The Church Confronts Modernity church confronts modernity: Catholicism since 1950 in the United States, Ireland, and Quebec

2. “They Are Not of Our Generation”: Youth,Gender, Catholicism, and Quebec’s Dechristianization, 1950–1970

M i c h a e l Ga u v r e a u 2. “They Are Not of Our Generation” Youth, Gender, Catholicism, and Quebec’s Dechristianization, 1950–1970 They have organized many frequent communions,    Many stations of the cross. They have turned the Temple of God into a collection    Of clowns, of eloquent puppets, What a bunch of fussy little panty-waists! One of the most compelling problems of postwar Canadian history was the devastating evisceration of Quebec’s Catholic identity in the space of one short decade between 1961 and 1971. In 1961 fewer than 6,500 Quebecers (less than 1 percent) declared themselves to be unbelievers, and Sunday observance, even in the highly urbanized region of Montreal, stood at 61 percent. However, by 1971, Sunday attendance in Montreal had fallen catastrophically to only 30 percent, and more troubling still was the fact that it stood at 12–15 percent for young adults aged twenty to thirty-four, raising the prospect that the Church would not be able to replenish either its faithful or its clergy. Equally disturbing was the apparent defection from Catholic teaching governing personal values. Before a series of 62 The chapter title, “Ceux-là ne sont pas de notre génération,” is from Roger Varin, “Quand on se parle ‘En Plein Front,’” Jeunesse, déc. 1937; and “Ils ont organisé beaucoup de communions fréquentes, Beaucoup de chemins de croix. Ils ont fait du Temple un ramassis de polichinelles, de fantoches à grands discours. Tas de femellettes artificielles.” (Ibid.) [end of unnumbered note on chap. Opener] amendments to the federal divorce laws in 1968, there were only 500 divorce proceedings per year in Montreal, but between 1968 and 1972, there were 11,300, settling down after that date to about 500 per month.1 And it must be underscored that these religious changes occurred in a society that displayed, at the end of the Second World War, what was in North America perhaps the most seamless fusion between Catholic values, social practices, and the political order. The weakening of a public culture that synthesized Catholic religion, expansion and promotion of the French language, and nationalism that had served to define Quebec’s place within the wider Canadian federation created a crisis of authority within Quebec , and in so doing, ushered in a long period of instability for Canada as a whole, as illustrated by the series of ongoing referenda, in 1980 and 1995, on the question of Quebec independence. How, then, to interpret this rapid, and extremely devastating, dechristianization ? From one perspective, the events of the 1960s were but the brutal backwash of reality as Quebec experienced in extreme and exaggerated form what other Western societies had been undergoing since the late eighteenth century. This approach, however, tends to deny the cultural and historical specificity of Quebec; worse still, it tends to obscure the significance of those social, cultural, and political factors specific to the post– Second World War era by lumping them all together under the rubric of “secularization.” The rapidity of Quebec’s dechristianization can be traced to the way in which the Church sought to appropriate and direct currents of modernity, in particular, the social and cultural category of “youth” in the early 1930s. In response to the papal encyclical Quadragesimo anno, a number of Quebec bishops imported the method of specialized Catholic Action, which had originated among Belgian and French youth. The novelty of this approach was that an influential type of social Catholicism legitimated the idea that “youth” constituted a separate cultural and moral category in modern society.2 According to a number of influential Cath- “They Are Not of Our Generation” 63 1. For these statistics, see Jean Hamelin and Nicole Gagnon, Histoire du catholicisme québécois: le XXe siecle, tome 2, de 1940 à nos jours (Montréal: Boréal Express, 1984), 277–78. Rates of religious practice in Quebec’s metropolis of Montreal appear much higher than those of a number of large European cities. See, for example, Hugh McLeod, Piety and Poverty : Working-Class Religion in Berlin, London, and New York, 1870–1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1996). 2. Sian Reynolds, France between the Wars (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1996), 51. The cultural notion of a generational divide had developed among young European in- olics, the nature of the relationship between adolescents and their parents was now adversarial in character...