Every time we walked along the streets of Quebec City, explored the neighborhoods, or drove through the villages up and down the river, we saw churches. Beautiful, towering, prominent, empty churches. It was strange to me, and then interesting, and then unsettling—almost haunting. I wanted to understand it, so I read about Quebec's "Revolution Tranquille" in the 1970s, when the Catholic Church's influence in Quebec fell from pervasive to almost nonexistent. Church programs were turned into government programs, a huge church bureaucracy became government bureaucracy, and the entire character of the province changed overnight. The numbers are almost unbelievable:
• 95 percent of the population went to Mass weekly in the 1950s, but only 5 percent do so today.
• The birth rate went from 40.6 births per 1000 in 1909, to 8.8 in 2023.
• The abortion rate ("voluntary termination of pregnancy") went from 1.4 per 100 births in 1971 to 40.2 in 2002.
• In 2003 (this was the earliest I found numbers for; it was probably higher later) there were 2746 churches in Quebec; by 2022, 713 of them had been demolished, closed, or converted into something else.
I think most people in Quebec aren't bothered by those statistics. They see it as progress, and consider themselves well rid of religion's controlling hand. Obviously I'm not qualified to discuss the ins and outs of Catholic influence in government; I'm sure you could make a case for corruption and overreach and coercion and whatever else. Perhaps church and state were too intertwined, and individual Catholic leaders may well have been as power-hungry and prideful as any politician. But, also obviously, I am sympathetic to the Catholic church, our sister church in Christ, and I think about all the generations of faithful people who built those thousands of churches scattered through every town and every village in Quebec. Surely there were people who kept the faith because they had their own connections to Jesus Christ; people who had many children not because they were "forced" or "intimidated" by the church, but because they loved God and loved their families. People who had generations of religious belief in their blood; who looked for miracles; who served and sacrificed because they chose to put God first. People who would be horrified by what their grandchildren and great-grandchildren have forgotten.
