The Priests of Canada

The patient toils of the missionary curé rest in the obscurity where the best of human virtues are buried from age to age.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in The Old Regime In Canada. Continuing chapter 19

Meanwhile Saint-Vallier, the new bishop, had raised a new tempest. He attacked that organization of the seminary of Quebec by which Laval had endeavored to unite the secular priests of Canada into an attached and obedient family, with the bishop as its head and the seminary as its home, a plan of which the system of movable curés was an essential part. The Canadian priests, devoted to Laval, met the innovations of Saint-Vallier with an opposition which seemed only to confirm his purpose. Laval, old and worn with toil and asceticism, was driven almost to despair. The seminary of Quebec was the cherished work of his life, and, to his thinking, the citadel of the Canadian church; and now he beheld it battered and breached before his eyes. His successor, in fact, was trying to place the church of Canada on the footing of the church of France. The conflict lasted for years, with the rancor that marks the quarrels of non-combatants of both sexes. “He” (Saint-Vallier), says one of his opponents, “has made himself contemptible to almost everybody, and particularly odious to the priests born in Canada; for there is between them and him a mutual antipathy difficult to overcome.” [1] He is described by the same writer as a person “without reflection and judgment, extreme in all things, secret and artful, passionate when opposed, and a flatterer when he wishes to gain his point.” This amiable critic adds that Saint-Vallier believes a bishop to be inspired, in virtue of his office, with a wisdom that needs no human aid, and that whatever thought comes to him in prayer is a divine inspiration to be carried into effect at all costs and in spite of all opposition.

[1: The above is from an anonymous paper, written apparently in 1695 and entitled Mémoire pour le Canada.]

The new bishop, notwithstanding the tempest he had raised, did not fully accomplish that establishment of the curés in their respective parishes which the king and the minister so much desired. The Canadian curé was more a missionary than a parish priest; and nature as well as Bishop Laval threw difficulties in the way of settling him quietly over his charge.

On the Lower St. Lawrence, where it widens to an estuary, six leagues across, a ship from France, the last of the season, holds her way for Quebec, laden with stores and clothing, household utensils, goods for Indian trade, the newest court fashions, wine, brandy, tobacco, and the king’s orders from Versailles. Swelling her patched and dingy sails, she glides through the wildness and the solitude where there is nothing but her to remind you of the great troubled world behind and the little troubled world before. On the far verge of the ocean-like river, clouds and mountains mingle in dim confusion; fresh gusts from the north dash waves against the ledges, sweep through the quivering spires of stiff and stunted fir-trees, and ruffle the feathers of the crow, perched on the dead bough after his feast of mussels among the seaweed. You are not so solitary as you think. A small birch canoe rounds the point of rocks, and it bears two men; one in an old black cassock, and the other in a buckskin coat; both working hard at the paddle to keep their slender craft off the shingle and the breakers. The man in the cassock is Father Morel, aged forty-eight, the oldest country curé in Canada, most of his brethren being in the vigor of youth as they had need to be. His parochial charge embraces. a string of incipient parishes extending along the south shore from Riviere du Loup to Rivière du Sud, a distance reckoned at twenty-seven leagues, and his parishioners number in all three hundred and twenty-eight souls. He has administered spiritual consolation to the one inhabitant of Kamouraska; visited the eight families of La Bouteillerie and the five families of La Combe; and now he is on his way to the seigniory of St. Denis with its two houses and eleven souls.

[These particulars are from the Plan général de l’estât présent des missions du Canada, fait en l’année, 1683. It is a list and description of the parishes with the names and ages of the cures, and other details. See Abeille, I. This paper was drawn up by order of Laval.]

The father lands where a shattered eel-pot high and dry on the pebbles betrays the neighborhood of man. His servant shoulders his portable chapel, and follows him through the belt of firs, and the taller woods beyond, till the sunlight of a desolate clearing shines upon them. Charred trunks and limbs encumber the ground; dead trees, branchless, barkless, pierced by the woodpeckers, in part black with fire, in part bleached by sun and frost, tower ghastly and weird above the labyrinth of forest ruins, through which the priest and his follower wind their way, the cat-bird mewing, and the blue-jay screaming as they pass. Now the goldenrod and the aster, harbingers of autumn, fringe with purple and yellow the edge of the older clearing, where wheat and maize, the settler’s meagre harvest, are growing among the stumps.

Wild-looking women, with sunburnt faces and neglected hair, run from their work to meet the curé; a man or two follow with soberer steps and less exuberant zeal; while half-savage children, the coureurs de bois of the future, bareheaded, barefooted, and half-clad, come to wonder and stare. To set up his altar in a room of the rugged log cabin, say mass, hear confessions, impose penance, grant absolution, repeat the office of the dead over a grave made weeks before, baptize, perhaps, the last infant; marry, possibly, some pair who may or may not have waited for his coming; catechize as well as time and circumstance would allow the shy but turbulent brood of some former wedlock: such was the work of the parish priest in the remoter districts. It was seldom that his charge was quite so scattered, and so far extended as that of Father Morel; but there were fifteen or twenty others whose labors were like in kind, and in some cases no less arduous. All summer they paddled their canoes from settlement to settlement; and in winter they toiled on snowshoes over the drifts; while the servant carried the portable chapel on his back, or dragged it on a sledge. Once, at least, in the year, the curé paid his visit to Quebec, where, under the maternal roof of the seminary he made his retreat of meditation and prayer, and then returned to his work. He rarely had a house of his own, but boarded in that of the seignior or one of the habitants. Many parishes or aggregations of parishes had no other church than a room fitted up for the purpose in the house of some pious settler. In the larger settlements, there were churches and chapels of wood, thatched with straw, often ruinous, poor to the last degree, without ornaments, and sometimes without the sacred vessels necessary for the service. [2] In 1683, there were but seven stone churches in all the colony. The population was so thin and scattered that many of the settlers heard mass only three or four times a year, and some of them not so often. The sick frequently died without absolution, and infants without baptism.

[2: Saint-Vallier, Estat présent de l’Eglise et de la Colonie Française, 22ed. 18nt-Vallier, Estat présent de l’Eglise et de la Colonie Française, 22 (ed. 1856).]

The splendid self-devotion of the early Jesuit missions has its record; so, too, have the unseemly bickerings of bishops and governors: but the patient toils of the missionary curé rest in the obscurity where the best of human virtues are buried from age to age. What we find set down concerning him is, that Louis XIV. was unable to see why he should not live on two hundred francs a year as well as a village curé by the banks of the Garonne. The king did not know that his cassock and all his clothing cost him twice as much and lasted half as long; that he must have a canoe and a man to paddle it; and that when on his annual visit the seminary paid him five or six hundred francs, partly in clothes, partly in stores, and partly in money, the end of the year found him as poor as before except only in his conscience.

The Canadian priests held the manners of the colony under a rule as rigid as that of the Puritan churches of New England, but with the difference that in Canada a large part of the population was restive under their control, while some of the civil authorities, often with the governor at their head, supported the opposition. This was due, partly to an excess of clerical severity, and partly to the continued friction between the secular and ecclesiastical powers. It sometimes happened, however, that a new governor arrived, so pious that the clerical party felt that they could rely on him. Of these rare instances the principal is that of Denonville, who, with a wife as pious as himself, and a young daughter, landed at Quebec, in 1685. On this, Bishop Saint-Vallier, anxious to turn his good dispositions to the best account, addressed to him a series of suggestions or rather directions for the guidance of his conduct, with a view to the spiritual profit of those over whom he was appointed to rule. The document was put on file, and the following are some of the points in it. It is divided into five different heads: “Touching feasts,” “touching balls and dances,” “touching comedies and other declamations,” “touching dress,” “touching irreverence in church.” The governor and madame his wife are desired to accept no invitations to suppers, that is to say late dinners, as tending to nocturnal hours and dangerous pastimes; and they are further enjoined to express dissatisfaction, and refuse to come again, should any entertainment offered them be too sumptuous. “Although,” continues the bishop under the second head of his address, “balls and dances are not sinful in their nature, nevertheless they are so dangerous by reason of the circumstances that attend them, and the evil results that almost inevitably follow, that, in the opinion of Saint Francis of Sales, it should be said of them as physicians say of mushrooms, that at best they are good for nothing;” and, after enlarging on their perils, he declares it to be of great importance to the glory of God and the sanctification of the colony, that the governor and his wife neither give such entertainments nor countenance them by their presence. “Nevertheless,” adds the mentor, “since the youth and vivacity of mademoiselle their daughter requires some diversion, it is permitted to relent somewhat, and indulge her in a little moderate and proper dancing, provided that it be solely with persons of her own sex, and in the presence of madame her mother; but by no means in the presence of men or youths, since it is this mingling of sexes which causes the disorders that spring from balls and dances.” Private theatricals in any form are next interdicted to the young lady. The bishop then passes to the subject of her dress, and exposes the abuses against which she is to be guarded. “The luxury of dress,” he says,

appears in the rich and dazzling fabrics wherein the women and girls of Canada attire themselves, and which are far beyond their condition and their means; in the excess of ornaments which they put on; in the extraordinary head-dresses which they affect, their heads being uncovered and full of strange trinkets; and in the immodest curls so expressly forbidden in the epistles of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, as well as by all the fathers and doctors of the church, and which God has often severely punished, as may be seen by the example of the unhappy Pretextata, a lady of high quality, who, as we learn from Saint Jerome, who knew her, had her hands withered, and died suddenly five months after, and was precipitated into hell, as God had threatened her by an angel; because, by order of her husband, she had curled the hair of her niece, and attired her after a worldly fashion.”

[“Témoin entr’autres l’exemple de la malheureuse Prétextate, dame de grande condition, laquelle au rapport de S. Jérôme, dont elle étoit connue, eut les mains desséchées et cinq mois après mourut subitement et fut précipitée en enfer, ainsi que Dieu l’en avoit menacée par un Ange pour avoir par le commandement de son mari frisé et habillé mondainement sa nièce.” Divers points a représenter a Mr. le Gouverneur et à Madame la Gouvernante, signé Jean, évesque de Québec. (Registre de l’Evêché de Québec.) The bishop on another occasion holds up the sad fate of Pretextata as a warning to Canadian mothers; but in the present case he slightly changes the incidents to make the story more applicable to the governor and his wife.]

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 19 by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

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