elective affinity, helped the Québécois to escape from the tutelage of the Church. Throughout this essay it will also become clear that the secularity of contemporary Québec was the culmination of a long and fairly intense course of preparation that was conceived well before the 1960s and, more significantly, that it largely proceeded under the auspices of the Catholic Church itself. Yet, despite the fact that these labours were guided by the Church’s clergy and peopled with its laity, they had the ironic effect of ushering into Québec society the very trends whose results the faithful remnant and their leaders now lament.
I. QUÉBEC'S CATHOLICISM: A PERSISTENT TRADITION
VVCatholicism in Canada evolved over a period of four hundred years, from the inauguration of the first Catholic colony within Canada in 1608 by Samuel de Champlain to the development of missions in the seventeenth century to the aggiornamento of the Vatican II in the twentieth.2 During this extensive period, Canada transformed from what King Louis XIV once described as ‘a few acres of ice and snow,’ to a multicultural country with a firmly rooted Catholic Church. Owing to unwavering evangelization efforts over the centuries, Catholicism currently holds the title as the largest religious denomination in the country.3
VVEver since the English conquest of 1760, the Roman Catholic Church of Québec has been the most important single agency for the defense and perpetuation of French-Canadian heritage in North America. Perhaps in no region of the world had the Church and its representatives been held in as high regard among all elements of the population. Over time, Québec Catholicism, in fact, had been so well adapted to traditional Québec society that when it came to the early twentieth century it was hard for the Church to situate itself in a context of urbanization, industrialization, and secularization of life. In the mid-twentieth century, the Church began to face these same problems which confronted European Catholicism in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Québec was, in a comparative sense, still lagging behind modernity. While Christian citizens of other Western nations met the challenges of industrialization and modernization that came with nation-building, French-Canadian nationalists, at the time, embarked on an aggressive programme of ‘Church-building’ with the goal of creating an Église-nation (nation-Church) rather than a nation-state.
8882. Annette Gagliano, “A Brief History of Evangelization in the Canadian Catholic Church,” Saeculum Undergraduate Academic Journal Vol. 6, No. 2 (2011).
8883. Allan Smith, “Catholicism,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, Web, November 1, 2012.
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