Worshippers pray near Brother Andre's tomb at Saint Joseph's Oratory basilica on the slopes of Montreal's Mount Royal on Oct. 17. in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.ROGERIO BARBOSA/AFP / Getty Images
Here is a Quebec joke:
Two evangelizing members of the Jehovah's Witnesses are standing on the porch of a house. The woman who has come to the door in response to their knock is saying to them, "How can I believe in your religion when I don't believe in my own?"
Ha-ha.
The joke is about Quebec's great religious contradiction, thrown into sharp relief this month by the seemingly inexplicable public celebration of Montrealer Brother André's admission into Roman Catholic sainthood. Fewer than 15 per cent (only 5 per cent in Montreal) of Quebeckers regularly attend worship services, but 83 per cent call themselves Catholic, and only 5.6 per cent mark "no religion" on the census.
Roman Catholicism in the province is the tribal faith of empty churches with a newly minted saint for a kind of mascot.
"Quebeckers are faithful to a religion they no longer believe in," says David Seljak, chair of religious studies at St. Jerome's University in Waterloo, Ont., who did his doctoral dissertation on the church in Quebec "And as conservative evangelists have discovered, they're absolutely conversion-proof."
The contradiction extends beyond religiosity, or the lack of it.
Since church attendance collapsed in the province in the 1960s, at least two secular generations have marched through life hardly tasting a Eucharist wafer or hearing an angelus bell, while the Council for Quebec's Religious Heritage estimates that 20 churches a year are sold or torn down.
Thus you'd think Quebec parents would be the last people to protest against the provincial government's decision in 1997 to amend the Constitution so that protections for Catholic and Protestant denominational education were replaced by linguistic protections.
Wrong. They protested as strongly as the Catholic Church did.
And when catechistical - religious initiation - instruction was taken out of the schools as a result of the constitutional amendment and replaced by a mandatory course in ethics and religious studies, parents then demanded the Catholic church take over the job even though it no longer had enough priests.
So university theology schools suddenly found themselves teaching hundreds of laypersons to fill the niche; the first year after the change, the University of Montreal had more than a thousand taking instruction. And the Supreme Court of Canada agreed on Thursday to hear two Catholic parents' claim that the mandatory Quebec school course violated their Charter freedom to have their children taught the faith of their choosing.
Moreover, while Catholic church marriage rates have dropped substantially in Quebec, child baptism has remained high, generation after generation after generation, says Solange Lefebvre, chair of University of Montreal's department of religion, culture and society.
All of which brings into focus the public hoopla - the mayor of Montreal and Canada's foreign minister among the throngs in Rome's St. Peter's Square, banners on Montreal lamp posts, a thanksgiving mass for an expected 50,000 scheduled for the city's Olympic Stadium at the end of the month - for the canonization of humble Brother André Bessette.
Brother André, the tiny, penniless, near-illiterate porter of College Notre Dame, became the Miracle Man of Montreal, with tens of thousands claiming he cured them of afflictions through prayer before his death in 1937.
The Quebec church at that time mistrusted him. Today, Montreal Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte likens him to Canadiens hockey great Maurice (Rocket) Richard and compares his canonization to winning an Olympic gold medal.
Scholars who study religion in Quebec agree that Roman Catholicism has become cemented into the province's folkloric history. It's likely more cultural heritage than religion, but exactly what it is remains a mystery.
Prof. Seljak says Catholicism has morphed into a kind of cultural insurance policy in Quebec. He tells of Quebec academics he knows being astonished when students of Montreal's l'École Polytechnique chose the monumental St. Joseph's Oratory on Mount Royal - the basilica built through the determination of Brother André - as the site of their vigil after 14 female students were killed by deranged misogynist Marc Lépine on Dec. 6, 1989.
"It's the place where they went when something terrible happened," he says.
Prof. Lefebvre says scholars don't know for certain what role religion plays in Quebec society.
But in her own assessment, she says, "it's still alive, but not out loud."
More people have been touched by Brother André and his elevation to sainthood than was expected, she says, but that could well be because he's such a sympathetic figure in Quebec - "simple, warm, generous, possessed of the kind of Catholicism Quebeckers like" - and because so many Quebeckers, in what's known in French as a jeu de memoire, a game of memory, can claim a personal connection.
They have an aunt or a grandparent or a friend of their parents who met him, or saw him or claimed to have been cured by him.