The abandoned church where outsider contemporary art found a home

This story originally appeared on November 13, 2025 in URBANIA, an online magazine based in Quebec focused on pop culture and society.

I pull over on Mansonville’s main street, a village tucked up against the American border. It has that old, quiet comfort of the Eastern Townships, with wooden porches, frayed flags and time stretching itself thin.

A friend tipped me off about the place. An art gallery hidden inside an old church, right next to an abandoned restaurant. From the outside, nothing remarkable. And yet, behind those well-behaved walls, something is going on.

Same steeple, same immaculate façade as all those little churches you pass along country roads. Same state of abandonment, for lack of parishioners. Except this one was resurrected in 2017 by Patrick Cady, a French psychoanalyst living in Montreal. People come here, they say, to discover “his finds.”