capital that, when eventually cashed, dislodged the Catholic Church from its paramount position in Québec society.
VVMany social institutions experienced transformation due the Révolution. No longer, then, was the power to define and to alter Québec’s culture lodged exclusively in the Catholic Church. In the eyes of countless observers and commentators, the power to interpret Québec’s provincial patrimony and to address its national destiny belonged to the new experts of a government and a private sector that spread in tandem throughout the middle part of the twentieth century. “The great majority of the architects and implementers of Québec’s entrance into the modern world and prosperity…are also the principal people responsible for the considerable weakening of the very institution that put them into the world,” namely the Roman Catholic Church.24
VI. EVIDENCE OF A DECLINING FAITH WITH HALLOWED RESIDUE
VVOn the surface, the Catholic Church in Québec felt the effects of an astonishing pattern of ‘secularization’ after the 1960s. The internal records of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops show that, between 1966 and 1988, the number of diocesan priests in Québec decreased by more than one quarter, from approximately 8,800 to 6,400.25 By 2005, they numbered 2,700. The same trend has occurred among the religious orders for both men and women. Ordinations, which hit their high point in 1963, when 127 priests were consecrated for Québec, dwindled to the degree that in 1988, merely seventeen men received holy orders.26
VVMoreover, in the last fifty years, rates of participation in religious services have declined everywhere in Canada. A Gallup Poll conducted in 1946 found that two-thirds (67 per cent) of Canadian adults attended religious worship in a typical week, but a similar survey in 1996 showed that this proportion had dropped to 20 per cent.[3] Over the decade separating 1988 and 1998, those who attended church at least once per month fell from 41 to 34 per cent of the Canadian adult population.[4] This dissipation of devotion was especially acute in Québec, where monthly attendance plummeted from 48 per cent in 1986 to 29 per cent by 1998.[5]
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8824. Alain Chanlat and Renée Bédard, “Managing in the Québec Style: Originality and Vulnerability,” International Studies of Management and Organization 21 (September 1991), p. 29.
8825. Jacques Legare, “Les religieuses du Canada : Leur évolution numérique entre 1965 et 1980,” Recherches sociographiques 10 (janvier-avril 1969), pp. 7-21.
8826. Gary Caldwell and Madeleine Gauthier, “Religious Institutions,” in Langlois et al., Recent Social Trends in Québec, pp. 317-18 and pp. 322-23.