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QUEBEC CITY — For more than 140 years, Saint-Jean-Baptiste Church, its conical spire rising high into the sky, is an imposing presence here in the provincial capital.
It was a rallying point for the Société Saint-Jean Baptiste, an organization dedicated to protecting the interests of Quebec’s French-speaking population. Appears in travel guides. In 1991, the church, with a facade designed to mirror that of Sainte-Trinité Church in Paris, was classified as a heritage building for its architectural and artistic value.
But today, amid growing secularization, low church attendance, declining revenues and rising costs of maintaining centuries-old places of worship, its doors are closed. The church celebrated its last mass in 2015. Its future is uncertain; officials are considering how the building could be repurposed.
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 steeples and steeples still tower over small villages and town centers – but which is now losing faith at a rapid pace.
Pope Francis arrived in Quebec on Wednesday for the second leg of his “pilgrimage of repentance” where he again drew criticism for what critics say was his insufficient apology on the role of the church in Canada’s school system for Indigenous 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 kilometers from their communities, where they were forbidden to speak their native languages languages, practice their cultural traditions and in many cases were physically and sexually abused. Most of the schools are run by Catholic organizations.
On Monday, Francis apologized for the “evil done 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 men approached the pulpit and unfurled a banner calling on Francis to revoke the 15th-century papal bulls that enshrined the Doctrine of Discovery, which had been used as justification for the colonization and conversion of indigenous peoples in the New World.
Pope apologizes for “evil done by so many Christians” in Canadian boarding schools
The Quebec that Francis met has changed dramatically since the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1984, John Paul was serenaded by 16-year-old Celine Dion at a packed Olympic Stadium in Montreal and celebrated Mass with some 350,000 people in what was then Canada’s largest religious gathering.
The proportion 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 people who identified as Catholic participated in a religious activity at least once a month. From 2017 to 2019, that figure was 14 percent.
The share of people with a religious affiliation other than Catholic doubled, from 9 percent in 1985 to 18 percent from 2017 to 2019.
“We have passed a situation where Catholicism had a kind of moral authority 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 weddings have also declined, researchers reported last year in the journal Secular Studies.
“We have been entering for 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 is primarily about institutional Catholicism.”
Residential schools banned native languages. The Kree want theirs back.
Quebec has had a long and complicated relationship with the faith.
For centuries, the Church had a stranglehold on public institutions in Quebec, including health, education and social services, before the province began to secede 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 could be found for the historic buildings.
In Sherbrooke, 100 miles east of Montreal, the former Sainte-Thérèse church is now the OMG restaurant, a “celebratory place” where cocktails are topped with cotton candy and “even the wisest will be tempted to listen to the devil that sleeps within them.”
(Oh OMG has devil horns. And some of the burgers.)
In Montreal, where Mark Twain once remarked that “you can’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,” defeated Brian Pillman to become the first Apex Championship Wrestling World Champion.
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Meanwhile, Saint Jean Baptiste is missing.
The first church on this site was opened in 1849. It was dedicated to John the Baptist, a cousin of Jesus who would become the patron saint of French Canadians. When it was destroyed by fire in 1881, it was immediately rebuilt.
The priest who delivered the last sermon in 2015 praised it as “a stone church built with genius, with grandeur, with pride that allows everyone – regardless of difference – to touch 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 could be rezoned.
Eva Dubuque-April waited at the Basilica of St. Anne de Beaupre on Francis Thursday to celebrate mass.
Dubuc-April, 31, said she has her children baptized and attends mass periodically. But she feels strongly that the church needs to modernize by revising its teachings on sexuality and the male-only priesthood.
She personally likes Francis and sees him as a reformer, but he faces opposition from the conservative Vatican bureaucracy.
“In Quebec, Catholics don’t agree with these old teachings,” she said. “If they don’t advance, there will be no one left.”
Chico Harlan in Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, Quebec, contributed to this report.
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