Troppo Ardenti Sacerdoti: the Conroy Mission Revisited

Abstract

THE LIFE OF THE CHURCH in mid-nineteenth-century Quebec was anything but serene. A prey to faction, divided by geography and temperament, Quebec clergymen presented an unedifying spectacle of feud and fervour. Only an apostolic delegate could save the faith in Canada, one priest desparingly concluded in 1876. By then, the church had been riven by twenty years of heated internal struggles. Two Montrealbased questions were at the root of this dissension: the establishment of a Catholic university in the city and the partitioning of the enormous parish of Notre Dame with its 90,000 parishioners. On both these issues Ignace Bourget, bishop of Montreal for over two decades, challenged the pretensions of two of the oldest and most powerful religious institutions in the province. The S(•minaire de Qu6bec, whose relations with provincial politicians were naturally intimate, as be fitted an institution in the provincial capital, claimed a monopoly of Catholic higher education for the recently established Laval University. The S6minaire de $aint-Sulpice of Montreal, for its part, wished to maintain exclusive control of parish life in the city, a prerogative strongly upheld during his lifetime by its solicitor, Sir George Cartier. Inevitably, these struggles acquired political overtones. The controversy over the dismemberment of Notre Dame gave rise in 1871 to the programme catholique, a conservative political manifesto signed by some aspiring Catholic politicians with the approval of Bishops Bourget of Montreal and Laflkche of Trois Rivieres. Many, including the recently appointed archbishop of Quebec, A.E. Taschereau, considered this document to be a scarcely veiled attempt by the clergy to control political life in Quebec. This question was hotly debated in diocesan newspapers, in pastoral letters, and among the provincial hierarchy themselves. Rome tried repeatedly, but in vain, to halt these