O Canada! In “Neither practising nor believing, but Catholic even so,” we learn of the tragic state of the Church in Quebec. The article summary reads: “The ‘baptized pagans’ of Quebec, the most secularized society in the Western world, have less and less knowledge of the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church, but attempts to remove Catholicism’s symbolic presence in public places and on the school curriculum are greeted with howls of outrage.”
The piece is written by a secularist who takes a couple of pokes at the Church for her supposedly dark past in French Canada, for instance:
But when baby boomers rebelled against the Church’s repression and hypocrisy, against the tedious, ritualistic lives and fearful piety of their parents, they didn’t ruminate.
Now Quebecers live the tedious life of secularization, complete with its fearfully pious attachment to liberal rituals like abortion and contraception. One religion has been replaced by another. Too bad the shelved one leads to Heaven, while the newer model leads elsewhere.
Baby-boomer Quebeckers still display palpable hostility toward the Church establishment – the one that excommunicated the Patriotes, that forced their mothers and grandmothers into reproductive servitude, that controlled access to higher education, that turned a blind eye to sexual abuse, that flirted with fascists and that colluded with reactionary politicians to keep French-Canadians in a permanent state of backwardness.
I suppose one of those “reactionary politicians” would be Paul Comtois. The fact that the man was a competent statesman would count for little. He believed in the Blessed Sacrament (and all that stuff) and died for It. That’s enough to make him “reactionary.” (Talk about tedious! The liberal secularist becomes positively boorish in his rigid dogmatism.)
Quebec, much more than the Old World it so beautifully resembles, is a lesson in how a once very Catholic people can quickly lose the Faith.
For a glimpse of the days when French Canada was still Catholic, take a look at:
Blessed Père Frédéric Janssoone
Blessed Brother André of Saint Joseph
Québec and French America: What Might Have Been
A Modern Catholic Hero: Paul Comtois
