Great photo, and fantastic to see the devotion of the people, however the Church in Quebec at the time had a major role in keeping the people under the thumb, under-educated and afraid of asserting their voice, to such an extent that there was a terrific backlash against the church in the 1960’s during the Quiet Revolution.
This all very true, in addition to forcing people to have very large families. If a woman wasn’t either pregnant or nursing during the priest’s annual visit, she had better have a good reason. The Church was very Jansenist at the time. French Canadian families had, for the most part, over 10 kids; 15-18 children wasn’t unheard of. It kept the population dirt poor.
On the flip side though, those large families are what permitted French Canada to survive, through sheer population growth. The irony now is that because of the backlash against the Church, we are reproducing below the replacement rate, and we’re aborting something like over 30,000 babies a year. As a result we’ve had to open the floodgates to immigration. Quebec always favoured francophone immigrants, and in recent years, mostly from Algeria. To the horror of many Quebecers, it turns out they’re mostly Muslim and now there’s a huge backlash against Muslim immigrants.
I live in the thick of it, there are many Muslims in the office I work in. I have no issues with them. They understand the notion of someone having a faith walk much better than the secular Québecois that dumped the Church.
But then the local Church was very much responsible for part of that. There are some parallels between the Quebec and Irish situations (British masters, severe Jansenist local Church, etc.), in fact intermarriage between the French and Irish was common.
I for one would never want to go back to the epoch captured in that picture.
