The Grandfathers of Confederation, Part Two

If Augustin-Norbert Morin had continued his career trajectory towards the priesthood, he would have risen in the hierarchy. Leaving it in favour of law did not make him less of a believer, though. The Catholic Church was forever present in his life. He was learning the importance of self-effacement, but the long game of the Church would not yet have been evident. He is my vantage point for this period of our history because he, like many good Catholics, believed the Church was about God and therefore his actions always expressed that goodwill. He had learned to read ancient Greek and Hebrew for a better understanding of the early writings and understood the great academic dedication and the surrendering of self and personal effacement the Church expected. At nineteen years old, he began to work for the resurrected newspaper Le Canadien, the paper that Pierre Stanislaus Bédard had founded and had gone to prison defending. It was an exciting departure for him – to work for his childhood idol, the founder of the Parti Canadien, the lawyer who had first conceived of ministerial responsibility, leading to responsible government, but neither the newspaper nor Bédard were recovering. He was free to work and needed the money, and his Catholic faith was beyond question, but Morin was no longer a priest in training. No longer studying to become a priest, he needed money.

A quick overview of history will suffice to demonstrate that the role of the churches involved a lot more than believing in the one true god. From the beginning of the Christian era, the early Nazarenes found their followers not simply by convincing people that Jesus Christ was the son of god, but by giving people the opportunity to belong to something. During the collapse of the Roman Empire, they created a social safety net for people. The Christian churches grew by accepting people into a community where some of their needs could be fulfilled. The system established itself during the Roman Empire and accelerated during the empire’s decline because the churches provided an infrastructure that was conceived with the needs of the people in mind. That infrastructure became Christendom and evolved into its various forms. Of course, it thrived best when times were the most difficult.

Looking back to the Wars of Religion in France during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it helps to understand if I see the different religions as competing social service providers fighting for territory. In today’s terms, it is as though the Protestants felt there should be more competition, more options, while the Catholics felt they had to have a monopoly to make their private system work. In creating New France, Pierre du Gua de Monts tried to establish a society where different service providers could co-exist. Founder of Quebec and employer of Samuel de Champlain, his protector was King Henri IV, who looked kindly upon the (protestant) Huguenots, but the king was assassinated in 1610, making the dream of a French colony with religious freedom more difficult and ultimately impossible. This was an aspect of the European Wars of Religion that continued and coloured English-French relations. A.-N. Morin would not have been educated about that in his early years of study, and in fact the picture of the world that the French Catholic Church drew did not include those aspects of our history either. Part of the long game of the Church was to bury inconvenient stories of the past, and our French, or Gallican, Catholic Church maintained this burial. This is important to Canadian history because the Church leaders, with their deep, academic understanding, had used that knowledge to survive the transfer from France in 1763, only a generation before the elder grandfathers of Confederation. The Gallican Church survived conquest because they accepted the transfer from one kingdom to the other and carefully guided the British in the governance of this Gallican (rather than Roman) Catholic colony. Their own secular leadership returned to France after 1763. The Church was built upon the foundations created by Bishop François de Laval in the late 1600s and stayed with its congregation. From the time Bishop Laval introduced la dîme (the tithe) in the mid 1600s, obliging Catholics to pay a flat tax of 10% of their earnings, the Catholic infrastructure was financially structured, if not secure. In a subsistence economy, ten percent of nothing was still nothing. It was a system that lived up to its own low expectations, but it was an infrastructure that the British would need in order to govern.

Before the French revolution, when France was a kingdom, the pope, also the king of the Papal States, had seen the French king as his defender, an ally he could turn to if his borders were threatened. In return, Gallican Church policy, appointments, etc., were subject to French royal approval. The Catholic Church in New France was also Gallican Catholic, subject to the same royal approval.

When the British took possession of New France, the Catholic Church dutifully transferred its allegiance from the French king to the English king. Their policy, as written by the then-bishop of Quebec Henri-Marie de Pontbriand, stated, “The Christian religion requires, for victorious princes who have conquered a country all the obedience, the respect, that is owed to the others …”; “The king of England now being, through conquest, the sovereign of Quebec, all the feelings of which the apostle St. Paul speaks are due him [Rom. 13:1–7].” This policy was more easily written than executed, especially considering that Pontbriand died in June 1760 before the treaty with France was signed. The transfer of the Gallican Catholic Church fell to Pontbriand’s vicar, Jean-Olivier Briand, who proved to be very much up to the task, bringing the Church into the ambit of the King of England almost as thoroughly as it had previously been subject to the King of France, even finding a way around a British law forbidding the naming of a Catholic bishop. He proposed taking a short vacation during his meetings with the British in London so he could see his family in France. While there he had himself quietly consecrated as Bishop of Quebec, and the British pretended to look the other way. Serving as Bishop of Quebec until his death in 1794, Briand so calmed tensions that he eventually told his secretary, “…under the British government the Catholic clergy and the rural populace enjoyed more liberty than they had been accorded before the conquest.” It was even a point of contention for the Anglican bishop of Quebec, Jacob Mountain, who declared in the mid-1790s that the Catholic bishop “disposes as he sees fit of all the curacies in the diocese, sets up parishes, grants special permission for marriages as he wishes, and carries out freely all those duties that the king’s instructions refuse him …”

Briand’s successor Plessis found ways around British refusals by ploys such as the one that saw Father Lartigue become the acting Bishop of Montreal. He requested the pope name Lartigue Bishop of Telmessus in Lycia, a region that had not been a part of the Catholic Church for centuries. Lartigue, now an Ottoman bishop, observed the casual way the British administration accepted his appointment after having refused the creation of a new diocese.

This bishop without a local diocese, Jean-Jacques Lartigue, was a passionate follower of the French Ultramontane movement. One of Lartigue’s first actions, working with his secretary Ignace Bourget, was to set up a seminary that became an Ultramontane training ground, graduating priests who believed in and taught Papal Infallibility forty years before the Vatican adopted it as official policy.

Lartigue also saw that, if the civil powers, led by his cousin Louis-Joseph Papineau, could learn to be more patient with their colonial overlords, both lay and Church powers would grow. Lartigue did not need more authority than that of his faithful congregations to make decisions. To demonstrate this, he asked the pope, on behalf of his parishioners, to create an episcopal see at Montreal, naming him bishop, exactly what the British colonial office had refused permission for when Plessis had requested it. He also asked his colleague, Bishop Joseph-Norbert Provencher, who was on his way to Rome, to reassure the authorities that there was no need to obtain “…the British government’s consent to or approval of such an arrangement.” On May 13, 1836, Pope Gregory XVI published a Bull creating the See and naming Lartigue its bishop. While the clergy held its breath in anxious anticipation of reprisals, Lartigue believed that, faced with a fait accompli, the colonial secretary would approve. He received confirmation of papal consent on May 26 and the governor’s office sent a note of congratulations. Catholic Lower Canada was no longer Gallican, nor was it British. It was Roman.

As historian Marcel Trudeau put it, he had “the courage to make the first gesture of absolute independence,” and the ramifications were huge.

All of this long game was opaque to the secular society, both British and French, but the Church knew and understood. All the work that Pierre-Stanislaus Bédard had begun, all the ambitions for greater responsibility, had to remain peaceful. Everything would come in good time.

Louis-Joseph Papineau headed the operations of the Parti Canadien ln Montreal. In time, he changed its name to the Parti des Patriotes, but he could never abide the conservative nature of his cousin, Jean-Jacques Lartigue, Bishop of Montreal.

When Le Canadien newspaper closed in 1822, Augustin-Norbert Morin followed the party to Montreal and studied law under Denis-Benjamin Viger.