Why the Quiet Revolution was "Quiet": The Catholic Church's Reaction to the Secularization of Nationalism in Quebec After 1960‪.‬

Writing about the rapid secularization of Quebec society in the 1960s and 1970s, Hubert Guindon remarks, "In every respect except calendar time, centuries -- not decades -- separate the Quebec of the 1980s from the Quebec of the 1950s." (2) A similar observation might be made about the Church of Quebec and its development between 1960 and 1980. Before 1960, the Church exercised a virtual monopoly over education, health care, and the social services offered to French Quebeckers who formed the majority of the population. During his years as premier from 1944 to 1959, Maurice Duplessis had declared Quebec a Catholic province and actively promoted the Church's welfare. In 1958, more than eighty-five percent of the population identified themselves as Catholic and more than eighty-eight percent of those Catholics attended mass every Sunday. (3) A virtual army of nuns, priests, and brothers, which by 1962 numbered more than 50,000, oversaw the Church's massive bureaucracy. (4) This semi-established status and public presence was legitimated by the traditional religious nationalism, which united a conservative, clerical version of Catholicism and French Canadian ethnic identity. By 1980, the situation had changed dramatically. The Quebec state had taken over the Church's work in education, health care, and the social services. This "Quiet Revolution" meant that the state and not the Church was to be "the embodiment of the French nation in Canada." (5) While the roots of the Quiet Revolution could be seen in the rapid economic growth and the growth of state power of the 1920s, (6) the changes of the 1960s were experienced as a dramatic shift. Thus the Church had to react both to its loss of real power and to its loss of control over the important symbols, stories, and values carried by traditional religious nationalism. By 1980 no nationalist group sought to promote a Catholic political culture or to remake Quebec's economy in conformity with the Church's social teaching. No one imagined that Quebec was a Catholic state. Like its control over schools, hospitals, and social services, the Church leadership saw its control over nationalist movements evaporate in two decades.