Catholicism in Quebec: Then and Now

Canada doesn’t stand much chance of ever winning a soccer title. But who needs soccer when your nation produced the Pope? Well, we came close (according to Maclean’s), but sadly cardinal Marc Oullet was bested by Jorge Bergoglio in last month’s papal election. The event got me thinking about Roman Catholicism in Quebec and how it developed to its state today.

Cardinal Marc Oullet with the former Pope Benedict XVI

From the founding of New France until the middle of the 20th century, the church was a defining feature of social life in Quebec. Religious leaders saw the new world as virgin territory, a haven of piety against the growing secularism in France. Did you know that Montreal was originally intended to be an outpost of religious devotion? 150 years later, while the Revolution raged in France, Catholic historians saw the hand of Providence in shielding religion in the St. Lawrence colony from secularism in the mother country. Even until 1960, Quebec had more clergy than both Ireland and France.

Today, the 80% of the people still identify with the Catholic Church, but only 20% attend church services. By Maclean’s assessment, they have become “allergic to the worship of their own deity.” So what happened? Essentially this: Quebec went though the same breadth of social change that took France 200 years. Let’s look at the forerunners of that change.

On August 1948, when Marc Oullet was just four years old, a group of painters in Montreal published the Refus Global. In the same tradition as The Communist Manifesto, they challenged the materialism and repression they saw in society. They accused the clergy of enslaving people in a regime of fear: “They have extorted with us a thousand times more than they ever gave.” Against this, they sound a call to freedom for the masses – “submissive slaves” – and their emotional development, material progress, and collective hope.

A sample work by one of the Montreal painters, Jean-Paul Riopelle. La Forêt Ardente

To be sure, power is often a corrupting force, and there’s no doubt that the artists had legitimate grounds for protest. At the same time, it would be unjust to forget that the church was the sole provider of social services to the sick, poor, and marginalized - not to mention the only caretaker of education for hundreds of years. I think it’s a shame that we're so quick to forget years of faithful service.

Well, what was the reaction to the Refus Global? It was condemned – universally. Hundreds of newspapers and magazines published articles overnight censuring the manifesto. Paul-Emile Bourdas, the lead writer, was fired from his position as an art teacher. The public wasn’t ready to question the church – not, at least, until the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s.

You may remember the scene from The Devil Wears Prada: Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is consulting with her fashion minions when Andy (Anne Hathaway) snickers at their discussion over two apparently identical belts. Miranda turns and fixes her with an icy stare. In the dressing down that follows, she rebukes Andy for her false pride and points out that her ‘decision’ to buy the sweater she is wearing was, in fact, a choice made for her by the fashion industry. What was once avant garde trickled down into society where it shaped the fashion choices of Andy and millions of other unsuspecting people.

In much the same way, the Refus Global stands as the forerunner of secularism in Quebec. Though rejected at first, its ideas would later motivate the wholesale departure from the church – whether people were aware of it or not.

Sources:

Maclean’s article, “Cardinal Marc Oullet: The Canadian who Could be Pope,” gives interesting commentary on Oullet and the state of Catholicism in Quebec:

http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/02/18/the-canadian-who-could-be-the-next-pope-2/

You can read the full text of The “Refus Global” here:

http://thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/refus-global-manifesto

The Black Loyalists of Canada

I grew up thinking that Canada was the antithesis of the United States in its treatment of minority groups. In my mind, this was especially true of African Americans; the US had cotton plantations, while we had the Underground Railroad. Black History Month inspired me to do a bit of reading, and I’ve discovered that sometimes the true story is not so tidy. Let’s look back 230 years to the founding of Canada’s first black community – Birchtown, Nova Scotia.

Birchtown has its roots in the Loyalist migration out of the American colonies during the Revolutionary War. Those who refused to take up arms against the British, or at least doubted that the British were trying to enslave them, were ostracized by their communities. Strangely, the movement towards liberty and freedom had led to vicious persecution against all dissenting voices. Just over a decade later, the French Revolution would do much the same.

Those among the 70,000 who remained loyal to Britain came from all levels of society. They were soldiers, labourers, farmers, artisans, merchants. They were Dutch, English, colony-born, and German; Quakers, Methodists, and Huguenots. And among their number were 3,000 African Americans.

During the Revolutionary War, British authorities had encouraged slaves to leave their American masters, and they were promised freedom if they fought for the crown. Many took up the offer, and after the war was over, migrated north to find refuge in the remaining British colonies. Most of their number gathered together to settle in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. True to their word, the authorities had granted them land – albeit, smaller plots in less desirable areas – and there they settled on the other side of the Shelburne harbour. They named their community Birchtown in honour of the British commander who had authorized their passage from New York.

A black woodcutter in Shelburne, Nova Scotia - 1788

Like us, they wanted to live free of prejudice, to own property, to give a promising future to their children. They arrived in Nova Scotia dreaming of a “promised land” – and, appropriately, one of their prominent leaders was named Moses. This Moses Wilkinson was a former slave and fiery Methodist preacher. Moses helped to lead spiritual revival in Birchtown, and his presence led several young men to take up the ministry as well. And his labours did not pass unnoticed. So many of their number belonged to the Methodist denomination that John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, learned of the community and wrote to encourage white Methodists in Shelburne:

The work of God among the blacks in your neighbourhood is a wonderful instance of the power of God; and the little town they have built is, I suppose, the only town of negroes that has been built in America – nay perhaps in and part of the world, except only in Africa… Give them all the assistance you can in every possible way.

Sadly, Wesley’s views were not shared by many of the white settlers in the area. Residents of Birchtown faced oppression, and even violence at the hands of their neighbours. They weren’t used to the Canadian winter, and their poor farmland was scarcely able to produce a crop. To sustain themselves, they were often forced to work in the lowest jobs for insulting wages. Perhaps the strongest testimony to their conditions was that, when the opportunity came for free passage to Sierra Leone (the new British colony), more than one third of Birchtown took up the offer.

I’ve come away from this story thinking that we Canadians have a small share of moral high ground on this topic. I am proud of the Underground Railroad, but we must grant that there is more to the story than that.

Sources

History of the Canadian Peoples, by Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel

The Structure of Canadian History, by J.L. Finlay and D.N. Sprague

Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People http://blackloyalist.com/canadiandigitalcollection/index.htm

"Adventurers in Paint": The Group of Seven

“Painting the Canadian scene in a Canadian fashion” was the vision of the artists who came to call themselves The Group of Seven. Between the years of 1920 and 1931, they held eight exhibitions of their works, and forever changed the landscape of Canadian painting. Rather than bore you with lots of text, today I want to let their paintings speak for themselves. Here are seven paintings by seven great Canadian artists!

The Edge of the Maple Wood

This first painting is by A.Y. Jackson. It might look like a muddy hill to us, but to the young Canadian artists at that time, it was “like a glowing flame packed with potential energy and loveliness.” That quote comes from Arthur Lismer, who saw the painting at the 1913 exhibition of the Ontario Society of the Arts with friends J.E.H. MacDonald, Tom Thomson, and Lawren Harris. They were so impressed that they invited Jackson to join their circle.

The Guide's Home

This painting by Arthur Lismer really shows the group’s debt to French Impressionism. Artists of that school used dabs of paint to express light and movement. With this painting, you can almost hear the rustle of the wind in the birch trees and feel the crunch of fall leaves underfoot.

First Snow, Lake Superior

Lawren Harris was a leader and visionary in the circle of young artists. One of the group wrote that art, for Lawren Harris, “was almost a mission. He believed that a country which ignored the arts left no record of itself worth preserving.” This painting of the north shore of Lake Superior shares the same smooth, rounded surfaces that are characteristic of his other works. He has simplified the ruggedness of the landscape to suggest a purified spiritual place.

Bisset Farm

Most of the Group of Seven painted with oil on canvas, but Franklin Carmichael developed a unique style with watercolour on paper. I like how this one displays the grandeur of the hills that rise high in the backdrop, set over the small, tenuous presence of the family farm in the foreground. Still to this day, our presence in Canada is small indeed in relation to the vast wilderness beyond our cities.

The Cloud, Red Mountain

Unlike most the group, Fred Varley preferred painting people more than lakes and trees. But when he took a teaching position in British Columbia in 1926, he couldn’t resist the grandeur and beauty of the Rocky Mountains. He wrote enthusiastically to a friend “British Columbia is heaven.” At first, I didn’t like The Cloud, Red Mountain, but it has grown on me since. Varley lifts our gaze to the sky above the mountains, with its rich deep blue in contrast with the sun-touched clouds.

Fire-Swept Algoma

The artists didn’t always paint scenes of arresting beauty; sometimes they turn our attention to the wild or destructive power of nature. In this composition by Frank Johnston, we see a hillside ravaged by forest fire. What I like here is how the artist shows us both the fierce and regenerative side of nature. If you look closely, you can see green blades of grass rising up from the forest floor.

Fine Weather, Georgian Bay

Georgian Bay was a favorite subject for the artists. Some of their most memorable works show windswept trees clinging for dear life to the rocky shoreline. In this one though, James MacDonald shows a rare view of the Bay in peaceful weather. The foreground shows three friends together enjoying the wide expanse of sun and sky, giving a vivid picture of how the artists saw themselves and their work. On a camping trip to Algonquin Park with his friends Tom Thomson, A.Y. Jackson, and Arthur Lismer, Fred Varley wrote that they were “all working to one big end… emptying ourselves of everything except that nature is here in all its greatness.”

Sources:
The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson, by Anne Newlands
The Art History Archive, "The Group of Seven." http://goo.gl/vYfdS

The Hardy Boys and the Case of the Arrogant Critic

I mentioned in an earlier post that I used to be a grad student in literature. Part of why I chose to abort my professor goal had to do with the feeling that I was becoming a self-righteous intellectual. Whether I was reading a novel for fun or watching a play at Stratford, I felt that I, the scholar, had to identify everything that was “problematic” and condemn it. Let’s see what that looks like in a sample book by a Canadian author.

The Tower Treasure (1927) is the first novel in the immensely popular Hardy Boys series. Leslie McFarlane, a Canadian, was the first author to ghost write under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon. Frank and Joe Hardy are the teenage sons of a middle-class, suburb-dwelling family in Bayport, a modestly sized city of 50,000. Aside from the crimes that drive the plot, the world of the books is basically a wholesome place where things are “swell” and “good night!” is an acceptable exclamation. The boys’ detective work fits around classes, church, baseball practice, and family meals.

An especially problematic feature of the story is the class values that operate in the background. When a package of jewels disappears from the mansion of a reclusive millionaire, the father of the boys’ friend Slim Robinson is the prime suspect. Mr. Robinson loses his job, and Slim, the A-student and aspiring engineer, is forced to drop out of school to get a job. Now here’s the thing: the family also has to move into the poor neighborhood of Bayport. The story describes their fallen state in one scene when Frank goes to visit his pal:

When they came to the street where the Robinsons had moved they found that it was an even poorer thoroughfare than they had expected. There were small houses badly in need of paint and repairs. Shabbily dressed children were playing in the roadway.

The Robinson’s misery is complete. The father is unemployed, their son has lost his future, and they have nameless street urchins for neighbors. To be identified among the poor is the worst possible condition, and the Hardys must solve the mystery to clear Mr. Robinson’s name and restore the family to the middle class.

What else is problematic in this story? Gender. Mrs. Hardy’s role in the story is limited to enabling the boys’ adventure, mainly by packing them lunches as they go off sleuthing. For example, “When [she] heard the boys’ plan, she thought it an excellent one and immediately offered to make some sandwiches for them. By the time they were ready to leave she had two small boxes packed with a hearty picnic lunch” (157). The mother has her own car, but doesn’t seem to need it; she never leaves home. The only exception is the final scene when all the characters gather at the house of Mr. Millionaire to celebrate the solved case (and I’m not sure why, but I pictured her wearing oven mitts).

Leslie McFarlane

 Now what do critics do with all of this? Here’s what I would say: “Aha! I knew it, you backward, middle-class, patriarchal so-and-so! (to borrow an expletive from Joe Hardy) “I see your ideology of class and gender oppression, and I censure it!” This is the spirit of judgment and condemnation that just stinks from a mile away. It’s the petty mindset that claims moral high ground and elevates one’s self above the author. Yes, The Tower Treasure perpetuates a vision of the middle class that alienates the lower class and limits women. But (and I say this to myself) let’s not go the extra step of using a children’s story to inflate our moral ego.