Reflections on John Webster Grant's Influence on Catholic Historiography in Canada (Essay‪)‬

The title of this short paper may be very baffling to many observers of Canadian religious history. John Webster Grant has been celebrated as one of the pioneer Church historians in Canada for a corpus of research that was primarily concerned with the developments in Canadian Protestantism. This career began in the military, in 1943, when he served on the Wartime Information Board, where he wrote on subjects germane to Non-Roman Catholic Churches. John Grant never wrote a book or paper on an overtly and singularly Roman Catholic subject (although the first three chapters of Moon of Wintertime were effectively on Catholic missions in New France) (1); he did not, as a rule, attend sessions of the Canadian Catholic Historical Association, except during joint sessions with the Canadian Society of Church History, and his writing was almost exclusively in English, thus creating certain linguistic barriers between his work and the majority of Canadian historians studying Catholic history in this country. Given this litany of incongruities between the two principal subjects of this paper, perhaps I had better cease and desist in this line of thought. Bear with me for a few moments and it may appear that there was method in my madness, and that the relationship between Grant's work and Canadian Catholic historiography is not such a far fetched idea. Significance is sometimes measured in odd ways. John Webster Grant's writings emerged from a period of great hope for the Canadian churches and the optimism inspired by the ecumenical movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as energized significantly by the work of the World Council of Churches and the declarations of the Second Vatican Council; this remarkable era provides an initial point of convergence between our two subjects. Secondly, historians of the Catholic traditions, particularly an emerging generation of professionally trained scholars in English Canada, could not help but become enamored by the quality of Grant's scholarship. As American historian Robert Handy cited, in a volume celebrating Grant, in 1988: "His appreciation for historical accuracy, theological flexibility, cultural diversity, and human empathy with every concrete situation make this work endure as a benchmark for its genre." (2) This type of critical acclaim spoke volumes to a new generation of religious historians, many of whom were members of both the Canadian Catholic Historical Association and the Canadian Society of Church History. Thirdly, his three most significant monographs of his mid-and late career--The Church in the Canadian Era (1972, reprinted 1988) Moon of Wintertime (1984), and A Profusion of Spires (1988)--provided sweeping narratives of religious history that departed significantly from the biographical and denominationally-focused studies of the past. In this way, Grant's work helped to create a new environment wherein the writing of Canadian religious history was grounded in the grand sweep of Canadian history, and pushed Catholicism into the main narrative in a serious and scholarly way. This rethinking of the way in which "Church history" was written provided the appropriate trans-denominational contexts in which Roman Catholicism found itself as a significant player among other churches across both regions and time periods. If one, however, is looking for a most tangible link one might find it by turning to Hymn 305 in the first edition of the Catholic Book of Worship. There one would discover "O Holy Spirit, By Whose Breath," to the music of Eisenach, with lyrics by John Webster Grant (Ottawa: CCC, 1972).