The Catholic religion that I knew as a child still had claims to influence the course of Quebec politics. But she had lost her power, her prestige, her pride and most of her followers.
It was after the Latin Mass, after the Catholic takeover of French education, after the classical colleges. Think that before Roger Gaudry, in 1965, all the rectors of the University of Montreal were “monseigneurs”.
The Quiet Revolution had emptied the churches and since the Cynics, proof had been made that there was nothing more iconoclastic in laughing at priests; the icons had been shattered.
The few clerks who taught me had put away their cassocks, like Father Jean-Baptiste Genest, a disciple of Marie-Victorin, a pedagogue passionate about “natural sciences” who had joined the public network when his “college” for boys had been transformed in a coeducational secondary school. I love birds thanks to him.
My father, 15e of 16 children, and my mother, 2e of 9, had brothers and sisters in “the orders”, like so many Quebec families. Women and men who were among the most talented, the most educated in their families. You could say of my aunts that they could have been CEOs, if they had been born 50 years later. This is often what people say now in an attempt to express their admiration for the intelligence and fearlessness of these women who often spoke three or four languages, drove jeeps into the bush to deliver babies, ran health clinics , were going to teach in makeshift facilities. Maybe so, mind you. But this misses the deep meaning of this commitment.
When one of my aunts died at age 98, I went to that big convent in Quebec with the shiny floors where she ended her days. I remember these hundreds of white heads in meditation for the departure of one of their sisters. One more.
All these lives devoted to the service of others, most of the time the worst taken. Above all, I thought that we had forgotten this gigantic human contribution to our society.
One of the most indecent things I have ever seen is the Vatican Museum, witness to centuries of exploitation. But it is not the clergy who live in episcopal palaces.
The other day my mother told me that another of her sisters – over 90 years old – now for the first time in her life in her convent had her own bathroom.
I have the impression that all that has been retained from Catholicism is the abuse of power by the clergy, colonialism, criminal acts and the equally criminal complacency of the rulers towards pedophiles and sexual aggressors.
Yes, that’s a lot of incriminating evidence.
Also, I am not here making a general eulogy of the Catholic religion. When Mathieu Bock-Côté writes that “Catholicism has also engendered in us a culture of solidarity which distinguishes us on a continental scale”, I wonder what he is talking about. There were progressive currents in the Church, but they were stifled by the conservatism of the leaders. For an Mgr Charbonneau who supported the Catholic unions against the Duplessis power, how many arch-conservative bishops?
Quebec stands out in many ways on the continental scale, but this idea that social solidarity is distinctive, or better still “Catholic”, does not hold water. The co-op movement in rural Western Canada still resonates today – the NDP grew out of it. Many of Pierre Trudeau’s “progressive” political ideas were defended by his mentor Frank Scott, one of the founders of the future NDP, and son of an Anglican priest from Quebec. The North American labor movement is also marked by many Jewish activists. And if “solidarity” rhymed with Catholicism, how to explain social policies in Scandinavia, and the deep social inequalities in several Latin American countries?
Unless we are talking about “national solidarity”: the guardian language of faith, and faith guardian of language, as the saying goes. The pact with “English” power certainly contributed to the survival of “French Canadians”. It should perhaps be remembered that in order to carry out this enterprise of national survival, the Church proceeded to expropriate the body of women. Just last week, an 82-year-old man told me that his mother almost died after her seventh childbirth. The doctor forbade her to have any more children. But the parish priest of Rosemont forbade her to confess when he saw that she had “prevented the family”. She was doomed to a life in hell. She had two more children. Then two miscarriages. She has not lost her faith. But his son loathes priests of all stripes, so to speak.
It is not for nothing that Catholic Quebecers have lost their religion, as REM sang. Let’s just say they got rid of it.
What we have experienced so intensely remains within us. When the whole calendar is marked with religious holidays for centuries, something remains. The landscape of Quebec, like my inner landscape, is forever marked by the Catholic religion. The language, the biblical stories, the life of Jesus, the values of Christianity are inscribed in me in perpetuity, even if I do not practice, even if I do not believe in and do not participate in these rites.
With the passage of time, what was already a spell for me as a child resembles superstitions and antics. But it’s in me. I am a cultural catholic.
The Prime Minister “retweeted” the text of MBC, and fell on it for this hitch to secularism of which he wants to be the champion1.
I have often written: I am opposed to “Law 21” on religious symbols, which for me is a perfect example of “Catholic-secularism”: in the name of neutrality, we affect above all “other” religions, i.e. Islam.
But state neutrality and the legal equality of all religions do not erase history. It is not forbidden to politically underline the dominant religious heritage, the contribution of religious, nor even to say something good about it on Easter Day.
It doesn’t deserve an excommunication.