Canadian Christendom – Lessons for America

Whilst Canada today is further into the abyss than these United States, there are still lessons to be learned from its Catholic history.

From One Peter Five

By Charles Coulombe, STM, KCSS

Sacred love of the throne and the altar,
Fill our hearts with your immortal breath!
Among the foreign races,
Our guide is the law:
Let us know how to be a people of brothers,
Under the yoke of faith.
And repeat, like our fathers,
The battle cry: “For Christ and King!”
—Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier, “O Canada.”

At this writing I am touring through the Canadian Province of Alberta, a place where I had only been once before – passing through on the passenger train called The Canadian, during which I stayed for two nights at Jasper.  Of course, much has happened since the last time I set foot in the Dominion of Canada in 2016.  Trump was elected the first time; COVID erupted, and Justin Trudeau behaved like a dictator; Queen Elizabeth II died, and was succeeded by her son, King Charles III; Trump was re-elected in 2024, and ordered little Justin to step down; Trump declared that Canada should be the 51st State, and so handed the Canadian election to the Liberals – as he had handed the Australian election to that country’s Labour Party.  Amongst other things, for decades the Liberals at both Provincial and Dominion levels had resisted having Royals open their legislatures.  But so frightened was the new Liberal Prime Minister, Mark Carney, at Trump’s posturings that he asked the country’s new King, Charles III, to remind everyone of Canada’s actual governance by opening Parliament.

Although this welcome bit of civics was quickly forgotten, it underlined one of the few obvious ways in which the United States and Canada are hugely different: we are a republic, and they are a Monarchy.  Yet our republic and their Monarchy have shared roots, as do our respective Churches and cultures.  The difference arises from our revolution, which in turn left its mark not only on our two nations – creating them as they are – but also on the Bahamas, Sierra Leone, and above all, the United Kingdom.

Before the revolution, Canada was basically the Province of Quebec.  Nova Scotia (then including New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island) had its “Neutral Yankees” – New Englanders who moved into the Acadian lands when they were expelled by the British government in 1755 (many of them would go to Louisiana, as the forebears of our own Cajuns).  In Cape Breton Island and elsewhere were new Scottish arrivals – many of them Catholic.  But the Province of Quebec, as determined by the Quebec Act of 1774, encompassed all of the King’s French-speaking subjects in the St. Laurence Valley, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio Country – the latter much to the annoyance of land speculators like Benjamin Franklin.

The challenge facing the British since the Treaty of 1763 was to bring these newcomers, alien in religion and language, into the Empire, while at the same time maintaining their rights “as though they were the King’s subjects born,” as the treaty put it.  They did so with the Quebec Act of 1774 which guaranteed the rights of Catholicism in Canada.  But alien as they appeared to their conquerors, the French settlers already had a highly developed sense of their own providential place in history.  With the long history of missionaries, saints, and martyrs behind them, and a deep and lively belief in the reality of Catholicism, they very much held that their role in North America was providential.  The attitudes expressed in two modern websites, one put out by the Catholic Renaissance in Canada and the other by a priest in the Fraternity of St. Peter and both entitled The Sacred History of Canada very much derive from this earliest assurance – which assurance was very much in the minds of the habitants, their clergy, and their seigneurs at the time the revolution broke out.  Before the revolution, despite the ruin brought by the conquest of Canada by the British King, the Church was able to rebuild and continue.  Bishop Pontbriand had died in 1760; six years later, despite the objections of the cabinet, King George III gave permission for Briand to be consecrated in France and enthroned in Quebec.

Thus, when the American Revolution began – not least because of the ever-blessed Quebec Act, neither Bishop Briand nor his Secretary, Joseph-Olave Plessis, took much of a liking to it; they excommunicated Fr. John Carroll when he came northward with Benjamin Franklin to try to seduce the French into joining the revolution.  Triumphant when the American invaders were defeated in 1776, it may truly be said that Bishop Briand was the father of French-Canadian Conservatism, of which more momentarily.  But the thing to bear in mind in the immediate is that Bishop Briand stood for the transferal of the same kind of loyalty the French in Canada had had to their Bourbon Kings to the new Monarch – even as he had promised to treat them as his subjects born.  When the French Revolution broke out, followed by the murder of Louis XVI in 1793, the horror of Catholic French Canada was enormous; for 50 years after, most paintings of St. Louis produced in the country bore the martyr’s face.  Republicanism was seen as not merely American, but ultimately Jacobin.

In our last article we dealt with the adventures of Fr. John McKenna and his Scots Catholic parishioners from New York.  We left them in Southern Ontario.  In 1787, a young Scots priest, Fr. Alexander MacDonnell (1762-1840), was sent to pastor the districts formerly looked after by Fr. John McKenna, whose career in many ways seemed to prefigure that of Fr. MacDonnell.  If anything the economy was worse than it had been twenty years before.  So at first, Fr. MacDonnell successfully sought employment for his charges in Glasgow – and was given charge of the Glasgow Mission.  But then the war with revolutionary France broke out.  Just as in Fr. McKenna’s time, the deep Jacobite loyalty to Church and King was expanded to include George III; this time the enemy would not be American but French Revolutionaries.  Fr. MacDonnell appealed to his clan chief, Alexander Ranaldson Macdonell of Glengarry.  Together, they raised the Glengarry Fencibles, and on August 14, 1794, Fr. MacDonnell was sworn in as the second Catholic chaplain in the British Army since 1688 – following, of course, Fr. John McKenna back in 1776.  The unit was set to Guernsey in 1795 and spent three years waiting for an invasion which never came.  But than a rebellion broke out in Ireland in 1798.  The Gaelic-speaking Glengarries were dispatched there.  In the districts in which they served, the rebellion was ended swiftly; unjust reprisals on the part of Loyalists were prevented; and for a good five years the horrors that took place during after that rising were not to be found where the Fencibles held sway.  But the outbreak of peace with France in 1802 meant the demobilising of militia units such as theirs.  Back in Scotland, conditions were not much better than when they had left; Fr. MacDonnell petitioned the Crown for lands near where their cousins had settled after the American War.  As it happened, the then Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada – to-day’s Ontario – had been their superior in Ireland, and was highly supportive of the move.  In 1804, he and his people arrived in Quebec, en route to Glengarry County.

There Fr. MacDonnell met Joseph-Octave Plessis, whom we had met last as Bishop Briand’s secretary.  Now a coadjutor bishop – two years later he would become Bishop – and later the first Archbishop – of Quebec.  He and his Scots co-religionist became firm friends – not merely because they were both Catholic but because they held similar views of the relationship of Church and State; both believed that their respective peoples had a particular vocation to spread the Catholic Faith in this New World; that they had an obligation of loyalty to the King; that in return the Province had an obligation to support the Church financially and in terms of security and education.  Bishop Plessis appointed Fr. MacDonell as Vicar of Upper Canada; in time, as Plessis knew, this would lead to the Scotsman becoming a Bishop as well.  As Upper Canada and Lower Canada (Quebec) had each appointed Upper and elected – by the taxpayers – Lower Houses, in time Bishop MacDonnell would serve in the Upper House – the Legislative Council – of Upper Canada; Bishop Plessis would be appointed to both.  It is to one of their colleagues in the Upper Canadian Legislative Council we must now turn our attention to, as worthy a representative of his strand of Canadian Conservatism: Bishop John Strachan.

Now, at this point, having looked at the first two elements of the Canadian Conservative identity – the French Ancien Regime and Scots Jacobitism – we must now look at the third and most amorphous: American Loyalism.  The “first civil war” that was the American Revolution, just as it brought together extremely diverse groups to overthrow the established government, so too did it rally others to defend it.  Sometimes it was a question of personal conscience – oath takers to the King who simply could not change their consciences, or various believers who felt their religion forbade rebellion against established authority.  The less assimilated members of non-English-speaking groups – Dutch, German, or Swedes, for example – were likelier to be Loyal; so too were frontiersmen and inhabitants of “neglected” regions.”

This last reflects an important reality about the revolution; it was brought about in the main by those who already had the larger share of power in the given colony, and dominated the lower houses of their assemblies.  So it was that in New England, where the Calvinist Congregational Church (although Unitarianism was about to emerge) was the established Church in Massachusetts/Maine, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, Congregationalists tended to be rebel, and Anglicans loyal.  But in the Southern Colonies, where Anglicanism was established, its adherents tended to be rebel, and the Calvinist Presbyterians Loyal.  When 100,000 Loyalists had to leave for Canada and elsewhere after the revolution, they brought all of these divisions with them.  But they all shared the right, passed on to all of their descendants, to write “U.E.” – “United Empire” after their names.

Settling in Ontario, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, these Loyalists were very contentious, indeed.  Some wished to reproduce conditions in prewar America, with a nominal Monarchical presence in government – primarily of a symbolic nature; just enough to justify not being annexed by the United States.  Out of these folk would develop the Liberal Party – many of whom would go on to advocate lessening the ties with Britain as much as possible, almost to the point of American seizure.

Others felt quite differently.  Thy believed that it was the levelling, democratic impulse in the first place that had opened the way to rebellion.  To prevent this, the new country, Canada, would need to return to what they conceived of as the principles that had made England and then Britain great: loyalty to the Sovereign (albeit with the strictures of 1688, the eternal Trojan Horse); an established Anglican Church – for Upper Canada, at any rate; and a strong aristocracy – made up, not surprisingly, of those Anglican Loyalist descendants who had come to dominate Upper Canada.  By the time Fr. MacDonnell and Bishop Plessis would meet, this “Family Compact” has encountered the man who would become its leader and spokesman, and whom we have already mentioned – John Strachan (1778-1867).

Born in Aberdeen to a keenly Jacobite Father, Strachan had been raised in the Presbyterian faith of his mother.  Failing as a schoolmaster in Scotland, he came to Upper Canada in 1799, hoping to start an academy in Kingston.  He met some of the leading members of the Family Compact, and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1804.  Reverend Strachan came to know General Brock, and was chaplain to both the Legislative Council and the militia when the War of 1812 broke out.

Bishop Plessis, Fr. MacDonnell, and Rev. Strachan rallied their respective peoples behind the forces of the Crown in the face of the American invasions of 1812 and 1813.  Indeed, all three were indispensable elements in those victories.  Although the War of 1812 is virtually forgotten in the United States (save for the very different tunes The Star-Spangled Banner and The Battle of New Orleans), it created the Anglo-Canadian identity in many ways.  Although Bishops Plessis, MacDonnell, and Strachan shared a common social and political vision, their religious divergence was an ongoing source of tension in their subsequent careers.

So it has proved with Canadian Conservatism in general: the French Catholic and – as the 19th century progressed – Ultramontane viewpoint was sometimes consonant and sometimes in conflict with the Scots Catholic Jacobite tradition, and most particularly with the Anglican High Tory element.  Yet their similarities were also great: in a word, another, different way of being North American from that held since 1783 to their South.  This meant, for instance, a much larger role for the churches in publicly supported education.  It meant the protection of the Catholic and Protestant Missionaries by the Hudson’s Bay Company and then by the Mounties in the settling of the Canadian West.  It meant the Canadian government allowing large numbers of young French Canadians to fight for Pius IX in the Papal Zouaves.  It meant a large role for the Church in Quebec Society until the 1960s.  It was an internal relationship not without pains: the Riel Rebellions, and the Manitoba, Ontario, and New Brunswick Schools controversies were all examples of the Anglophone majority taking advantage of its position.  But even Riel, between the two rebellions he led (and after the second of which he was executed) had problems with the Ottawa government, not the Monarchy: he led the Métis against Fenian raiders from the United States in the name of Queen Victoria.

The two World Wars destroyed Britain’s role in world affairs – and certainly, Canada has been legally independent of the British since 1931.  Slowly, and gradually, both Anglo- and French Canadian identity has been diminished and adulterated, alongside its unique Conservatisms.  The Revolution Tranquille of the 1960s saw the secularisation and republicanising of Quebec’s society, and analogous.  There were prophetic voices raised against this, most notably among the French, Msgr. Lionel Groulx, the great historian, and amongst the English, the philosopher George Grant.  The latter’s masterwork, Lament for a Nation, will show an American audience that what the Canadians lost would be great for Americans to understand.

As we have seen American Exceptionalism dissolve into Wokery, perhaps we can learn at the very least to look at an alternative that worked very well for a long time, and was in many ways more Catholic than our own – and which has dissolved in part to our long-term influence.  One thing is certain: if Canada is to survive for a great deal longer, she needs to revive the Faith that made her once, and can make her great again.