Catholic identity and insist on Catholic religious education for their children.35 Other remnants of the Catholicism persist. Municipalities, for example, are still widely referred to as paroisses (parishes). Every saint, no matter how obscure, has a village or street named for him or her, from Cléophas to Tharcisius. The national holiday is officially known as la Fête nationale, but only bureaucrats, TV announcers and politicians call it that. To everyone else, it is still la Saint-Jean Baptiste. If a person takes a walk around Québec’s legislature, they will find plenty of Roman Catholic symbols too: the white cross on the Québec flag, the statues of missionaries – there is even a chapel a stone’s throw away from the Premier’s office, in a government building. Mass for civil servants is held there twice a week. Even inside the legislature itself, a crucifix hangs in the Blue Room, right above the Speaker’s Chair. It dates back to 1936, when Premier Duplessis decided to symbolically seal the bond between the government and the Catholic Church.
VVThe aftermath of Révolution’s transition is highly visible in the reduced position of the Roman Catholic Church in contemporary Québec. Over time, the Church and its ubiquitous functionaries had consumed so much of the active space in the civil realm that for them, under pressure from an elite laity who had succeeded in mastering much of the same secular expertise, no measured withdrawal from power was possible. Instead, the retreat, while orderly, verged on the total, and a virtually complete cave-in of traditional structures ensued, leading to the dismal fate of institutional religion in the province today. Interestingly, Québec’s historical struggle with the Church is akin to many other Western societies of lapsed Catholics, which still show somewhat of an attachment to religious traditions without necessarily embracing the doctrine itself. As Charles Taylor writes in A Stillborn God, the most secular societies in the West also “retain the vestigial public reference to God in public space.” Québec is no less an exception.
124
8835. Micheline Milot, “Le catholicisme au creuset de la culture," Studies in Religion, 20, no. 1, (1991) : pp. 51-64.