Archbishop-designate Charles Duval, CSsR looks back on three decades of priesthood

On Feb. 14th Fr. Charles Duval, CSsR was appointed to be the Coadjutor Archbishop of Grouard-McLennan.

When Archbishop Pettipas retires later this year, Archbishop-designate Duval will automatically become the new archbishop and shepherd of this archdiocese. He is stepping into this most pivotal role after 32 years of priesthood, missionary work, and leadership experience.

Born in Hull (now Gatineau), Québec on April 12th, 1964, Duval is the eldest of three siblings. His family was raised in the Catholic faith, and it was in his early teens that the possibility of religious life first entered his mind. At that time, his family attended a Dominican-run chapel at Stanford University in the U.S., where his father was completing his PhD.

“The first time I really thought I could become a priest was when I was 13-years-old,” Duval said. “We were at the Dominican chapel for the Easter Triduum and they had invited their novices and those aspiring to become Dominicans. Some were really young, and looking at them I realized ‘Oh, I could be a Dominican too.’

“But then, as they always say, girls took over.”

The calling to priesthood did not expand beyond that initial thought until several years later, when Duval was 19. He was in a committed relationship at the time, but in his prayer life thoughts about the possibility of priesthood came back very strongly. He felt that he had to at least pursue the calling a little more, lest he spend his life regretting that he never took those thoughts in prayer any further.

So Charles went to see his pastor at the time, who was a member of the Congregation of the Holy Redeemer (better known as the Redemptorists), to get his advice.

“I told him, ‘I’m thinking that I may be called to the priesthood’. And he said, ‘Oh. What kind of priest?’ And I said, ‘Oh… There are different kinds?’” Fr. Charles recalled with a laugh. “I didn’t realize at that time that there were diocesan priests and priests that were religious. So I just said, ‘Well, I want to be a priest like you!’”

From there, Duval received the phone number of the Redemptorists’ Vocations Director, and he scheduled to meet him in Quebec City.

Ultimately, this decision would forever change the direction of his life. He was drawn to the charism of the Redemptorists, and began his novitiate in Saine-Anne-de- Beaupré, Québec in 1985. He made his first profession of vows on August 4th of the following year. He was ordained to the diaconate by Bishop Clément Fecteau in 1992.

At that time, Charles felt a strong calling to missionary life – which was partly what drew him to his formation with the Redemptorists in the first place.

After his ordination as a deacon, he had the opportunity to serve as a missionary in Haiti for nine months. It was a very powerful experience for Duval, but, because of the extreme heat in Haiti, he got very ill over those nine months.

When he returned to Canada in 1993 to prepare for his ordination to the priesthood, Charles was initially expected to go back to Haiti afterwards to continue his missionary work. But given the ill health he endured there, his superiors decided it was best for him to remain in Canada. Although Fr. Charles never returned to Haiti as a missionary, that zeal and calling to the missionary life never went away.

In his first years as a priest, Duval was given a particularly formative experience as an associate pastor in Hamilton, Ontario, at Notre-Dame-du-Perpétuel-Secours Parish. Unexpectantly, this first assignment plunged him into youth ministry – a ministry that would define his early years of priesthood.

“That for me was a very good learning experience,” Fr. Charles recalled. “We had organized a meeting with all of the heads of the ministries in the parish. And they asked at this meeting, ‘What do you think your parish needs the most?’ And every one of them responded that we need something for the youth. And every time this was said the pastor would look over at him, gesturing that I should take this on. So I ended up working mostly with the youth and teenagers of the parish.

“Before this, I had some experience working with young people, because when you’re a young religious they always try to put you with the teenagers and young adults, but not all that much.”

Fr. Charles soon discovered that many of the youth at Notre-Dame-du-Perpétuel-Secours had been going to youth groups at other Christian churches in the area. He also learned that the opportunity to travel abroad as missionaries was something these youth were particularly drawn to.

“In these churches they would take a mission trip to other countries, share their faith, help their communities, and so forth. And we thought ‘Let’s do that too’,” Fr. Charles recalled. “But we couldn’t plan to go to other countries right away, so we looked at doing mission trips here in Canada. It had such an effect on the young people here, and these were really good experiences for me in my first years as a priest.”

In those initial “mission trips”, Fr. Charles and a group of young parishioners travelled to isolated areas in Northern Ontario, Newfoundland and Quebec. After building up this youth ministry for five years, Fr. Charles was then asked to build larger youth ministry efforts for the Redemptorists. He served as Director of the Redemptorist Youth Mission Team from 1998-2000, and then as the Director of Redemptorist Youth and Vocational Ministry from 2002-2008.

After his time in youth ministry, Duval became the local superior and pastor of the Marie-Étoile-de-la-Mer Pastoral Unit in the Diocese of Bathurst, New Brunswick, from 2008-2011. He was then vice-rector at the Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré Shrine from 2011 to 2015. Duval was elected as the Provincial Superior of the Province of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in 2015, followed by an appointment as the Provincial Superior of the newly unified Province of Canada in 2019.

His two terms as Provincial Superior were particularly challenging. When Duval took over the Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré Province, the province had just come out of a class action lawsuit related to abuse at the Séminaire Saint-Alphonse, which was run by Redemptorists. Also at this time, the Redemptorists saw a significant decline in their membership due to the death of many elderly priests. At the start of his term with the Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré Province, Fr. Charles notes that there were 92 Redemptorist priests in the province, but by the end of his term they were down to 68.

Then, when he became the first Provincial Superior for the newly unified Canadian Province, the COVID-19 pandemic began, bringing with it strict and constantly-changing restrictions on the celebration of Mass and other activities related to the life of the Church.

Yet, when reflecting on these two difficult terms, the bishop-designate says the lesson he ultimately took away is this: “God is faithful”. This lesson had much to do with the years before Fr. Charles became Provincial Superior, which he came to recognize were God’s way of preparing him for these great challenges.

This is only an excerpt. Read the full story in the March 2025 edition of Northern Light