Catholic The 60 S

Quebec separatism going way of the church

It was not so long ago — only a few decades — that devout Quebecers took to the streets in droves on June 24 to celebrate their Catholic faith on the name day of Saint Jean-Baptiste, the patron saint of French-Canadians.

Then, in a matter of only a few years in the ’60s, Quebec took the Catholic Church down from its pedestal, consigned its cardinals and bishops to their altars and moved on with a collective single-mindedness that caused that period to go down in history as the Quiet Revolution.

A half-century after that seismic shift, the Fête Nationale weekend finds the high priests (and priestesses) of the sovereignty movement scrambling to deal with a similar exodus from their chapels. That the Quebec sovereignty movement is undergoing a massive crisis of faith is obvious.

That its decline may turn out to be as permanent as that of the Catholic Church in the Quebec of the ’60s is a real possibility.

On that score, the polls that show one in two Quebecers still declares himself or herself a sovereigntist are as misleading as the census numbers that recurrently report that a majority of the province’s population is Catholic. Just because one decides to stop attending a given church does not mean one is looking for a different religion.

Nor does the occasional well-attended nationalist celebration amount to a lasting renewal of faith. To this day, lapsed Catholics routinely return to church for baptisms, weddings and funerals.

Less than 100 days into the new Parliament, it is increasingly evident the May 2 results were part of a larger shift in the tectonic plates of Quebec politics. With every passing week, the collateral damage of the demise of the Bloc Québécois on the Parti Québecois is becoming more irreversible.

Pauline Marois received a massive vote of confidence from her party just prior to the beginning of the tailspin decline of the BQ. She has since lost five MNAs. The sum of the dissidents is less important than the conflicting reasons for their departures. Fatigue with the open-ended wait for an opportunity to achieve sovereignty has claimed some of them. Impatience with the PQ’s go-slow approach to its goal of an independent Quebec has got the better of others. The contrary desire to move on to other battles precipitated the last one.

Harsh words have now been exchanged in public between past and present PQ leaders — causing virtually irreparable rifts. Marois’s damage-control efforts have so far only made things worse. According to a CROP poll, the PQ would have lost an election held last week to the Liberals.

TRANSCEND MEDIA SERVICE » Blame the '60s? The Catholic Church's ...

Try to avoid religious commentary, but — Good God! What is it about confession that the Catholic hierarchy can’t seem to grasp?

The grotesque epidemic of priestly pedophilia that has roiled the church has been under assessment in a five-year, $2-million study commissioned by our country’s Catholic bishops. At long last, the report is out, but not the truth. Instead, the panel concludes that this horror is not the fault of the church, nor even of the abusive priests. Rather — cue the heavenly music — the sixties made them do it.

Yes, it’s the Woodstock defense. The diabolical theory of this study is that “social chaos” created by the tie-dyed sexual revolution of the 1960s so discombobulated otherwise chaste and honorable men that they used their religious authority to rape 10-year-olds and teenagers.

Dios mio This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 3.0 United States License .