Fact check: Did the Mount Royal cross turn purple when Pope Francis died?

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Montrealers are asking: Did the lights adorning the Mount Royal cross go purple to mark the death of Pope Francis?
The cross certainly looked purple in photos posted to Facebook and Reddit on April 21, the night of the pope's death.
But city officials insist the lights stayed white, making Pope John Paul II's death in 2005 the last time the cross was lit purple after a pope died.
In 2010, the City of Montreal mandated the cross remain white year-round and would no longer change colour to mark the deaths of pontiffs or kings. The rule was an effort to not 'trivialize' the heritage site, according to city spokesperson Camille Bégin, and followed a recommendation from the Table de concertation du Mont-Royal.
So why did Montrealers see a purple cross when Pope Francis died? The Gazette headed up to Mount Royal and noticed the cross wasn't white, but it wasn't quite purple either. Some bulbs shone magenta, others turquoise.
Was the cross purple that night? Sort of — but it always is
The City of Montreal maintains that the lights on the Mount Royal cross were not changed to mark Pope Francis's death on April 21. However, they admitted the photos shared on social media were confusing.
'I'm very puzzled by this photo,' Bégin said after being shown photos of the cross looking purple.
When pressed for an explanation, the city consulted its technicians.
Upon investigation, city representatives found that some of the LED bulbs changed colour due to wear and tear.
'We're currently looking into scenarios to replace the lighting system,' Bégin wrote.
According to Chris Wardell, a lighting technician for Cirque du Soleil, this is a common problem.
Colour-changing LEDs, like the bulbs on the cross, combine three different coloured diodes to create white light or other colours, Wardell explained. The standard LED colour diode combination is red, green and blue, known as RGB.
Over time, the RGB circuits can get 'broken, burnt or old,' and stop working. This changes the colour of light the bulb emits.
'If you have no red but you have blue and green, you'll get a teal. If you have only red and blue, you'll get a purple or a pink, depending on how much blue or how much red,' Wardell said. 'It's about mixing those three colours.'
Wardell said LED bulbs can last tens of thousands of hours, but harsh weather may shorten the lifespan of the colour diodes.
'If you get ice and moisture and then it freezes over the wintertime, that's going to be damage, and wear and tear.'
Multiple cities, multiple explanations
Montreal is not the first city where there were inadvertent changes of colours with LED lights.
In 2022, street lights in Vancouver turned purple because of a manufacturing defect in the bulbs' coating, according to the CBC, creating a 'black light effect' on Vancouver streets.
The same has happened across the United States, including in Florida, Utah, Texas and Massachusetts. According to a report in Scientific American, a peeled coating may have caused the bulbs to turn purple.
Isabelle Lessard, who worked for two decades as a street lighting engineer for Montreal, said there could be multiple explanations for the colourful bulbs on the Mount Royal cross.
She said variations in colour can happen due to differences in the colour rendering index (CRI). If the bulbs have different CRI levels, they can have different hues.
Lessard said Wardell's theory about broken RGB circuits makes sense for colour-changing LED lights, such as the ones on the cross.
Changing rules about the colourful cross
After lights were first added to the cross in 1924, Bégin recalled, the city would occasionally replace the white bulbs with coloured ones to mark special events: purple for the death of a pope, a colour of mourning in the Catholic Church; blue for the 1975 St-Jean-Baptiste celebrations; and yellow for the 1960 Grand Mission, a diocesan celebration in the city.
The old bulbs were replaced in 1992 with an LED fibre-optic system, allowing the cross's colour to be changed without manually swapping bulbs, which Bégin said used to take two hours. The new system was used twice: the cross was lit red during an AIDS awareness march, and purple following the death of John Paul II.
In 2010, the Table de concertation du Mont-Royal passed a resolution that the cross remain permanently lit in white and that no further colour changes be authorized to mark events.
The group argued that changing the cross's colour risked trivializing its symbolic importance and that a strict rule would prevent 'inevitable dissatisfaction resulting from any refusals,' Bégin wrote.
Even though the cross is a religious symbol, Bégin said the decision was unrelated to the laicity of the state.
Until recently, the Mount Royal heritage website indicated that the Mount Royal cross turns purple when a pope dies. Bégin noted this 'didn't help' the confusion about the cross's colour following Pope Francis's death. She said the website has since been corrected.
City spokesperson Julie Bélanger said the 2010 rule change was not widely announced.
'Nobody knew in the city. And for 15 years after that, the website about the cross still reflected the fact that the cross was supposed to change colour when a pope died,' she said.
Société St-Jean-Baptiste de Montréal president Marie-Anne Alepin only learned during an interview with The Gazette that the rule had been changed. She said she wishes the city had been more transparent about the new protocol.
'It's just a matter of informing people and launching a public consultation,' she said.
Alepin recognizes why the city changed its rule. At the same time, she said traditions such as changing the lights purple are a part of the cross's heritage.
'(The cross) represents the francophonie, our history, our baggage. It represents Montreal,' she said.

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