Fifty-three years is a long time to use a building you haven't finished paying for. Holy Rosary in Vancouver opened its doors around the turn of the century — Masses said, babies carried in, funerals, the whole working life of a parish church — and the solemn dedication didn't happen until 1953, when Archbishop William Mark Duke did the honours.

That gap isn't neglect, it's arithmetic. In Catholic practice a church can be blessed and used straight away, but the full consecration or dedication waits until the thing is free of debt and not mortgaged to anybody: you don't solemnly give God a building the bank has a claim on. So the long wait is a ledger as much as a liturgy. Somewhere in that half-century there are collection envelopes, bazaars, and almost certainly a committee that met for years about a sum of money, which is the most human part of it.

The sources disagree on some of the detail — exactly when the doors first opened, how much was owed and when the last of it cleared — and I'd rather say that than tidy it. What I'm fairly sure of is that in 1953 a man in his seventies walked into a church that had been standing on the corner of Richards and Dunsmuir since before he arrived in the country, and did the ceremony it had been waiting for since the beginning.