Canada's Religions: An Historical Introduction

11. The Churches and the State

CHAPTER 11 The Churches and the State During the first half of the nineteenth century, while the Catholic and Protestant missionary agencies were launching their initial campaigns, the main Christian churches in Canada underwent significant structural changes and rapid development. At the beginning of 1800, only the Catholic Church had large numbers of faithful, some 140,000, mainly in Quebec. In the Maritime colonies as in Upper Canada, settlement of any importance was just getting underway, while only a handful of fur traders and their scattered Amerindian clients inhabited the vast Northwest. By mid-century however, the situation had changed dramatically. In a total population of just over 2.3million people, there were 983,680 Catholics and 965,055 Protestants belonging to the four leading traditions that were, in order of numerical representation: Presbyterian (310,512), Anglican (303,897), Methodist (258,1570), and Baptist (92,489). In addition, the Protestant group included a number of other small denominations that came to Canada after the War of 1812; these included Universalists, Unitarians, Mormons, Disciples ofChrist, and the Catholic Apostolic Church or Irvingites. When the members of all Protestant denominations are taken into account, Canada harboured six Protestants for every four Catholics in 1850. It was during this period that the relationship between thechurches and the state was radically transformed. Whereas in 1800 the laws in all of the colonies that made up Canada either formally established or favoured the establishment of the Church of England as the state religion and discouraged other forms of Christianity, by the midnineteenth century most official ties between churches and governments had been severed. 206 Canada's Religions The structure and development of the churches During the first half of the nineteenth century, the accelerated growthof the population in allthe British colonies that would later becomeCanada was accompanied by rapid development and important organizational changes in the churches. Leading the movement were the Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Presbyterians, and the Methodists. Simultaneously, several denominations underwent an institutional fragmentation driven by diverse regional, theological, and spiritual factors. The Roman Catholic Church Canada's sole diocese of Quebec was unable to divide into several jurisdictions until the close of the War of 1812. The main obstacle to the earlier creation of more dioceses and bishops was the obstruction of British authorities who, after 1793, were subjected to the constant pressure of the Church of England's founding bishop, Jacob Mountain of Quebec; he sought the implementation of the Crown's official policyof making the Church of England into Quebec's established church, a policy that had always remained a dead letter. However, the Catholic Church's manifest loyalty to the British Crown, particularly during the War of 1812, ensured a change of heart by London. Beginning in 1817, a series of new Catholic ecclesiastical jurisdictions were authorized, new apostolic vicariates, districts, and dioceses that by mid-century would encompass all of British North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Government support for the growing number of bishops would be reinforced by their continuing loyalty to the British Crown during the rebellion of 1837-1838 in Lower Canada. By mid-century, the former solitary but immense diocese ofQuebec had been subdivided into more than a dozen dioceses, each headed by a bishop responsible for nurturing a growing flock. Upon his retirement in 1784, Bishop Briand had been succeeded in turn by L.-P.-F. Mariauchau Desgly (1784-1788), Jean-Franc.ois Hubert (1788-1797),PierreDenaut (1797-1806), and Joseph-Octave Plessis (18061825 ). They directed a diocese of Quebec whose Catholic population had doubled from 70,000 to 140,000 during the thirty years between 1760 and 1790, and would more than double again in the subsequent thirty years, to surpass 400,000 faithful by 1820. However, during the same period their diocese suffered from a diminishing number ofclergy. The Churches and the State 207 Indeed,the number ofpriestshad diminished by 25% between 1760 and 1790, dropping from 196to 146, a diminishing ratio of priests to faithful that went from one priest for every 350Catholics to one priest for every 1,000. Concerned as they were with their diminishing number of church workers, the successive bishops of Quebec were just as concerned by the sustained efforts of some of the colonial officials to put the Catholic Church on a British government leash. Indeed, since his arrival on 1 November 1793, JacobMountain, founding bishop of...