All these comments read and heard on the Catholic religion in French-speaking Quebec for two weeks made me want to taste moments of silent interiority. Because the blunders and the presumed intentions of those who valued this hated heritage, François Legault at the head, seemed to me to take from the tree which hides the forest. The comments of each other awakened above all the enormous trauma, never resorbed, of Catholicism in our lands. With collective shame and the desire to bury him forever without burial or cross on it, like a vampire pierced with a stake.
There is something to moan about. The domination of the clergy was married to an ignorance which ensured the docility of the people. We think of all these poor women, exhausted by too many deliveries, in families unable to meet the needs of new mouths to feed, compelled by their priests to “conjugal duty” by reciting their rosary during the act. To this specter of hell brandished over everyone’s head. Without forgetting the victims of religious abuse, themselves frustrated to the last degree.
Peoples, like individuals with respect to childhood, have a hard time with the past, whatever it is, in fact. The fact remains that native Quebecers were drooling over it before the Quiet Revolution which emptied its churches. Enough to look askance at its naves and steeples. To this precious heritage stubbornly remembered, it is difficult to find new vocations, for lack of measuring its full value, under the charge of furious affects.
However, the mentalities of yesteryear have spread to the generations below, including anti-intellectualism, survivor of sermons against free thinkers. Among contemporary lay people, small priests and good nuns who ignore each other blow an intolerance of tradition. Ingrained prejudices such as the fear of “the other” remain unidentified for lack of tracing their sources. As for misogyny, much of it stems from the teachings of the Church Fathers, passed down to generations of worshipers, and then to their children down to the present day.
Such blockages, certainly justifiable, prevent many compatriots from getting to know each other. The legacies of Catholicism, even hidden, remain in our minds, with their blindness as well as their aspirations for something more, of the order of spirituality and ethics, rejected however by many, because associated with the old dogmas. The best film on the transmissions between the Catholic heritage and secular thought is in my opinion The Novena, of Bernard Émond, who reconciled without judging them believers and heretics.
Have French-speaking Quebecers retained in their mores a sense of solidarity from the religious core, as Mathieu Bock-Côté believed in his shocking writing retweeted by the Prime Minister? Not sure ! Ambient individualism seems to crush everything. But it is true that in the past, in the countryside, village corvées were organized into parishes to rebuild burnt barns and help neighbors build houses. In addition, the French language was preserved with the support of the clerical authorities who found there a force of cohesion. The monks and nuns taught it, ironically, in the schools much better than today. In their ranks, real bastards rubbed shoulders with people of great devotion, as everywhere. As for the archives of old congregations, they are full of wonderful stories about New France and the links of the sons and daughters of Europeans with the Aboriginal peoples, shedding light on ancient times.
We wish many Quebecers to one day make peace with this long episode of Catholicism, because the rejection has unfortunately led to it! a break with the whole of the past. The knowledge of fabulous folklore, nourished by French songs with numerous refrains adapted to the territory of spinets (on Irish violins), suffered from this thread severed during the Quiet Revolution. National history, often badly taught, would interest the population more without this resentment against the clergy pegged to memories. To delve into the many historical works available in libraries and bookstores is to revel in the trajectories of various peoples on the same land.
Legacies convey a living culture in the psyches, although denied very loudly. However, to carry several generations while turning the back to them, it is to deprive the young people to collect the gleams. Accepting the religious past as historical reality would not turn atheists into devout Catholics or erase their grievances. But it would help to connect to the chain of filiations with its colonialism, its abuses, its received ideas, its submissions, its revolts and its roots. All survivals to be deciphered in us.