Fr. Walsh died June 2, 1933, and Fr. William Gough was appointed pastor. No less than five wardens’ meetings were convened in 1934 to deal mainly with building issues.
The roof of the basement church – barely six years old – had started to leak. The wardens naturally concluded: instead of repairing the basement roof, erect the upper church and install a proper roof.
Fr. Gough now made the second petition in six years for permission to erect the superstructure. But the request was again denied for good reason. The parish was barely generating $5,000 annually in surplus funds, all of which was needed to pay the present debt.
In April 1936, Fr. Gough also died. He was succeeded by Fr. William Ryan on May 22, a tough Irishman, known to speak his mind but reportedly much-appreciated by the parishioners. It was time to “batten the hatches,” and Fr. Ryan was up to the task, shepherding Holy Family through the darkest times of the 20th century.
It was the height of the Great Depression – when one in five Canadians were surviving on government relief programs – followed by the tumultuous years of the Second World War. Although times were tough, Holy Family still contributed to a diocesan-supported fund to operate a summer Catholic boys camp, Camp Orelda, that had started in 1927.
The war put most new construction on the back burner – building a church was out of the question – but employment soared and the economy recovered. So did parish revenues.
By the end of 1939, it had taken Holy Family Parish a decade to generate a grand surplus – after debt payments – of only $7,741. The parish was literally “just getting by.” However, by the end of 1949, the parish had amassed a surplus 12 times that amount. With $96,000 in the bank, it used $54,500 to pay down the debt incurred to build the basement church and rectory. Holy Family, now debt-free, started to build its investment fund – totalling $60,000 by 1950 – to construct the upper church.