Canada, A Priest And The Curling Club

By Geraldine Brodnitzki

When driving east on Route 44, the town of Norfolk is announced by the imposing pink stucco church (attributed in part to Alfredo Taylor), which houses the Immaculate Conception Church. The church, originally a small, white, wooden building, was consecrated in 1890.

In recent history, the priest of Immaculate Conception Church [ICC] was Father Brian Jeffries. Within a month of his recent untimely death, the church began a search for a replacement. Friar Iain Highet, a newcomer to Norfolk, became the new parish priest.

Fr. Highet also officiates at ICC’s partner church, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Canaan, Since there is a general shortage of Roman Catholic priests, churches of the same denomination often share clergy. On his first day of work, Highhet celebrated mass in Norfolk. Loyal congregants included not only parishioners from both churches, but also from two prior churches in which he has served.

Father Highet was born in Toronto to Scottish parents in 1965 and was raised in the Presbyterian/United Church of Christ tradition. His father moved the family many times for work and, while young Iain was unable to move all of his possessions from home to home, he was able to take his two passions, sports and nature, with him. In Nova Scotia he became proficient at ice hockey, which presented a conflict with church attendance , as the team held practices on Sundays.

While his enthusiasm for sports did not prepare him for a life in the clergy, his affinity with nature did. An itinerant adventurer, Highet worked on a small oil tanker, sailing up and down the St. Lawrence River and into remote sections of northern Quebec Province. There the inhabitants would trade handmade caribou leather work for staples with the 15-man tanker crew.

Highet went on to complete an undergraduate degree in Communications from Concordia, a Jesuit University, in Montreal. In his senior year a philosophy professor asked what he planned to do at graduation? He stammered, “I’m not sure..advertising?.…grad school?….produce rock videos?…” The professor suggested a yearlong monastic internship program at the Benedictine Abbey of Regina Laudis in Bethlehem, Conn.., which Highet entered at age 22.

This career choice was a pivotal point in Highet’s life. “I loved the abbey’s rhythm of life, living in natural surroundings and the fact that around me were the happiest people I’d ever met. That’s what made me want to become a Catholic — to enter the Church.”
Teaching at a Montessori School in Bridgewater, Conn. followed, as did returning to Canada for a three year graduate program in Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. His thesis explored water stewardship in a Benedictine monastery. Merging his two callings, he returned to the Bethlehem abbey to implement water quality designs and as an environmental consultant. At the abbey, his calling to the priesthood emerged. On May 14, 2011, one day shy of his 46th birthday, he was ordained a priest in the Archdiocese of Hartford. After serving as chaplain in the Hartford area, he was ultimately assigned to lead the catholic church in an unfamiliar location, Norfolk, Conn.

Ironically, Fr. Highet was unaware that he already had made a bond with Norfolk. Before assuming his new post he travelled to Scotland to visit his 98 year old grandmother, perhaps for the last time. While there he made a short day trip to the Island of Great Cumbrae,a remote spot where the granite for curling stones is quarried. Little did he know at the time that he would soon be blessing the ice at the Norfolk Curling Club upon their grand opening.