This is a question that we can ask ourselves at the time of the great religious festivals, and Easter is one, and for many, the most beautiful, because there we celebrate the resurrection of Christ and the victory over death: what remains- is there Catholicism in Quebec?
We have long been a believing people: Catholicism structured our mental universe and our collective existence. Catholicism was the matrix of our culture.
This is obviously no longer the case. The Church had certainly abused its privileges, linked to the Conquest.
Rituals
Catholicism took the edge with the Quiet Revolution.
Quebecers have even developed through their traumatic experience with the Church a form of deep aversion to religion itself.
But the human being is a religious being. He needs, even if he doesn’t put it that way, to believe in something that goes beyond him.
- Listen to Mathieu Bock-Côté’s editorial via QUB :
He needs to mark the major stages of existence with rituals which place him in the continuity of time, where he will find traces of his ancestors and certain traditions to pass on to those who follow him.
I also note that the end of religion was not accompanied by the end of belief. But man in search of meaning began to believe in anything.
Crystals, talismans, guardian angels, the new spiritualism often takes the form of a naive religion.
Nostalgia
Conversely, and whatever the vulgate of present times says, Catholicism was very philosophically structured. It is obviously based on an act of faith, but he has developed, over the centuries, a detailed knowledge of the complexities of the human soul, and the rituals he offers respond to this.
It could be that Quebecers, by brutally denying their Catholicism, have lost something essential.
It is not without reason that they sometimes express a dull nostalgia for it.