Feature Article

Founded on faith

Quebec was built on Catholicism, and then in the 1960s appeared to reject it. Many thought the faith had been consigned to history, but today it is putting out new shoots and next year's Eucharistic Congress may help promote a significant revival

The Ursuline Museum in Quebec City has on display a belt made by the sisters in the seventeenth century. It emulates belts created by the native people the sisters encountered in New France. But the Ursuline sisters have adapted the traditional technique, replacing shellfish beads with glass beads imported from Europe, making the belts much lighter and less cumbersome to wear.

This blend of cultures, distilling what is best from each, encapsulates what the French, particularly the religious orders coming to the New World, attempted to do in the region. Although it is clear that the French considered themselves superior to the indigenous people (evident in their description of the native people as "savages"), instead of the brutal assimilation or annihilation carried out by the English and Spanish on the native people further south, the French tried to operate a healthier system of exchange and profit.

As Quebec City prepares to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of its foundation next year, there is an effort under way to remind the province of its ancestry and in particular to awaken pride for the role the Church played in the early days. For though social commentators assert that modern Quebec is one of the most secular places on earth, one does not have to bore deep to expose a rich seam of Catholic heritage. Just last week, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Archbishop of Quebec, defended the role of religion in the province, telling a commission set up to soothe tensions over multiculturalism that modern social problems in Quebec were due to the decline of Catholicism.

The French explorer Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec City in 1608, more than 70 years after the first Frenchman had set foot in the region. The French relied on the indigenous people as partners in the brisk trade in beaver furs, while the natives themselves began to use European innovations such as metal tools and weapons.

Professor Dominique Deslandres, an historian at the Université de Montreal, describes the relationship between the early French settlers and the Indians as one of mutually exploitative symbiosis.

"The Indians were essential to the French here," she says. "Without them they could not get to the fur and trade. The Indians who converted to Christianity became French subjects with all the rights that that brings. The idea was to blend the peoples into one French Catholic people, a fusion of their respective best qualities, in order to provide the French king and Church with good subjects. That did not happen when the English were the invaders - where a good Indian was a dead Indian."

The first missionary arrived in 1615 and for the next century religious orders tried to impose Christianity on the various tribes in the region, such as the Algonquin, the Naskapis, the Huron and the Micmacs. In 1642 what is now the vibrant city of Montreal was founded as a deprived missionary outpost, a base from which to convert the native people.

One of the earliest missionaries and women to come to Quebec was Marie de L'Incarnation, an Ursuline sister, who remains one of the best-known names in early Canadian history. She set up a monastery and school in Quebec City, learned three aboriginal languages and compiled dictionaries to promote the cross-cultivation of cultures.

An exchange system was also established whereby young Indian girls would go to the Ursuline nuns to be educated, which would guarantee French protection for their tribe, while young French girls would go to live with Indian families to learn the indigenous languages and cultures.

Guy Laperrière, Professor of History at the University of Sherbrooke, says that one of the problems for today's Church is the perception that Catholic missionaries behaved badly towards the native people of Quebec. "In particular the adoption of little native girls and boys is denounced today and public opinion is very severe against the Church," he says.

The missionaries also discovered that the project of blending the two societies had its shortcomings, since the French were adopting the habits of the "savages". They therefore tended to segregate the two societies, in order also to protect the native people from the influence of those among the French who were judged bad Christians.

In the first part of the seventeenth century it was Jesuit missionaries who held the monopoly over the religious identity of the region. In 1657 a group of Sulpicians arrived in Montreal, shortly followed by Quebec's first bishop, François Laval, who wielded enormous social and political power, even though when he arrived there were only around 2,000 French people in the entire vast territory of Canada.

It would be wrong to give the impression that the newcomers never clashed with the indigenous people in Quebec. Five missionaries who died at the hands of the people they were attempting to convert are today revered as martyrs. Meanwhile, the indigenous population was devastated by diseases brought by the newcomers. In the 1660s, in a letter to her son in France, Marie de L'Incarnation said that of every 100 Indians she had met when she first arrived in Canada, there was now only one left.

When the Province of Quebec became a British colony under the Treaty of Paris in 1763 it was difficult for the Church to operate with the same freedom that it had previously enjoyed. Catholicism was suppressed in post-Reformation England and the first Governor of Quebec, James Murray, was instructed to establish English laws and the Anglican Church in the region. However, Murray realised the importance of the Catholic clergy to social order and formed an alliance with the Church. Church influence was later fully re-established in what Professor Deslandres describes as a religious reawakening, with the next 100 years representing a "golden age of French Canadian Catholicism". In 1851 there were 41,464 Catholics in the city of Montreal and by 1891 this had more than tripled.

"From the seventeenth century, language, religion and customs are seen as a whole," she says. "Religion was part of being a French settler in Canada - you couldn't be French Canadian without being Catholic."

The man responsible for this, according to Professor Deslandres, was the Bishop of Montreal, Ignace Bourget, "who set up 100 years' worth of French Catholicism in Quebec". However, Quebec was not immune to the secularist, anti-authoritarian movements that swept through the Western world in the 1960s. In Quebec this era came to be known as the Quiet Revolution, and involved the wholesale rejection of traditional Catholic values and the rise of the state as the most important influence on people's lives.

But the residue left by 350 years of church activity can be seen on every street in every town in the province. Street names betray it, as does the proliferation of churches. The clustering of parishes and closing of churches is a regular occurrence in Quebec, but Fr Luc Lantagne, of the Salesians of Don Bosco in Montreal, says that the people of the province, even those who have forsaken Catholicism, have formed a great attachment to the church buildings. "People don't like seeing their churches becoming restaurants. They were often built by the poor before the war - families gave what they could contribute towards building them and their descendants are upset when those buildings are not dealt with respectfully."

To the indigenous people who were so important to the founding of Quebec this new age has not been kind. Now known as First Nations people, they number around 58,000 and live on reservations where they struggle to keep their distinctive cultures and languages alive. Too often these communities are blighted by dependence on drugs or alcohol and relations with the Canadian state are strained.

Naturally, it is planned that the First Nations people will play a significant role in the celebrations to mark the fourth centenary of the founding of Quebec. Likewise, the diocese of Quebec is eager to play its part, hosting the International Eucharistic Congress, a gathering of 15,000 Catholics from around the world in June. Forty-five cardinals have already accepted their invitations and Cardinal Ouellet is expected to receive the Pope's reply when he meets him on 27 November.

Mgr Jean Picher is in charge of organising the congress. He says that it was natural that the Church should play a significant role in the centenary celebrations. "The religious history of Quebec is really the social history as well," he explains. "Society has changed a lot here but we feel people should be reminded of their past. We should be proud of our heritage, and faith is an essential component of this. I'm not saying that we're expecting everyone to be converted to the Church next year, but it's important that religion plays its role in our celebrations."

Cardinal Marc Ouellet is more confident still, saying that he believes that religion is simply going through a period of hibernation in the province. "We are close to a renaissance in Quebec," he insists. "We had a sacramental culture and it's been removed but there's nothing to replace it. There will be a moment of return and this moment has come. The Eucharistic Congress will give an impulse for the development of recapturing our identity with a pride in our heritage."