That memorable3 journey of Laval to court, which caused the dissolution of the Company of New France, the establishment of the Supreme4 Council, the recall of Avaugour, and the appointment of Mézy, had yet other objects and other results. Laval, vicar apostolic and titular5 bishop of Petr?a, wished to become in title, as in fact, bishop of Quebec. Thus he would gain an increase of dignity and authority, necessary, as he thought, in his conflicts with the civil power; “for,” he wrote to the cardinals7 of the Propaganda, “I have learned from long experience how little security my character of vicar apostolic gives me against those charged with political affairs: I mean the officers of the Crown, perpetual rivals and contemners of the authority of the church.” *
* For a long extract from this letter, copied from the
original in the archives of the Propaganda at Rome, see
Faillon, Colonie Fran?aise, III. 432
This reason was for the Pope and the cardinals. It may well be believed that he held a different language to the king. To him he urged that the bishopric was needed to enforce order, suppress sin, and crush heresy8. Both Louis XIV. and the queen mother favored his wishes; * but difficulties arose and interminable disputes ensued on the question, whether the proposed bishopric should depend immediately on the Pope or on the Archbishop of Rouen. It was a revival9 of the old quarrel of Gallican and ultramontane. Laval, weary of hope deferred10, at length declared that he would leave the colony if he could not be its bishop in title; and in 1674, after eleven years of delay, the king yielded to the Pope’s demands, and the vicar apostolic became first bishop of Quebec.
If Laval had to wait for his mitre, he found no delay and no difficulty in attaining11 another object no less dear to him. He wished to provide priests for Canada, drawn12 from the Canadian population, fed with sound and wholesome13 doctrine14, reared under his eye, and moulded by his hand. To this end he proposed to establish a seminary at Quebec. The plan found favor with the pious15 king, and a decree signed by his hand sanctioned and confirmed it. The new seminary was to be a corporation of priests under a superior chosen by the bishop; and, besides its functions of instruction, it was vested with distinct and extraordinary powers. Laval,
* Anne d'Autriche a Laval, 23 Avril, 1662; Louis XIV. au
Pape, 28 Jan., 1664; Louis XIV. au Duc de Créquy,
Ambassadeur à Rome, 28 June, 1664.
an organizer and a disciplinarian by nature and training, would fain subject the priests of his diocese to a control as complete as that of monks16 in a convent. In France, the curé or parish priest was, with rare exceptions, a fixture17 in his parish, whence he could be removed only for grave reasons, and through prescribed forms of procedure. Hence he was to a certain degree independent of the bishop. Laval, on the contrary, demanded that the Canadian curé should be removable at his will, and thus placed in the position of a missionary18, to come and go at the order of his superior. In fact, the Canadian parishes were for a long time so widely scattered19, so feeble in population, and so miserably20 poor, that, besides the disciplinary advantages of this plan, its adoption21 was at first almost a matter of necessity. It added greatly to the power of the church; and, as the colony increased, the king and the minister conceived an increasing distrust of it. Instructions for the “fixation” of the curés were repeatedly sent to the colony, and the bishop, while professing22 to obey, repeatedly evaded23 them. Various fluctuations24 and changes took place; but Laval had built on strong foundations, and at this day the system of removable curés prevails in most of the Canadian parishes. *
* On the establishment of the seminary. Mandement de
l’Evêque de Petrée, pour l’Etablissement du Séminaire de
Québec; Approbation26 du Roy (Edits et Ordonnances, I. 33,
35); La Tour, Vie de Laval, Liv. VI.; Esquisse de la Vie de
Laval, Appendix. Various papers bearing on the subject are
printed in the Canadian Abeille, from originals in the
archives of the seminary.
himself at its head. His seminary, the mother who had reared them, was further charged to maintain them, nurse them in sickness, and support them in old age. Under her maternal27 roof the tired priest found repose28 among his brethren; and thither29 every year he repaired from the charge of his flock in the wilderness30, to freshen his devotion and animate31 his zeal by a season of meditation32 and prayer.
The difficult task remained to provide the necessary funds. Laval imposed a tithe33 of one-thirteenth on all products of the soil, or, as afterwards settled, on grains alone. This tithe was paid to the seminary, and by the seminary to the priests. The people, unused to such a burden, clamored and resisted; and Mézy, in his disputes with the bishop, had taken advantage of their discontent. It became necessary to reduce the tithe to a twenty-sixth, which, as there was little or no money among the inhabitants, was paid in kind. Nevertheless, the scattered and impoverished34 settlers grudged35 even this contribution to the support of a priest whom many of them rarely saw; and the collection of it became a matter of the greatest difficulty and uncertainty36. How the king came to the rescue, we shall hereafter see.
Besides the great seminary where young men were trained for the priesthood, there was the lesser37 seminary where boys were educated in the hope that they would one day take orders. This school began in 1668, with eight French and six Indian pupils, in the old house of Madame
Couillard; but so far as the Indians were concerned it was a failure. Sooner or later they all ran wild in the woods, carrying with them as fruits of their studies a sufficiency of prayers, offices, and chants learned by rote6, along with a feeble smattering of Latin and rhetoric39, which they soon dropped by the way. There was also a sort of farm-school attached to the seminary, for the training of a humbler class of pupils. It was established at the parish of St. Joachim, below Quebec, where the children of artisans and peasants were taught farming and various mechanical arts, and thoroughly40 grounded in the doctrine and discipline of the church. * The Great and Lesser Seminary still subsist41, and form one of the most important Roman Catholic institutions on this continent. To them has recently been added the Laval University, resting on the same foundation, and supported by the same funds.
Whence were these funds derived42? Laval, in order to imitate the poverty of the apostles, had divested43 himself of his property before he came to Canada; otherwise there is little doubt that in the fulness of his zeal he would have devoted44 it to his favorite object. But if he had no property he had influence, and his family had both influence and wealth. He acquired vast grants of land in the best parts of Canada. Some of these he sold or exchanged; others he retained till the year
*Annales du Petit Séminaire de Quebec, see Abeille, Vol. I.;
Notice Historique sur le Petit Séminaire de Quebec, Ibid.,
Vol. II.; Notice Historique sur la Paroisse de St. Joachim,
Ibid., Vol. I. The Abeille is a journal published by the
seminary.
1680, when he gave them, with nearly all else that he then possessed45, to his seminary at Quebec. The lands with which he thus endowed it included the seigniories of the Petite Nation, the island of Jesus, and Beaupré. The last is of great extent, and at the present day of immense value. Beginning a few miles below Quebec, it borders the St. Lawrence for a distance of sixteen leagues, and is six leagues in depth, measured from the river. From these sources the seminary still draws an abundant revenue, though its seigniorial rights were commuted46 on the recent extinction47 of the feudal48 tenure49 in Canada.
Well did Laval deserve that his name should live in that of the university which a century and a half after his death owed its existence to his bounty50. This father of the Canadian church, who has left so deep an impress on one of the communities which form the vast population of North America, belonged to a type of character to which an even justice is rarely done. With the exception of the Canadian Garneau, a liberal Catholic, those who have treated of him, have seen him through a medium intensely Romanist, coloring, hiding, and exaggerating by turns both his actions and the traits of his character. Tried by the Romanist standard, his merits were great; though the extraordinary influence which he exercised in the affairs of the colony were, as already observed, by no means due to his spiritual graces alone. To a saint sprung from the haute noblesse, Earth and Heaven were alike propitious51. When the vicar general Colombière pronounced his funeral eulogy52 in the sounding periods of Bossuet, he did not fail to exhibit him on the ancestral pedestal where his virtues53 would shine with redoubled lustre54. “The exploits of the heroes of the House of Montmorency,” exclaims the reverend orator55, “form one of the fairest chapters in the annals of Old France; the heroic acts of charity, humility56, and faith, achieved by a Montmorency, form one of the fairest in the annals of New France. The combats, victories, and conquests of the Montmorency in Europe would fill whole volumes; and so, too, would the triumphs won by a Montmorency, in America, over sin, passion, and the devil.” Then he crowns the high-born prelate with a halo of fourfold saintship. “It was with good reason that Providence57 permitted him to be called Francis: for the virtues of all the saints of that name were combined in him; the zeal of Saint Francis Xavier, the charity of Saint Francis of Sales, the poverty of Saint Francis of Assissi, the self-mortification of Saint Francis Borgia; but poverty was the mistress of his heart, and he loved her with incontrollable transports.”
The stories which Colombière proceeds to tell of Laval’s asceticism58 are confirmed by other evidence, and are, no doubt, true. Nor is there any reasonable doubt that, had the bishop stood in the place of Brebeuf or Charles Lalemant, he would have suffered torture and death like them. But it was his lot to strive, not against infidel savages59, but against countrymen and Catholics, who had no disposition60 to burn him, and would rather have done him reverence61 than wrong.
To comprehend his actions and motives62, it is necessary to know his ideas in regard to the relations of church and state. They were those of the extreme ultramontanes, which a recent Jesuit preacher has expressed with tolerable distinctness. In a sermon uttered in the Church of Notre Dame38, at Montreal, on the first of November, 1872, he thus announced them. “The supremacy63 and infallibility of the Pope; the independence and liberty of the church; the subordination and submission64 of the state to the church; in case of conflict between them, the church to decide, the state to submit: for whoever follows and defends these principles, life and a blessing65; for whoever rejects and combats them, death and a curse.” *
These were the principles which Laval and the Jesuits strove to make good. Christ was to rule in Canada through his deputy the bishop, and God’s law was to triumph over the laws of man. As in the halcyon66 days of Champlain and Montmagny, the governor was to be the right hand of the church, to wield67 the earthly sword at her bidding, and the council was to be the agent of her high behests.
France was drifting toward the triumph of the parti dévot, the sinister68 reign69 of petticoat and cassock, the era of Maintenon and Tellier, and the
* This sermon was preached by Father Braun, S. J., on
occasion of the “Golden Wedding,” or fiftieth anniversary,
of Bishop Bourget of Montreal. A large body of the Canadian
clergy were present, some of whom thought his expressions
in the “Montreal Weekly Herald” of Nov. 2, 1872; and the
above extract is copied verbatim.
fatal atrocities71 of the dragonnades. Yet the advancing tide of priestly domination did not flow smoothly72. The unparalleled prestige which surrounded the throne of the young king, joined to his quarrels with the Pope and divisions in the church itself, disturbed, though they could not check its progress. In Canada it was otherwise. The colony had been ruled by priests from the beginning, and it only remained to continue in her future the law of her past. She was the fold of Christ; the wolf of civil government was among the flock, and Laval and the Jesuits, watchful73 shepherds, were doing their best to chain and muzzle74 him.
According to Argenson, Laval had said, “A bishop can do what he likes;” and his action answered reasonably well to his words. He thought himself above human law. In vindicating75 the assumed rights of the church, he invaded the rights of others, and used means from which a healthy conscience would have shrunk. All his thoughts and sympathies had run from childhood in ecclesiastical channels, and he cared for nothing outside the church. Prayer, meditation, and asceticism had leavened76 and moulded him. During four years he had been steeped in the mysticism of the Hermitage, which had for its aim the annihilation of self, and through self-annihilation the absorption into God. * He had passed from a life of visions to a life of action. Earnest to fanaticism77, he saw but one great object, the glory of God on earth. He was penetrated78 by the poisonous casuistry of the Jesuits,
based on the assumption that all means are permitted when the end is the service of God; and as Laval, in his own opinion, was always doing the service of God, while his opponents were always doing that of the devil, he enjoyed, in the use of means, a latitude80 of which we have seen him avail himself.
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1
zeal
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| n.热心，热情，热忱 | |
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bishop
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| n.主教，（国际象棋）象 | |
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memorable
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| adj.值得回忆的，难忘的，特别的，显著的 | |
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supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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titular
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| adj.名义上的，有名无实的；n.只有名义（或头衔）的人 | |
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rote
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| n.死记硬背，生搬硬套 | |
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cardinals
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| 红衣主教( cardinal的名词复数 )； 红衣凤头鸟（见于北美，雄鸟为鲜红色）； 基数 | |
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heresy
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| n.异端邪说；异教 | |
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revival
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| n.复兴，复苏，（精力、活力等的）重振 | |
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deferred
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| adj.延期的，缓召的v.拖延，延缓，推迟( defer的过去式和过去分词 )；服从某人的意愿，遵从 | |
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attaining
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的现在分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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wholesome
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| adj.适合；卫生的；有益健康的；显示身心健康的 | |
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doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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pious
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| adj.虔诚的；道貌岸然的 | |
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monks
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| n.修道士，僧侣( monk的名词复数 ) | |
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fixture
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| n.固定设备；预定日期；比赛时间；定期存款 | |
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missionary
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| adj.教会的，传教(士)的；n.传教士 | |
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scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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miserably
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| adv.痛苦地；悲惨地；糟糕地；极度地 | |
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adoption
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| n.采用，采纳，通过；收养 | |
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professing
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| 声称( profess的现在分词 )； 宣称； 公开表明； 信奉 | |
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evaded
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| 逃避( evade的过去式和过去分词 )； 避开； 回避； 想不出 | |
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fluctuations
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| 波动，涨落，起伏( fluctuation的名词复数 ) | |
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clergy
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| n.[总称]牧师，神职人员 | |
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approbation
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| n.称赞；认可 | |
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maternal
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| adj.母亲的，母亲般的，母系的，母方的 | |
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repose
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| v.(使)休息；n.安息 | |
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thither
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| adv.向那里；adj.在那边的，对岸的 | |
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wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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animate
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| v.赋于生命，鼓励；adj.有生命的，有生气的 | |
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meditation
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| n.熟虑，（尤指宗教的）默想，沉思，（pl.）冥想录 | |
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tithe
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| n.十分之一税；v.课什一税，缴什一税 | |
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impoverished
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| adj.穷困的，无力的，用尽了的v.使（某人）贫穷( impoverish的过去式和过去分词 )；使（某物）贫瘠或恶化 | |
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grudged
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| 怀恨（grudge的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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uncertainty
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| n.易变，靠不住，不确知，不确定的事物 | |
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lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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dame
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| n.女士 | |
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rhetoric
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| n.修辞学，浮夸之言语 | |
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thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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subsist
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| vi.生存，存在，供养 | |
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derived
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| vi.起源；由来；衍生；导出v.得到( derive的过去式和过去分词 )；（从…中）得到获得；源于；（从…中）提取 | |
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divested
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| v.剥夺( divest的过去式和过去分词 )；脱去（衣服）；2。从…取去…；1。（给某人）脱衣服 | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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possessed
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| adj.疯狂的；拥有的，占有的 | |
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commuted
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| 通勤( commute的过去式和过去分词 )； 减（刑）； 代偿 | |
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extinction
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| n.熄灭，消亡，消灭，灭绝，绝种 | |
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feudal
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| adj.封建的，封地的，领地的 | |
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tenure
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| n.终身职位；任期；(土地)保有权，保有期 | |
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bounty
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| n.慷慨的赠予物，奖金；慷慨，大方；施与 | |
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propitious
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| adj.吉利的；顺利的 | |
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52
eulogy
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| n.颂词；颂扬 | |
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virtues
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| 美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处 | |
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lustre
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| n.光亮，光泽；荣誉 | |
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orator
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| n.演说者，演讲者，雄辩家 | |
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humility
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| n.谦逊，谦恭 | |
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providence
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| n.深谋远虑，天道，天意；远见；节约；上帝 | |
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asceticism
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| n.禁欲主义 | |
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savages
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| 未开化的人，野蛮人( savage的名词复数 ) | |
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disposition
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| n.性情，性格；意向，倾向；排列，部署 | |
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reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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supremacy
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| n.至上；至高权力 | |
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submission
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| n.服从，投降；温顺，谦虚；提出 | |
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blessing
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| n.祈神赐福；祷告；祝福，祝愿 | |
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halcyon
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| n.平静的，愉快的 | |
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wield
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| vt.行使，运用，支配；挥，使用(武器等) | |
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sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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reign
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| n.统治时期，统治，支配，盛行；v.占优势 | |
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emphatic
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| adj.强调的，着重的；无可置疑的，明显的 | |
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atrocities
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| n.邪恶，暴行( atrocity的名词复数 )；滔天大罪 | |
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smoothly
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| adv.平滑地，顺利地，流利地，流畅地 | |
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watchful
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| adj.注意的，警惕的 | |
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muzzle
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| n.鼻口部；口套；枪(炮)口；vt.使缄默 | |
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vindicating
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| v.澄清（某人/某事物）受到的责难或嫌疑( vindicate的现在分词 )；表明或证明（所争辩的事物）属实、正当、有效等；维护 | |
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leavened
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| adj.加酵母的v.使（面团）发酵( leaven的过去式和过去分词 )；在…中掺入改变的因素 | |
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77
fanaticism
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| n.狂热，盲信 | |
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78
penetrated
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| adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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maxims
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| n.格言，座右铭( maxim的名词复数 ) | |
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latitude
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| n.纬度，行动或言论的自由(范围)，(pl.)地区 | |
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