Comment QUEBEC CITY — For more than 140 years, Saint-Jean-Baptiste Church, with its conical steeple rising high into the sky, was a commanding presence here in the provincial capital. It was a rallying point for the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, an organization dedicated to protecting the interests of Quebec’s French-speaking population. It has appeared in travel guides. In 1991, the church, with a facade designed to mirror that of Sainte-Trinité Church in Paris, was designated a heritage building for its architectural and artistic value. But today, amid growing secularization, poor mass attendance, declining revenues and climbing expenses to maintain age-old places of worship, its doors are closed. The church held its last Mass in 2015. Its future is uncertain. officials are considering how the building could be renovated. Saint-Jean-Baptiste’s plight parallels the declining role of the church in Canada’s most Catholic province, where it dominated for centuries public and private life — and where steeple and belfry still rise above small villages and urban centers — but which is now losing faith at a stormy rate. Pope Francis arrived in Quebec on Wednesday for the second leg of his “pilgrimage of repentance” where he criticized – again – what critics say was his inadequate apology on the role of the church in Canada’s residential school system for aboriginal children. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families to be placed in boarding schools often hundreds of miles from their communities, where they were forbidden to speak their native languages and practice their cultural traditions, and in many cases of physical and sexual abuse. Most schools were run by Catholic entities. Francis apologized Monday for the “evil committed by so many Christians” in the system, but not for the complicity of the Church as an institution. The 85-year-old pontiff celebrated Mass on Thursday at the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, a popular pilgrimage site outside Quebec City. Before he began, two people approached the pulpit and unfurled a banner calling on Francis to rescind the 15th-century papal bulls enshrining the Doctrine of Discovery, which were used as justification for the colonization and conversion of indigenous peoples in the new world. Pope apologizes for ‘evil committed by so many Christians’ at Canada’s residential schools The Quebec Francis met has changed dramatically since he visited Pope John Paul II in 1984. John Paul was serenaded by a 16-year-old Celine Dion in a packed Olympic Stadium in Montreal and celebrated Mass with some 350,000 people in Canada’s largest religious gathering at the time. The share of Catholics aged 15 and over in Quebec fell from 87 per cent in 1985 to 62 per cent from 2017 to 2019, according to Statistics Canada. In 1985, more than half of those who identified as Catholic participated in a religious activity at least once a month. From 2017 to 2019, that figure was 14 percent. The percentage of people with a religious belief other than Catholic doubled, from 9 percent in 1985 to 18 percent from 2017 to 2019. “We’ve gone through a situation where there was a kind of moral authority of Catholicism decades ago,” said Jean-Francois Roussel, a professor of theology at the University of Montreal. “For many Quebecers … Catholicism is not part of their lives, not even part of their family life.” Between 2000 and 2020, the number of parishes in the province fell from 1,780 to 983, according to the government agency that manages Quebec’s library and archives. Catholic baptisms and marriages have also fallen, researchers reported last year in the journal Secular Studies. “We are entering, in the last 10 years or so, a strong phase of decline of a certain Catholicism in Quebec,” said University of Ottawa sociologist E.-Martin Meunier, co-author of the report. “If there is a collapse of Catholicism, it concerns first of all institutional Catholicism.” Home schools banned native languages. The Cree want theirs back. Quebec has had a long, complicated relationship with faith. For centuries, the Church had a stranglehold on public institutions in Quebec, including health care, education and social services, before the province began to disengage in favor of a more secular approach — the so-called Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. The shift away from Catholicism has accelerated in recent decades. The result is that more than 600 churches in Quebec have been closed, many of them bulldozed or deconsecrated so that other uses can be found for the historic buildings. In Sherbrooke, 100 miles east of Montreal, the former Sainte-Thérèse church is now the OMG restaurant, a “party place” where cocktails are covered in cotton candy and “even the wisest will be tempted to listen to the devil that sleeps within them.” (The O in OMG has devil horns. So do some of the hamburgers.) In Montreal, where Mark Twain once remarked “you couldn’t throw a brick without breaking a church window,” places of worship have also been converted into condominiums and community centers. In 2014, the former Notre-Dame du Perpétuel Secours was reborn as the Théâtre Paradoxe, where this month, Justin Turnbull, who goes by the name ‘The Suicide Jesus’, beat Brian Pillman to become the first world Apex Championship Wrestling. . Court rules Quebec can ban government employees from wearing hijabs, turbans and other religious items Saint-Jean-Baptiste, meanwhile, is in limbo. The first church on this site was opened in 1849. It was dedicated to John the Baptist, Jesus’ cousin, who would become the patron saint of French Canadians. When it was destroyed by fire in 1881, it was immediately rebuilt. The priest who gave the last homily in 2015 praised it as “a stone church, built with genius, with magnificence, with pride, which allows everyone — without distinction — to rub shoulders with beauty, silence, elevation, contemplation.” The church is owned by the archdiocese, said David O’Brien, a spokesman for the local government. He said the city is analyzing how it can be rebranded. Eva Dubuc-April waited in the Basilica of St. Anne-de-Beaupré on Francis Thursday to celebrate Mass. Dubuc-April, 31, said she had her children he was baptized and attends the service Periodically. But he feels strongly that the church needs to modernize by revising its teachings on sexuality and the all-male priesthood. She likes Francis personally and sees him as a reformer, but has faced resistance from a conservative Vatican bureaucracy. “In Quebec, people who practice Catholicism don’t agree with these old teachings,” he said. “If they don’t move forward, there won’t be anyone left.” Chico Harlan in Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, Quebec contributed to this report.
