Leader, Volume 14 #6

Quebec's Church after the Revolution

When I was growing up in the small town of Temiscaming, Quebec, I lived in many cultural worlds--though I only partly knew it at the time. The guys who played ball hockey in the back lane were a mix of Protestants and Catholics. We Anglophones went to different schools and churches but most other things we did were the same. Crossing language lines, we all played on the same hockey, baseball and football teams and we were with our French friends in Scouts. But the main thing we English-speaking Catholic kids shared with our French-speaking friends was church.

In our church in the forties and fifties, the two languages and even the religious sensibilities (French and mainly Irish) danced a delicate pas de deux that gave me what I now see as my first experience of ecumenism. I was well into my boyhood before I knew that the great Christmas song "Minuit chrétien" sung every year by the town's favourite French tenor just before Midnight Mass actually had an English version. I can remember what felt even then like "French excesses" in the emotion and panoply we Catholics brought to the Corpus Christi procession. We wound our way through town wrapped in coloured costumes, clouds of incense and mournful, triumphal French songs--with our Protestant friends staring as though we had come from another planet. Although we were supposed to be proud of our faith in this grand gesture, I felt strangely uncomfortable with the in-your-face drama that highlighted our differences from half our town. But it was us. And "us" was strongly defined by the Catholicism that had formed the very identity of Quebec for its entire 350 years of existence.

It is no secret that things have changed. The Quiet Revolution, defined most perceptibly by the motto "Maîtres chez nous," launched a project that invited self-assertion as well as self-questioning to penetrate to the core of Quebec identity. For some churchwatchers, it seemed as though Quebec had begun its own French Revolution: hostile to religion and its claims to authority while engaging with exhilaration in the new project of building a society with humanistic and even secular energies. Almost in a flash, the church seemed to be resented, rejected and--worse--insignificant.

Is this really a fair reading? Or is it a gross simplification of a hugely rich, complex and even promising phase in the life of the church in Quebec? Even as this issue of Compass was being prepared for press, the polled response to the commission on "dereligifying" schools in Quebec was showing from 65 to 75 per cent of Quebec's people saying they did not want religion removed entirely from their schools. Is this nostalgia? Or is it the sign of a deeper, perhaps purified religious sentiment? Do many Quebecers possibly feel that the exclusively "humanistic" principles recommended by the commission in the name of respecting social pluralism will remove the spiritual compass by which they and their children know how to make the new society just and caring?

Several writers in this issue offer a taste of the hopes and struggles at work in the much humbled and reduced but vibrant church in Quebec. What comes through is the image of a church very much alive to the needs of the people and closer now to the heart of the Gospel message. It is a church that with less volume and less status but no less conviction can offer to its people the eternal Christmas wish of the angels: "Glory to God in the highest, and peace to all people of good will."