transformation.”23
VVAs Catholic Action reached its historical zenith in Canada, however, the seeds were sown for a very different type of society in francophone Québec, one that would be revealed more fully by the 1960s, at the first opportunity for liberalization of political leadership, of basic schooling and of the values of the workplace. Religious men and women, many with advanced training, were streaming from the monasteries and convents of Québec and moving unimpeded into positions within the mushrooming public bureaucracies of education and social service, as well as into increasingly broad-based private corporations. They joined there laypersons whose own fidelity to Catholicism encouraged a devotion to constructing the Kingdom of God in the world of mundane affairs. With the onset of the Révolution tranquille, then, the social doctrine of the Church henceforth not only admitted the necessity of an expanded intervention by the State, it even went so far as to encourage lay people to work fervently for it. And so that the laity could make of the State a genuine setting for the embodiment and blossoming of spiritual values, the Church gave up its drive to influence temporal structures directly.
VVThe sociological irony of Québec’s secularization thus came to a proper fruition: it was not at the hands of modern doubters and scoffers at religion that the core of Québec society was evacuated of the Catholic Church’s once-dominant presence, but rather through the faith-filled intentions of religious-motivated and socially-committed Catholic laypersons and of onetime professional operatives of the Church itself. The knowledge of coordination; the facility with organizational personnel, funding, and communications; and the skill at administration that time spent in Catholic associations (and, to a different degree, in Catholic communities of men and women) had bestowed on the faithful were all transferable assets. They constituted a kind of human capital that, when eventually cashed, dislodged the Catholic Church from its paramount position in Québec society.
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8823. “Vous êtes persuadés que le repli du clergé hors des responsabilités temporelles qui ne sont pas les siennes entrainera fatalement l’annulation pratique de toute vie religieuse. Nous estimons au contraire que Église québécoise a besoin d’abandonner un rôle qui n’est pas le sien pour retrouver son vrai sens et qu’elle sortira plus grande de cette transformation.” Quoted in Meunier and Warren, Sortir de la “Grande noirceur,” p. 158.
8823.
8824.