mandate extends beyond elite, competitive varsity exercise to encompass holistic physical and mental well-being for Xaverians. This holistic philosophy is exactly what Father Stan’s role on campus represents. He always made a habit of checking in on the mental and emotional health of the students. So placing his memorial in a building dedicated to “healthy living” is an acknowledgement that spiritual and emotional health are essential components of human wellness.
With this context in mind, let’s circle back to the question: Does the placement of a bust of a Catholic priest in a multi-million-dollar sports complex constitute a “secularization” of his legacy? By monumentalizing him primarily as a “Super Fan” in an athletic centre rather than as a priest in a chapel or a library, is the university community stripping away the specific theological and sacramental realities of his lifelong vocation?
Well, from a strict traditionalist or classical Weberian perspective, an argument can be made that placing the bust in the Saputo Centre secularizes and dilutes Father Stan’s legacy. He was, after all, fundamentally and permanently an ordained priest who served as a spiritual shepherd for nearly forty years in conventional parish settings across Nova Scotia.
But a post-secular sociological perspective suggests the exact opposite. The placement of a Catholic priest’s monument in a secular sports complex isn’t the dilution or erasure of his religious vocation, as classic secularization theory would have it; rather, it is the most authentic reflection of his incarnational ministry. Father Stan deliberately chose to execute his post-retirement ministry in the secular spaces of the campus. He didn’t wait passively in the chapel for students to seek him out; he proactively went to the hockey arenas, the running trails, the dining halls, and the coffee shops. The concept of incarnation (present in multiple religions) dictates that the divine enters into the messy, physical reality of the human world. Father Stan’s ministry was nothing if not incarnational. He was indeed the “Super Fan,” using the universal language of collegiate sports to bridge generational, cultural, and ideological divides, offering guidance, joy, and spiritual steadying to thousands of students regardless of their personal religious affiliations.
Viewed this way, the Saputo Centre is the very site of his most impactful work; it’s not a profane space that degrades his memory. To place his memorial in a quiet, purely religious space—a space he frequented but which did not define his public persona over the last two decades—would be an exercise in historical revisionism. Instead, the placement of the bust in the Saputo Centre accurately acknowledges that in the modern, pluralistic university, the sacred is encountered more often in the bleachers, the locker rooms, and the shared pursuit of excellence. By placing his bust in the very arena where he championed the physical and emotional health of the student body, St. Francis Xavier University ensures that the Xaverian spirit of compassionate community is expressed through the power of presence, proving that the sacred can indeed flourish amidst the noise, sweat, and challenge of the modern secular arena.