Excerpt from A Sketch of the Life of the Honourable and Right Reverend Alexander Macdonell: Chaplain of the Glengarry Fencible of British Highland Regiment, First Catholic Bishop of Upper Canada, and a Member of the Legislative Council of the Province

But the exact date and exact place of his birth are of no very great importance. It is of the great use he made of the life God gave him, of the talents and great parts with which he was so liberally endowed, of his usefulness to the Church of his forefathers, of his stalwart loyalty to his Sovereign, of his services to his adopted country, and of the all-abiding love he bore his Scottish fellow-countrymen - that we have to do.

His parents were respectable people of Glengarry's clan - of much the same class and walk in life as those of that other great Scottish-Canadian of his own time, his colleague in the Legislative Council and intimate friend of many years, Bishop Strachan, the head and front in this Province of the Anglican Church, as Bishop Macdonell was of that to which he belonged. They were people who were unable to give their children any great advantages in a worldly point of view, but who instilled into them from the cradle those great principles which became of themselves a heritage of inestimable value, and of which both so largely availed themselves to the benefit of the flock over which were respectively called upon in time to become the shepherds in a common and far distant country.

Being destined for the Church, and there being no Catholic Colleges in Scotland at the time, Mr. Macdonell was at an early age first sent to the Scottish College in Paris, and subsequently to the Scots' College at Valladolid in Spain. While in Paris, the student at his Seminary were on one occasion brought from their peaceful retreat by some revolutionary enthusiasts and forced to dance around a Liberty Pole. Mr. Macdonell, who in early life, as in more mature age, was an ardent Royalist, was much shocked at such an outrageous proceeding, and with a ready wit bound a handkerchief around his knee and feigning lameness, thus managed to escape the threatened indignity.

He was ordained Priest at Valladolid, in Spain, on February 16th, 1787, and on leaving there returned to Scotland, and was stationed as a Missionary Priest in the Braes of Lochaber, where he remained for several years.

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