Wilfrid Laurier by Andre Pratte

Author:Andre Pratte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada

CHAPTER 4

God and His Men

I was educated by priests, and amongst young men who have become priests. I flatter myself to have sincere friends amongst them, and to them at least I can and I do say: “Can you find under the sun a happier country, where the Catholic church is freer and enjoys greater privileges?”

WILFRID LAURIER, 1877

Since its construction in 1852, the Quebec Music Hall had been considered one of the most beautiful venues in North America. Located not far from where the Château Frontenac Hotel stands today, the Music Hall hosted the great music and theatre performances of the day. On the evening of June 26, 1877, however, the two thousand people crowded into the hall were not there to listen to Bach or to enjoy the humour of Molière. The evening was reserved for politics. The guest speaker was the rising star of the Liberal Party of Canada, a certain Wilfrid Laurier. Thirty-five years of age, he had been sitting in the House of Commons for barely three years.

Expectations were high, inordinately so. The young politician had been asked to speak on the current state of Canadian liberalism. The partisan audience hoped that this new voice would help counteract the incessant attacks of the clergy against the school of thought they belonged to. They would get their wish. “Mr. Laurier opened up a new era in our politics,” wrote the Liberal lawyer Charles Langelier in his Souvenirs politiques. “In one breath, with one master stroke, he dissipated all the old prejudices, vanquished the hydra of fanaticism and showed the true colours of the Liberal Party.” This judgment was obviously overenthusiastic; nevertheless, the press coverage from the period shows that it was indeed a decisive event, for Laurier as well as the Liberal Party.

To better appreciate it, we have to look back briefly at the context of the period. In the province of Quebec, Conservative politicians were generally more favourable than Liberals to intervention by the church in public affairs. The radicals among them, the Castors,1 defended ultramontanist ideas; they included many powerful bishops, such as Msgr. Ignace Bourget of Montreal and Msgr. Louis-François Laflèche of Trois-Rivières. The Liberals were more reserved regarding the role of the clergy outside the church. The Liberal Party also had its radicals, the Rouges, who were staunchly anticlerical. Taking their inspiration from the French republicans, they advocated, among other things, education for all under government control.

Far from conceding anything to the state, the ultramontanists wanted to strengthen the clergy’s control of the province. For example, the “Catholic Program” published by the Journal de Trois-Rivières in 1870, which was written by laymen but known to represent the views of Monsignori Bourget and Laflèche, stated that in political matters as in others (education, culture, morality), voters should follow the directives of the church: “Full and entire adhesion to Roman Catholic doctrines in religion, in politics, and in social economy ought to be the first and principal qualification which the Catholic electors should require from the candidate.

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