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

1. The Trajectory of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century Quebec

K e v i n J . C h r i s t i a n o 1. The Trajectory of Catholicism in Twentieth-Century Quebec You know, way back, everybody here was Catholic, just as in Spain or Ireland. And then, at a very specific moment—it was during the year 1966—in only a few months, the churches suddenly emptied out. A very strange phenomenon, one that nobody has ever been able to explain. —Father Raymond Leclerc (Gilles Pelletier) in Les invasions barbares (directed by Denys Arcand; Cinémaginaire, 2003).1 In the space of little more than fifty years, between the end of the Second World War and the close of the twentieth century, the Canadian province of Quebec went from being one of the most socially traditional, politically conservative, and religiously devout regions of the developed world to one of the least. Existing explanations for these sweeping changes, for both their breadth and their abruptness, are many and varied. They indict a panoply of vari21 I thank Leslie Woodcock Tentler for her organizational initiative and editorial guidance ; and Gregory Baum, Calum M. Carmichael, Theodore de Bruyn, Michele Dillon, Martin E. Marty, and Alven M. Neiman for their charitable assistance with, and always sound reactions to, previous forms of this essay. Unless otherwise indicated, translations of sources from the original French are my own. 1. In the original French, the character of the priest says: “Vous savez, ici, autrefois, tout le monde était catholique, comme en Espagne ou en Irlande. Et à un moment très précis , en fait pendant l’année 1966, les églises se sont brusquement vidées, en quelques mois. Un phénomène très étrange, que personne n’a jamais pu expliquer.” Denys Arcand, Les invasions barbares: Scénario (Montréal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 2003), 154. 22 k e v i n j . c h r i s t i a n o ables, some marked with the impersonality of large-scale social differentiation and others with the intimacy of individual crises of commitment. But almost all of the prevailing accounts refer at least tangentially to the advent of what Quebecers have labeled “la Révolution tranquille” (“the Quiet Revolution ”), a period of rapid and profound social transformation that is ordinarily dated from the election in June 1960 of Jean Lesage, leader of the Liberal Party of Québec, to head the provincial government.2 The rise of the Liberals put an end to a streak of conservative administrations that, with only the slightest interruption, had traversed three successive decades. Yet the Révolution tranquille meant infinitely more to the French-speaking citizens of Quebec than an alternation in ruling parties. The Liberals quickly put the government to work rooting out favoritism in procurement contracts and corruption in public works. In a few short years they augmented agencies of the bureaucracy, expanded the scope of regulation, and applied professional standards to the civil service. Finally , they set into motion a process whereby institutions such as schools, which previously had been the all-but-exclusive province of the Catholic Church, were placed in the hands of public authorities. This flurry of frenetic activity left a permanent mark, so that in our day the Révolution tranquille primarily signifies not the growth of the Quebec state or the rationalization of its services (although these did occur), but the veritable coming-of-age of a people in its belated encounter with modernity.3 For his part, Charles F. Doran, a leading American observer of Can2 . See Thomas Sloan, Quebec: The Not-So-Quiet Revolution (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1965); and Dale C. Thomson, Jean Lesage and the Quiet Revolution (Toronto: Macmillan, 1984). For an account of the same period from the perspective of Daniel Johnson [Sr.], one of Lesage’s opponents and leader of the conservative Union nationale, compare Pierre Godin , La Révolution tranquille, vol. 1: La fin de la Grande noirceur, Collection “Boréal compact ,” no. 27 (Montréal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 1991). Numerous sources set the religious context for this transition in Quebec history. A few of the more general are works of Jean Hamelin: Hamelin, Le XXe siècle: De 1940 à nos jours, vol. 3, tome 2, of Histoire du catholicisme québécois, ed. Nive Voisine (Montréal: Les Éditions du Boréal, 1984); Hamelin, “Société en mutation, Église en redéfinition: Le catholicisme québécois contemporain de 1940 à nos jours,” in Guy-Marie Oury...