View From Rome: Archbishop Stagni's 1915 Reports on the Ontario Bilingual Schools Question 9780773570108

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The View from Rome Archbishop Stagni’s 1915 Reports on the Ontario Bilingual Schools Question

One of the acrimonious episodes in French-English relations in Canada resulted from the bilingual schools question in Ontario in the early part of the twentieth century; the issue reinforced the divisions within the Catholic Church between francophones and anglophones. In 1916 the Pope wrote a letter to the Canadian bishops in the hope of encouraging a peaceful settlement to this dispute. In his discussion the pope and his advisers relied heavily on the Apostolic Delegate of the Holy See to Canada, Archbishop Pellegrino Stagni, particularly on two reports Stagni had sent to Rome in 1915 on the problems regarding bilingual schools in the province and especially in the city of Ottawa. In The View from Rome John Zucchi translates these two reports for the first time. His introduction places the reports in context and offers historical background to the events surrounding the divisions in the Church. john zucchi, professor of history at McGill University, is the author of The Little Slaves of the Harp: Italian Child Street Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Paris, London, and New York and Italians in Toronto: Development of a National Identity, 1875–1935.

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mcgill-queen’s studies in the history of religion Volumes in this series have been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto. series two In memory of George Rawlyk Donald Harman Akenson, Editor Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640–1665 Patricia Simpson Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience Edited by G.A. Rawlyk Infinity, Faith, and Time Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature John Spencer Hill

Culture, Religion, and Demographic Behaviour Catholics and Lutherans in Alsace, 1750–1870 Kevin McQuillan Between Damnation and Starvation Priests and Merchants in Newfoundland Politics, 1745–1855 John P. Greene

The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk, editors

Martin Luther, German Saviour German Evangelical Theology Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917–1933 James M. Stayer

Labour, Love, and Prayer Female Piety in Ulster Religious Literature, 1850–1914 . Andrea Ebel Broz yna

Modernity and the Dilemma of North American Anglican Identities, 1880–1950 William Katerberg

Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine The Greek Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 John-Paul Himka

The Methodist Church on the Prairies, 1896–1914 George Emery

The Waning of the Green Catholics, the Irish, and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 Mark G. McGowan

A Social History of the Cloister Daily Life in the Teaching Monasteries of the Old Regime Elizabeth Rapley

Good Citizens British Missionaries and Imperial States, 1870–1918 James G. Greenlee and Charles M. Johnston, editors

Households of Faith Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 Nancy Christie, editor

The Theology of the Oral Torah Revealing the Justice of God Jacob Neusner Gentle Eminence A Life of George Bernard Cardinal Flahiff P. Wallace Platt

Christian Attitudes Towards the State of Israel Paul Charles Merkley

Blood Ground The Khoekhoe, Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 Elizabeth Elbourne

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iii Acknowledgments A History of Canadian Catholics Gallicanism, Romanism, and Canadianism Terence J. Fay

The View from Rome Archbishop Stagni’s 1915 Reports on the Ontario Bilingual Schools Question Translated and Edited by John Zucchi

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series one G.A. Rawlyk, Editor 1 Small Differences Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815–1922 An International Perspective Donald Harman Akenson

11 Creed and Culture The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750–1930 Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz, editors

2 Two Worlds The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario William Westfall

12 Piety and Nationalism Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in Toronto, 1850–1895 Brian P. Clarke

3 An Evangelical Mind Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 Marguerite Van Die 4 The Dévotes Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France Elizabeth Rapley 5 The Evangelical Century College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression Michael Gauvreau

13 Amazing Grace Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll, editors 14 Children of Peace W. John McIntyre 15 A Solitary Pillar Montreal’s Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution Joan Marshall

6 The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods James M. Stayer

16 Padres in No Man’s Land Canadian Chaplains and the Great War Duff Crerar

7 A World Mission Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918–1939 Robert Wright

17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America A Critical Analysis of U.S. and Canadian Approaches P. Travis Kroeker

8 Serving the Present Age Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada Phyllis D. Airhart

18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917–1981 Robert K. Burkinshaw

9 A Sensitive Independence Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881–1925 Rosemary R. Gagan

19 Through Sunshine and Shadow The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario, 1874–1930 Sharon Cook

10 God’s Peoples Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster Donald Harman Akenson

20 Church, College, and Clergy A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844–1994 Brian J. Fraser

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21 The Lord’s Dominion The History of Canadian Methodism Neil Semple 22 A Full-Orbed Christianity The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau 23 Evangelism and Apostasy The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico Kurt Bowen

24 The Chignecto Covenanters A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brusnwick and Nova Scotia, 1827 to 1905 Eldon Hay 25 Methodists and Women’s Education in Ontario, 1836–1925 Johanna M. Selles 26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy William Lamont

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vi Acknowledgments

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The View from Rome Archbishop Stagni’s 1915 Reports on the Ontario Bilingual Schools Question Translated with an Introduction by

jo h n zu cch i

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002 isbn 0-7735-2347-2 Legal deposit third quarter 2002 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free, and printed with vegetablebased, low voc inks.

McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for its publishing activities. We also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Stagni, Pellegrino The View from Rome: Archbishop Stagni’s 1915 reports on the Ontario bilingual schools question (History of religion) Translation of reports originally written in Italian. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2347-2 1. Bilingual schools—Ontario—History—Sources. 2. Separate schools—Ontario—History—Sources. 3. Catholics—Education—Ontario—History—Sources. I. Zucchi, John E., 1955– II. Title. II. Series: History of religion (Montréal, Quebec). lc3734.2.o6s68 2002

371.071’2713

Typeset in 10/13 Sabon by True to Type

c2001-903814-3

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Contents

Preface

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Introduction

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archbishop stagni’s reports report one: the bilingual schools question in ontario, 1915 3 Appendix 1 Extracts from a Speech by Senator N.A. Belcourt 61 Appendix 2 Speech by Mgr Bruchési; letter to Mgr Bruchési from Cardinal Bégin 66 Appendix 3

Denunciation of Regulation 17 70

Appendix 4 Letter from Mgr William Macdonell to Archbishop Stagni; Letter from Mgr D.J. Scollard to Archbishop Stagni 72 Appendix 5

Prayer to Joan of Arc 76

Appendix 6

A Pressing Appeal to Children 77

Appendix 7 Stagni 79

Letter from Senator Landry to Archbishop

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Appendix 8 The School Situation in Other Provinces of the Dominion 84 report two: the separate schools question in ottawa 91 letter from pope benedict xv to the bishops of canada ( COMMISSO DIVINITUS ) 109 Notes 115 Index 129

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This volume is a translation from the Italian of two lengthy reports on the controversial issue of French-English bilingual schools in Ontario submitted to Rome by the Apostolic Delegate to Canada, Bishop Pellegrino Stagni, in November and December, 1915. The bilingual schools question has been amply covered in the historical literature, although the full extent of Rome’s perspective could not be known because the Vatican’s archives for that period were made accessible only about fifteen years ago. I have therefore not “reinvented the wheel” in my introduction but have presented a context for a reading of the two documents. I have kept most secondary references in my introduction in order not to clutter the translations with too many endnotes. Stagni’s own notes appear at the foot of the page. I am very grateful for the help of a number of individuals and institutions, in particular the Secret Vatican Archives, and for their permission to publish the two reports. In particular I thank Mr Claudio de Dominicis, archivist, for making the necessary documentation so easily accessible. Matteo Sanfilippo was a constant guide during my research period at the Vatican and Propaganda Fide archives. Rev. Donald Tremblay kindly gave me a copy of his dissertation on Mgr Stagni in Canada. Finally, I am grateful to McGill University and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, without whose sabbatical leave and funds this publication would not be possible.

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On 8 September 1916, Pope Benedict xv took the unusual step of issuing a letter, in the first instance, to Louis Nazaire Cardinal Bégin, Archbishop of Quebec and unofficial Primate of Canada, and to all of Canada’s bishops and archbishops. Its contents are well known and have been published elsewhere.1 The purpose of this communication was to bring peace to the main ethnic or linguistic groups in the Canadian Catholic Church, the so-called English or Irish Canadians and the French Canadians. The occasion for the letter, the first of two, has also been well covered by Canadian historians: the Ontario French-English bilingual schools controversy had been brewing since before 1910, and in particular since the introduction of “Regulation 17,” which officially restricted the traditional ambit of those schools.2 Legally, there was no such classification as a “bilingual school” in the province. The French-English schools were virtually all Catholic and mostly to be found in eastern and southwestern Ontario, and their bilingual character had existed by custom and toleration rather than by law. The schools had come under closer scrutiny in recent years and in particular since 1910. The political tensions between anglophones and francophones in the country could not allow such an exercise to proceed without accusations, arguments, and animosity. These tensions were dragged into the Catholic world as well, including the episcopal hierarchy of the Dominion: in newspapers and in public statements, Catholics priests, lay people, and even bishops spoke indiscreetly about

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fellow Catholics of other ethnic backgrounds. In the Catholic Church such actions were considered unacceptable and this was not only a matter of form or public image, but one of substance and principle as well. The Church emphasized the importance of unity and was obliged to recall its pastors to this imperative if a situation seemed to be leading its members down the wrong path ... and thus, Pope Benedict’s letter. The Pontiff’s letter alluded to the grievances of both linguistic groups. French Canadians claimed a right to the use of French when they were concentrated in a particular district even if the province was overwhelmingly anglophone, as was the case in Ontario. Englishspeaking Catholics claimed that they needed priests who spoke their language fluently and that this was difficult in parts of the country where francophone Catholics had predominated, such as the West. In Ontario, anglophone Catholics feared that the controversy over bilingual schools might threaten the very existence of separate schools. The letter did not state it explicitly, but implicitly it recognized that although Catholics were strongly affected by the bilingual schools question, the fundamental issues were legal and political, not religious. The Pope reminded bishops of the obvious, that the whole question of schools “cannot be dealt with independently of the government.” So what was to be done? In predictable fashion, for one who prized unity, Benedict called for moderation among the priests and faithful, and for the bishops to do everything possible to “put an end to the existing evils and to bring about the return of peace.” To put it more succinctly, he quoted St Augustine’s admonition that if “the vessels of the flesh are straitened, then the bounds of charity should be enlarged.” Papal letters and encyclicals have a way of appearing ambiguous yet unambiguous at the same time.3 The Pope speaks for the entire Church and wants to get a clear message across. At the same time he does not want to drag the Church into any particular mêlée. If the letter addresses a burning issue, you can be sure that no partisan names will appear in such a document. Personalities will not be blamed, nor will any particular political party. This, of course, leaves a great deal of room for what have become known as “spin doctors” to fabricate their versions of the story or their analyses of the letter, of what the Pope “was really trying to say.” This was the case with the September 1916 letter to Canadian bishops. French- and English-speaking Catholics presented the letter as a vindication of their respective positions, even if francophone bishops were disappointed by it. Yet the Pope had a clear

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perspective which saw merit both in the francophones’ battles to preserve the French language outside of Quebec and in the anglophone Catholics’ concerns that an aggressive stance by francophones could be detrimental to the Catholic cause. On what did Benedict xv base his reading of the situation? Why, for example, did he not ally himself with one side or the other? Why did he even pronounce himself if the issue of bilingual schools was not a religious one? Why did he see injustices perpetrated in both linguistic camps? Why did he not come down more forcefully on the excesses committed by each linguistic group? The letter was the product of a close reading of, and meditation on, the situation in Ontario by a number of parties, including the Secretary of State and especially the Sacred Consistorial Congregation, but the single most important discussion of the problem and commentary on the situation of the bilingual schools was written by the Apostolic Delegate to Canada, Archbishop Pellegrino Stagni. On 19 November 1915 Archbishop Stagni sent off a lengthy report on bilingual schools in Ontario to Cardinal Giovanni De Lai, the Secretary of the Sacred Consistorial Congregation in Rome, who had requested a report on 13 September. This committee of cardinals was the body to which the Apostolic Delegate in Canada reported from 1910 on, even if substantial matters involving politics or international questions were also referred to the Holy See’s Secretary of State. (Until 1908, the delegate had reported directly to Propaganda Fide, which was responsible for mission countries or countries in which Catholics were a minority.) The report was followed by a shorter yet substantial document on 13 December specifically about the separate schools question in Ottawa, which seemed to be the nucleus of the whole controversy. These two reports gave the background to both questions (which, after all, were intertwined), provided a primer on Canadian constitutional law as applied to matters of education, reviewed education guidelines and regulations in Ontario, and did what the papal letter, as a public statement, could not do: they named names and gave the papal delegate’s discreet yet frank perspective on the issues and personalities involved.4 The reports would clearly be read and discussed in Rome, but they would also be the basis for examining the bilingual schools question in the Sacred Consistorial Congregation, which would, in turn, strongly influence the Pope’s letter and furthermore represent the Vatican’s reading of the controversy. As such they are a fascinating window on how a particular Canadian controversy was viewed by an interested outsider. This volume provides an

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English translation of the two reports from the original Italian. The reports are found in the collection of documents pertaining to Canada in the Secret Vatican Archives (Archivum Secretum Vaticanum) and have been accessible to researchers for about the last fifteen years.5 The reports are preceded by a brief introduction, which will go over some old ground, such as the events regarding the bilingual schools controversy and earlier studies on it, but will look at how religion got confused with a question that was not essentially religious.

th e events o f th e bi l i n g ua l sch o o ls q ues ti o n Archbishop Stagni’s reports give an excellent narrative of the events regarding the controversy, and numerous studies have been published on the subject; therefore, our overview can be brief. Bilingual schools had existed in Ontario since well before Confederation, but they were few in number and easily tolerated.6 From 1851, teachers who taught students in French or German could substitute one of those languages for proficiency in English. The Council of Public Instruction reaffirmed this in 1858.7 The understanding was that the real divisive factor in society was religion and not language, and that even if children of French or German origin were taught in their mother tongue in the early grades they would, through assimilation, adopt English in time and be fluent in it as they studied the language in later grades. In 1881, for the first time, an inspector was named in Prescott and Russell counties for the French schools. German immigrants in Waterloo County had requested one for German schools in Ontario in 1872 but this had not been accorded. In 1885, the minister of education in the Oliver Mowat government, George W. Ross, advised that English and French schools be given instructions to devote a certain number of hours a day to English subjects: reading, spelling, grammar, and composition. There were some objections to the regulations, but it was clear that the directives were to be interpreted liberally.8 In the late 1880s it was already becoming evident that the FrenchEnglish or French-only schools had serious problems which could be held up to indicate their “inefficiency”. Nonetheless, it was felt that the appointment of a French inspector had begun to address these problems, not the least of which was the low level of training of the teachers in those schools. But the schools were under the ultimate control of the Education Department and therefore open to political scrutiny at a

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time of significant migration of Quebec francophones to eastern Ontario, in particular to the Ottawa Valley. The opposition Conservative party in the province, under the leadership of William Meredith (1878–94), went on the attack, demanding English-only schools, but an ensuing commission to investigate French- and German-language schools reported conveniently before the 1890 elections that though these schools had problems, they were improving. More important, in April 1890, two clauses were passed in the legislature, one which implicitly tolerated French (and German) in Ontario schools and another which required teachers to conduct classes and communication with students in English, unless this was not practical because of the student’s lack of English comprehension.9 The dramatic growth in the francophone student body, which by the turn of the century predominated in the Ottawa Separate School Board, led to friction between the two ethnic or linguistic groups. Robert Choquette has chronicled events in that city amply for us. His study shows us how struggles among bishops over the nominations of new bishops to the ecclesiastical sees of Ottawa, London, and Sault Ste Marie, in the first decade of the last century, could contribute to a climate of mistrust among priests and laity. The battle over which ethnic or linguistic group – the English-speaking or the francophones – would ultimately “control” the dioceses in question and thus give a stamp to Catholicism in Ontario (presumably, much of this depended on the background of the episcopal nominee) created a great deal of acrimony even at the local level. Trustees and parents of children in the Ottawa separate school board shared these tensions. In 1904 the board was taken to court by an Irish Catholic teacher who protested the decision of trustees to open a new, mainly French-language school run by the Christian Brothers. Ostensibly, Mr J.D. Gratton’s complaint had to do with the teaching qualifications of the brothers, but his objections about the financial costs of such an establishment were not far below the surface. An injunction was granted by the courts and was upheld in 1906 when the trustees appealed to the Privy Council. In 1907, the government passed a law requiring teachers who did not qualify as certified teachers (as was the case, for example, with many francophone teaching sisters and brothers in Ottawa) to show the intention of doing so by 1 July of that year.10 While this battle was going on, another controversy divided Catholics in Ottawa, from 1901 to 1907 (and would return a decade later), the university question, in which the “Irish” faction, led by the future bishop of

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London, Michael Fallon, accused fellow Oblates of advancing the francophone interests in the University of Ottawa. All of this occurred in the changing political climate in 1906 just after the Conservatives came back to power in Ontario. This was, of course, the same party that had pressured the Liberal government to tighten the thumbscrews on the French-language schools, partly in response to the influence of its Orange constituency and heightened tensions between “les deux races” in the country. The francophones in Ontario certainly detected the threat and called for better conditions for bilingual schools in the province. A series of conferences culminated in the January 1910 Congrès de l’association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario that was also attended by many prominent politicians and ecclesiastics. The congress promoted the conception of a bilingual country in which the two official languages would have equal status. The ethnic and linguistic affirmation of French Canadians in Ontario also stirred up tensions with anglophone Catholics and Protestants. We can thus see how Francis Cardinal Bourne’s remarks at the Eucharistic Congress of 1910, in Montreal, on the necessity to make English the language of the Catholic Church in Canada, and Henri Bourassa’s public reaction to those comments would have inflamed an already volatile situation. Even more serious, private critical comments regarding bilingual schools made to Provincial Secretary W.J. Hanna by London’s Catholic bishop, Michael Fallon, in May 1910, were leaked to the press in the fall by M.H. Maisonville, the secretary of Public Works Minister Dr Charles Reaume. From 1910 to 1915, the tensions between francophone and anglophone Catholics in the province would mount relentlessly. In October 1910 the Department of Education commissioned Dr F.W. Merchant to report on bilingual French-English schools in the province, and the report appeared in February 1912. Merchant visited 269 bilingual schools and found that a very large proportion of the teachers had no certificates, or only temporary ones. Little attention was being given to English in many of the schools. The report summed up the English-French schools as “lacking in efficiency.” Just as important was the observation that the best results were obtained in those schools in which instruction in the early years was in the mother tongue of the student.11 The Merchant Report was not surprising, except for those who might have expected to eradicate French from the curriculum alto-

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gether. When, in June 1912, Regulation 17 was published, it prohibited students who could function in English from taking instruction in French. On the other hand, students who could not function in English could be instructed in French in the first form (grades 1 to 3). Two inspectors were to visit the schools, a supervising inspector and one subordinate French-language inspector. The two were placed on an equal level with revisions to the regulation in 1913. The reactions to the report, including the behaviour of students in the classroom, was taken up by the Apostolic Delegate and can be consulted in his report. These included protests and mass exits from classrooms upon the arrival of the “English” inspector. At the same time, many francoontariens attacked Bishop Fallon’s criticisms of the bilingual schools and what at times must have been perceived as the even louder silence of the other, “Irish” bishops in the province. If Fallon believed that the French Canadians had subordinated religion to nationality,12 the other bishops argued constantly that prudence dictated silence: a Protestant backlash might harm separate schools. The only Ontario bishop to speak out in defence of the legal right to continue the status quo regarding bilingual schools was Mgr Elie-Anicet Latulipe, Vicar-Apostolic of Temiscaming.

th e c o ntext On the one hand the Ontario bilingual schools question was a local question, based in Ontario, and in particular in eastern Ontario. On the other hand it evolved in a national context of ethnic and religious tensions. Harold Isaacs’s observations a generation ago on the new pluralism in the United States could have been applied to early twentieth-century Canada. It seemed, notes Isaacs, that human differences with regard to skin colour, names, language, history, origins, nationality, and religion “would be flattened out under the pressures of modernization or kept under control by the benign power of superior peoples carrying out their divinely ordained missions.” But this did not come about: “our tribal separatenesses are here to stay.”13 Indeed those separatenesses were very much in evidence in Canada a few generations before Isaacs’s statement. It is well known to us that, from the 1880s, relations between the English- and French-speakers in Canada grew ever more tense and bitter, and we can refer to a litany of burning issues which divided them: Louis Riel’s hanging, the Jesuit Estates’ Act controversy, the Manitoba schools question, the Northwest

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schools question, the Boer War, the race question, the Naval Acts, and, of course, the question of bilingual schools in Ontario. These events and controversies, which stemmed from differing visions of the Confederation, led the two groups towards that low point in their relations brought on by Conscription in 1917.14 Historians have already shown us how the battle between “les deux races” was not really a racial battle but one between two ethnoreligious and linguistic groups, French-Canadian Catholics and BritishCanadian Protestants. These labels do not, of course, capture the entire Canadian population. A tiny fraction of the francophone population was Protestant at the turn of the century. There were also many Irish and British Roman Catholics in the country, not to mention other Christians and non-Christians. Even the term “British” is a misnomer if we are referring to ethnic groups: it would be more appropriate to refer to the English, Scottish, and Welsh. To be sure, Roman Catholics were not wholly united in their vision of the relationship of their faith to the civil polity, even if ultramontanism had such a powerful influence, in particular in Montreal and Trois-Rivières, but also in other dioceses, such as Toronto. But the identities which coalesced and emerged in the struggle might be divided into two main broad camps, Protestant Canadians overwhelmingly of British origin, and Catholic Canadians overwhelmingly of French origin.15 That French Canadians were being attacked was cold comfort for the Irish Catholics, who had already fought their battles on a number of fronts, whether it was political skirmishes regarding the no-popery cries of George Brown and his Clear Grits, or the street fights against the Orange Order on the 17th of March or the 12th of July, or even the constant struggle for jobs in niches jealously guarded by Orangemen.16 During many of the struggles between 1885 and 1920, the Irish Catholics would be caught in the crossfire and would have to negotiate their position between the two main ethnoreligious groups. During the second half of the nineteenth century the Irish Catholics had developed a strong ethnoreligious identity. What Brian Clarke has told us about this community in Toronto in that period can probably be applied to other parts of the province: the Irish had forged a sense of nationality strongly informed by ultramontane Catholicism.17 Most Roman Catholics in Ontario lived in relative peace with each other until the late nineteenth century. If you were to follow Catholic newspaper reports in this period, you would notice significant goodwill on the part of English-speaking Catholics towards their franco-

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phone co-religionists even in the 1870s and 1880s.18 This was soon to change, however, as tensions and even animosity grew between the English and French worlds, both at the hierarchical level of the Church and among the laity. Canada was “born of ethnic tension,” Roberto Perin reminds us in the conclusion to his excellent study Rome in Canada. Given the close association between religion and ethnicity, it was inevitable that the ethnic tension would eventually enter the Catholic world. Perin gives us some interesting clues to some of the origins of those tensions. For example, he juxtaposes the vigilance of Quebec bishops (and in particular the ultramontane bishops) in the late nineteenth century over the rights of Catholics in other provinces, the Métis in Saskatchewan in 1885, the New Brunswick schools in 1873, the Manitoba schools from 1890, and the Northwest schools from 1892, with what appeared to be the remarkable indifference of Ontario bishops, or the so-called “Irlandais,” to the plight of Catholics in other provinces and in particular, but not only, to that of the French-speaking ones.19 Where did these differing attitudes have their origins? The FrenchCanadian case has been amply addressed by a number of historians, and in particular, Arthur Silver and Roberto Perin.20 The Church in Quebec participated in the general cultural and political climate, which advocated developing strong autonomy for the province and its French-Canadian people. At Confederation there was little awareness of the French fact outside Quebec, but this was soon to change. Increasingly, the French-Canadian church became a messianic and missionary agency to spread Catholicism across Canada and indeed North America, with a “mission providentielle et salutaire.”21 In the United States this would be made possible through the great migration of les canadiens to New England (the so-called franco-americains), in particular, but also to the Midwest and other parts of the country. In Canada, migration would also be instrumental, and even more so would be the control of Church institutions by francophones. The same cannot be said about the Irish. The perceived absence of a similar missionary élan among the Irish has not been accounted for systematically. Certainly, one factor would be the very development of Irish Catholic ethnicity in Canada. The secular nationalist societies played a significant role in advancing Irish-Canadian nationality, but Brian Clarke points out that this ethnoreligious group was very strongly marked by ultramontane Catholicism and deeply influenced and controlled by the bishop and clergy. This leads us to observe that the

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Catholicism of this group was also very much considered in ethnic terms. Irish Catholics in Toronto, like French Catholics in Quebec, had developed a sense of what some anthropologists call primordial ethnicity: one belonged, as it were, to a “tribe” (and not in the pejorative sense).22 The tribe, however, did not have a territory and even the notion of the homeland was ambiguous. Bishop Lynch and his generation were very much caught up in Irish politics and in the questions of Home Rule, for example, while the first Canadian-born generation was much less interested in such questions and more engaged in the Canadian polity.23 The territory of the French tribe was Quebec, the missionary centre for North America. Here, the tragedy of the British conquest could even be presented in a positive light: the conquest had preserved les habitants from the ideological influences of the French Revolution and therefore gave those original 8,500 immigrants and their descendants (who by the time of the Conquest numbered 65,000) a sense of peoplehood, of being chosen to spread Catholicism in the northern hemisphere of the Americas. Cardinal Bégin proudly proclaimed to the head of Propaganda Fide in 1907 that “les canadiens-français, colons intrépides, ont entrepris de conquérir” the “Protestant province” of Ontario, whereas “[l]es irlandais ... renoncent à la lutte.”24 We could say, then, that the French Canadians perceived themselves as a nation with a specific territory and a Catholic culture, indeed a formidable counterculture: after all, the messianic vision was one strongly inspired by the French-speaking Catholic Church in Canada. The Irish in Ontario, without a real territory in Canada, appeared to be an ethnic group jockeying for position in a Protestant society that was hostile to their religious denomination and culture. They clearly did not feel the need to participate in Church-led projects to affirm their presence transnationally in the polity as did the French Canadians, even if they did so on the local scene through the construction of churches and schools. The homeland of the Irish diaspora was a few thousand kilometres away, whereas the heartland of the French-Canadian diaspora – really and symbolically – was a key feature of the Canadian political and social landscape. We should note, however, that Quebec for French Canadians had a different meaning from what the Old World had for immigrants to Canada.25 While French Catholic Canada perceived itself as spreading its Catholic message and culture in North America through its diaspora and institutions, Irish Catholics engaged themselves in cutting out a

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niche in the social and economic structures of urban and rural Canada and advancing their position in an overwhelmingly (admittedly outside of Quebec, and ever more so as one moved west) Protestant Canada. The French-Canadian Church could afford to be aggressive – even arrogant – and at the very least self-confident: after all, its representatives could claim to have been at the origin of the Catholic Church in Canada and a founding people. “Loin d’être considéré un peuple conquis, nous possédons toutes les prérogatives de la souveraineté,” wrote Cardinal Bégin to Cardinal Gotti of Propaganda Fide in 1907,26 indicating that while the French-Canadian Catholics had four ministers in the federal cabinet the Irish Catholics had but one. The Irish, on the other hand, had to fight for a distinctive voice in parts of the country where they constituted a significant minority, and in the broader Canadian polity. In this they resembled to some extent nineteenth-century Irish Catholics in American cities, whose clergy were described by Jay P. Dolan twenty years ago as “bricks and mortar priests,”27 constructing edifices that would leave a mark on the broader urban society. The development of an institutional landscape at the local level was instrumental to the Irish Catholic clergy in both countries, and not only in order to erect a protective ring around the ethnie. Even more important was what economists call the “demonstration effect” of the Protestant world. During the romantic revival, North American Irish Catholics joined the neo-Gothic revival and the trend towards new and large churches among their “separated brethren.” Furthermore, they forged an educational, health, and welfare system which paralleled that of the state or of other Protestant or secular organizations. In Ontario, the cornerstone of this infrastructure was the separate school system which allowed Catholics to “separate” from the public school system and erect their own board and direct real estate taxes of Catholics to Catholic schools (in fact, Protestants could do the same). It is a wellknown fact that these schools came into being thanks largely to the support of French Catholics from Canada East. But even if the Irish Catholics could not have launched the system on their own, they certainly were the most vehement in upholding the rights of those schools and in negotiating doggedly to obtain concessions for their maintenance and expansion.28 It would not be an exaggeration to say that separate schools were a shibboleth of the increasing strength of Irish Catholics in English Ontario Protestant culture and society. Not only did the schools demonstrate the capacity of Irish Catholics to “look after their own”

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and even the newer Catholics arriving at the end of the nineteenth century, from Germany, Italy, or Poland; they also were proof that the Irish could match the Protestant world, in erecting not only a school system, but an excellent one. Catholic schools, like any others, had to pass the litmus test of the Ontario Department of Education’s inspectors, who were usually Protestant, and who admitted, by the late nineteenth century, that the separate schools were irreproachable.29 Why were the separate schools so important to Irish Catholics in Ontario and why were they a symbol of the Irish Catholic presence in that province? Clearly, part of the answer lies in the rootedness of antiCatholic prejudice among a large segment of the Protestant population, often spearheaded by one local branch or another of the Orange Order. And the Loyal Blue’s influence on the Conservative Party ensured that the battle against Catholics could be kept alive, among other means, by attacking the separate schools. As we know, Orange lodges and their members were instrumental at the local party levels in keeping up the attack on French bilingual Catholic schools in the years leading to the Regulation 17 controversy, especially after the Conservative victory in Ontario in 1905.30 However, the symbolic value of separate schools to the Irish Catholics had less to do with external perceptions than with the aspirations of the Irish Catholics themselves. Roberto Perin has echoed the point, made by others as well, that in the late nineteenth century, within the context of Leo xiii’s dream to bring the “separated brethren” back to the fold, many members of the Roman Curia, inspired by Newman himself, looked to a conversion of English-speaking Protestants through English-speaking Catholics. The hope was that Protestants with the proper evidence would see reason and convert to Catholicism. It was precisely on the points of what constituted proper evidence and of the perceived purpose of that evidence that we see the Irish Catholic world in Ontario develop a position on French-Canadian Catholics. The hope among Catholic leaders in the English-speaking world and even in Rome was that the Protestants would be brought back to the fold by seeing that Irish Catholics were better than Protestants at their own game. Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val, for example, the Spanishborn and English-educated noble prelate who had visited Canada in 1897 and had a continuing influence on Roman decisions regarding Canada until 1914, as the Secretary of State for the Holy See (he was replaced in that year by Cardinal Giovanni De Lai and became Secretary of the Holy Office with the accession of Benedict xv to the papal

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throne), felt that the evidence of superior intelligence among anglophone Catholics in an English-speaking culture would make AngloAmerican Protestants see reason. Roberto Perin argues that this partly explains Merry del Val’s preference for the Irish over the FrenchCanadian Catholics in Canada.31 Indeed, Donato Sbarretti, the Apostolic Delegate from 1903 to 1910, subscribed to this policy. When he confided his thoughts to Rome regarding the situation of priests in the Canadian West in 1905, he recognized that priests needed to speak the languages of their parishioners, whether they were Galicians (Ukrainian-speaking), Italians, Poles, or Hungarians. What preoccupied him most, however, was the lack of English-speaking priests in the West, for, as he saw it, English was destined to be the language of immigrants and their children. There was an even deeper reason for his preoccupation: “to raise the prestige of our Holy Catholic Church in the eyes of Protestants … For the good of religion it would be necessary to make every effort to increase the number of English-language priests, who being more in harmony with the surroundings would be able to strongly advance the interests of religion.”32 The Archbishop of Westminster, Francis Cardinal Bourne, in his famous address of 10 September 1910 at the Eucharistic Congress in Montreal, argued that the “future of the Church in [Canada] and its consequent re-action upon the older countries in Europe, will depend to an enormous degree upon the extent to which the power, influence, and prestige of the English language and literature can be definitely placed upon the side of the Catholic Church.” Even if the Apostolic Delegate had a deep sympathy for French-speaking Catholics in Canada, as did Pellegrino Stagni, the imperative in Vatican policy to reach the Protestant world by favouring the English language would always block the hope of the FrenchCanadian hierarchy for a stronger influence in the Canadian West and in Ontario.33 The Irish Catholics in Ontario and even in Quebec probably bought these arguments as well, and it seemed logical given not only the success of separate schools but also the establishment of many private secondary schools in the province, not to mention Catholic postsecondary institutions such as St Michael’s College, Assumption College, or St Jerome College.34 However, matching or surpassing Protestants also led Irish Catholics to accumulate other baggage, in particular the civic values and goals of English Protestant Canada. Catholics could prove themselves just as good as Protestants when it came to the

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quality of educational institutions, but also when it came to business success, politics, or the professions. In the mid-nineteenth century it was clear that the famine migrants had a long way to go to “catch up” to other groups, including pre-famine Irish Catholic immigrants, but already within a generation the Irish cohort had made great strides in that direction. Gordon A. Darroch and Michael D. Ornstein’s analysis of their huge database on ethnic and religious groups in Ontario between 1860 and 1870 found that the Irish generally had a disproportionately large cohort among unskilled labourers, but not to the extent that was commonly believed by historians. By the late nineteenth century, Irish Catholics were quickly catching up to Protestant neighbours in Toronto and had made great inroads into the clerical and white-collar employment sectors. By that time, governments at all levels understood the political importance of Irish Catholic representation. It had become a custom to have at least one Irish Catholic in the federal cabinet. The Supreme Court chief justice, Sir Charles Fitzpatrick, for example, had served as a minister of justice under Laurier (from 1897 to 1905), and C.J. Doherty filled this portfolio throughout the Borden years. Inevitably, keeping up politically and socially with the Joneses also meant internalizing some of their cultural baggage, even if it meant contradicting Church teaching. When, for example, Irish Catholic Ottawa Mayor D’Arcy Scott greeted the delegates to the annual meeting of the Grand Lodge of Masons of Canada in June 1907 with warm praise, he was taken to task by his bishop, Thomas Duhamel, who reminded him that “A Catholic is always a Catholic, whether he is in a high position or not,” and that he therefore could not publicly praise a society condemned by the Church.35 Brian Clarke has elegantly described the crucial role that Catholicism played in the Irish Catholic identity and how it emerged not only from the programs of the Irish hierarchy and clergy but also from the influence of the mothers of the famine generation. These mothers, argues Clarke, had been educated in the faith in Toronto through ultramontane-inspired practices of popular piety, and they communicated this faith to the subsequent generation. In the late nineteenth century, the new generation could not identify with an Irishness that did not subsume a Catholic identity. Yet, at the same time, the public face of this Catholicism was not always clear. We can argue that to participate as a Catholic in the Jubilee riots in 1875 was to stand up for one’s religious freedom in a bigoted Protestant and Orange-inspired city; at the same time this could simply mean skirmishing for one’s claim over

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contested terrain in an ethnic war. An ambiguity about what precisely one was fighting for – the universal Church or the ethnie – coloured the Irish Catholic perspective on French-Canadian Catholics.36

perc epti o ns o f the “ o t h e r si d e ” In ethnic history, it would seem that perceptions that competing ethnic groups have about each other are only interesting in as much as they reflect tensions in their relations. And so it is with French-Irish relations in Canada. There had been general goodwill between the two groups, which was perhaps best exemplified in their significant rate of intermarriage in Quebec after the famine. At the same time there had been conflict at the local level, whether it was between woodsmen of the two ethnic groups in the Ottawa Valley in the 1830s and 1840s in the “Shiners’ Wars” or between Bishop Ignace Bourget and Montreal’s Irish Catholics lobbying for an English-speaking parish in the 1840s, or tensions arising when Acadians advanced claims for a francophone bishop in New Brunswick at the turn of the century and Irish clergy on Prince Edward Island claimed that the Scottish hierarchy and clergy discriminated against them.37 However, it was not until the late nineteenth century that local skirmishes came to be seen as part of a grander design on the part of both French and Irish Catholics to subvert the competitor and to predominate as the voice of Catholicism in the country. Local skirmishes mattered more in the national scheme of things in 1900 than they did in 1867. When the policy to populate the West finally seemed to bear fruit, gradually in the 1880s and much more strongly after 1896, all of the churches realized that there was new territory to conquer out there for God’s Kingdom.38 An earlier generation of priests or bishops might have been surprised at the terms that their successors would employ to discuss the place of the Catholic Church in the new West. The Bishop of St Albert in what was about to become the province of Alberta in 1905 proudly declared the establishment of the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan as “une époque solenelle de l’histoire et du développement de notre pays. Nous ne resterons pas en arrière, mais au contraire nous marcherons avec le progrès qui se manifeste autour de nous. C’est notre but principal à nous, de voir à ce que le progrès religieux et moral soit encore apparent et plus réel que le progrès matériel.”39 And even in the heady days of New Ontario a prelate could use the general terms of progress and expansion to describe the role of the Church. Bishop Richard O’Connor of

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Peterborough, in a 1904 pastoral letter, informed his flock that “It has been our consistent desire that religion should keep pace with the material advancement of the country, hence our motive for building churches and schools wherever possible.”40 It now mattered what the face of the Catholic Church was going to be, in the West, or in northern Ontario, for this would become the new face of Catholicism before all of Canada. For French Canadians, it was clear in the late nineteenth century that the face would be French-Canadian. French-speaking prelates, clergy, and male and female congregations had set up the institutional infrastructure. From 1818 these heroes of the faith had fought the resistance and hostilities of Natives and Métis and white fur-traders, companies, or, as the Northwest came to be settled, of new politicians, governments, and administrators, many of them Orangemen, in order to establish the Church on the Prairies. The nerve-centre was to be found in St Boniface, the see of the ecclesiastical province which, at the time that Adélard Langevin became its archbishop, comprised part of the Canadian Arctic and present-day Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. For Langevin, the Irish were latecomers to the West and although numerous they could not outnumber the francophones easily. In addition, the Irish seemed to have few priests willing to accompany immigrants to western Canada, a fact repeated frequently by Archbishop Langevin but also admitted by anglophone priests.41 The Irish, on the other hand, partook of English Canada’s dream of an anglophone Canada within the British Empire and also seemed to share in the Protestant English attitude towards the French. One priest from Fallowfield, Ontario, in a long exposé on the need to divide the diocese of Ottawa in order to keep the Ontario portion of the diocese firmly under the English-speaking control of Ontario bishops, referred to his vision of Canada – which was by no means uncommon among the English-speaking clergy – on its way to being a great sovereign state within the British Empire. Except for the province of Quebec, this state would be English-speaking through and through, and the only obstacle would be the attempts by French-Canadian Catholics to hold on to the institutions of the Church in the West. New immigrant groups were populating the West and they naturally turned to the English language. Father J.T. Foley, who later would become the editor of London’s Catholic Record, explained that if the “Church remains French, the exigencies of life will impel these foreign Catholics to affiliate with non-Catholics, with the consequent weakening of faith in the parents

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and its total loss in their children.” He continued, “The welfare of the Church and the country, aye, and the salvation of souls, are sacrificed to the un-Catholic and impossible dream of the extension of French language and influence in these new provinces destined to become the most populous and most important in this great British dominion.” Father Foley, like so many of his confrères, had bought into the dream of Empire Ontario, of a West that would be essentially anglophone and would reflect the glory of the British Empire. In their perspective, the Church in the West was identified with “a foreign nationalism and a foreign tongue.”42 The French-Canadian dream of sharing in that expansion, or the more specifically Catholic French-Canadian dream of expanding the Catholic presence in that territory, could only be viewed in a negative light, as foreign and out of touch with the times. Thus French Canadians were seen to be backwards, too confrontational with the Protestant world, or at least with the anti-Catholic world, far too bold in the public forum, and too distant from the cultural values of English-speaking society.

th e wes t The tension regarding which ethnic group would primarily direct and influence the Church in the West is certainly one of the key themes in Catholic Church history in Canada, in particular because Rome had a strong bearing on the course of events. Matteo Sanfilippo and Raymond Huel have already taken us over that ground. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, Rome developed a program regarding the spread of the Church in new growth areas in North America. Essentially, it would set up new dioceses and archdioceses in key growth cities. While in 1902 St Boniface was the archdiocese or ecclesiastical province for the entire territory between the Rockies and Ontario, by 1918 Winnipeg, Regina, and Edmonton had been erected to the status of archdioceses. The effect of this program was to diminish the influence and power of St Boniface and, hence, francophones in the West.43 Rome’s program had to take into consideration local problems and personalities, and the thorniest of these was the Archbishop of St Boniface, Adélard Langevin. Bishop Langevin does not deserve all the bad publicity he has received, because he found himself in a most difficult situation. He spent almost the last twenty years of his life trying to ameliorate the conditions of Catholics in Manitoba in accord with

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Rome’s policy on the schools question, which essentially blessed Laurier’s “sunny ways” approach. Langevin had to deal on a number of fronts, political, social, ecclesial, and linguistic, as he tried to eke out concessions from the Manitoba government to ease the situation of his flock: anglophones and francophones, Liberals and Conservatives, the Quebec bishops and Ontario bishops, other Western prelates and the Apostolic Delegate, Prime Minister Laurier and Premier Roblin, laity and clergy. Roberto Perin, who among historians has had the most sympathetic disposition to Langevin, has rightfully observed that with the “story of broken promises and broken dreams” which constituted the Manitoba schools question, Langevin was forced to live a “drama ... from day to day.”44 It is easy for us in hindsight to accuse him of having been partisan, unforthcoming in his approach to anglophones and ethnic groups, and lacking in tact. This is not, however, to take away from the fact that Langevin indeed was often too suspicious of English-speaking Catholics in his diocese, curt with “foreign” Catholics, and certainly lacking in tact. To no one could this be more apparent than the Apostolic Delegate, who himself was constantly being reminded by Rome to follow a course using fermezza e prudenza, that is, to be firm but prudent. Mgr Sbarretti complained to his superiors that the Western prelate “lacks prudence, and has an impulsive character, and he is unstable and too easily impressionable and what is worse, he imbibes too much of the narrow-minded French-Canadian national spirit, which veils his intelligence thus impeding him from seeing things as they really are, and it leads him to judgments and actions which turn out to be prejudicial to the true interests of our Holy Religion, even though he has the most righteous intentions.”45 Laurier wanted Langevin to be muzzled because he considered him to be what we might call a “loose cannon.” Sbarretti, who relied on Laurier to come up with even the slightest improvement of the terms for Catholic students in Manitoba, also tried to control Langevin’s public statements that they might not scuttle his efforts to find a political solution. In the best of all worlds he would have had Langevin removed, for he considered the St Boniface archbishop to be a “grave obstacle,” and believed that “little or nothing can be done until such an obstacle be removed.”46 Archbishop Langevin was working for a noble cause, the protection of religious and linguistic rights, and there is no question that his motives, marred as they might be by nationalistic overtones and unkind remarks, were influenced by a love for his Church and his own

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national group, French Canadians. He suffered from a certain myopia, however, in not entrusting himself more to the judgment of the apostolic delegates, and in particular Mgr Donato Sbarretti and Mgr Pellegrino Stagni. These two men may have had their own limitations in their understanding of Canadian politics and what was best for Catholics in the country. However, they also had a broader perspective on the schools questions, for example, which included the Church’s response to the “laicizing” (or secularizing) movements in France and Italy in the late nineteenth century or in the early 1900s, or to the kulturkampf in Germany in the 1870s.47 On a number of occasions, Langevin, a Conservative partisan who disliked what he perceived to be too cozy a relationship between Sbarretti and the Liberal federal government (whom the Vatican viewed as the more likely of the Canadian parties to make some concessions for Catholics, even if it was realistic and did not expect any great changes), stonewalled the delegate’s painstaking efforts to eke out of politicians the smallest of concessions to ease the plight of Catholic schools in Manitoba. He also blocked attempts by the anglophone laity to obtain English priests or English-speaking congregations for Winnipeg and condemned what he saw as their offensive project of trying to establish Winnipeg as a diocese, clearly with an English-speaking prelate. However, he cannot be blamed as the thorn in the side of Catholic anglophones or Irish-origin Catholics in the West in this period, for the real thorn was the religious and ethnic prejudice always present in politics. It also drew Catholics into conflict with one another over political and “racial” questions. All sorts of extraneous issues involving language, public image, and party politics constantly opened up wounds among Canadian Catholics. Any disagreement was expressed in ethnic terms: “the problem with French Canadians is ...,” or “le problème des irlandais ...” For many of the Irish hierarchy and clergy, the problem was simple: French Canadians put nationalism or language before religion. The same Father Foley exclaimed that the effects of the French hierarchy’s way of dealing with the various schools questions in the West in 1909 would have a negative effect on Ontario because the hierarchy was possessed by a “narrow nationalistic spirit which blinds them all to an incredible degree, to the interests of the Church as well as to the interests of Canada.”48 Even the Protestants, bigoted as they might be, were much better, because, “as a general rule, [they] have admirable traits of character, among which is a disposition to be fair and just to all, especially all who are, or give promise to be good and loyal Canadians.”

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Foley advocated splitting the diocese of Ottawa, essentially to keep the Ontario side English-speaking. Another priest, the Jesuit Lewis Drummond of St Boniface College and editor of the English Catholic Northwest Review, was one of the leading advocates for an English-speaking bishop in Winnipeg – and not only an English speaker, but one who was also English in “race, name and language.” He described to the Apostolic Delegate in 1903 the view that English speakers in the West had of French Canadians, and one cannot help believing that he partook of these views and accepted that most anglophone Catholics did as well. He argued that “For the English-speaking people of the West, the French are an inferior and contemptible race, with narrow views, extraordinary meanness and merely a superficial attachment to their religion. Hence, a French Canadian, even if he is a superior man, is at a disadvantage when he is a bishop or an archbishop. The English-speaking people are persuaded that he does not understand them, and this is almost always true.”49 When Archbishop Langevin tried to split the mostly English-speaking parish of St Mary’s in Winnipeg in order to send francophones to a new parish, there were complaints from clergy and laity. Rev. Alphonse A. Cherrier, pastor of Immaculate Conception parish, was against having French-speaking parishioners leave the mostly English parish because it would lead to “More enmity between these two sections of our Community.” Cherrier acknowledged how much the political climate had “created already too much uneasiness and division[:] must religion come in to widen the abyss?”50 J.K. Barrett, a leading member of the Winnipeg anglophone Catholic laity and a loyal Liberal party member, also expressed disappointment at Archbishop Langevin’s project, accusing him of being strongly influenced by his fellow Oblates to have the order take over all the parishes in Winnipeg. He betrayed his view of the French-Canadian clergy and hierarchy when he referred to the Oblates as “French-Canadian first, last and all the time ... it would not be too much to say that French domination and the French language were the first dogmas of their religion. Their dream is to establish a French domination in this country, but the sooner that His Grace realizes that this only a dream the better it will be for him and for the interests of the Church ...”: Manitoba, predicted Barrett, would be home to five hundred thousand Catholics, “mostly English-speaking and foreigners, who will learn only to speak the English language.”51 The two most important issues that engaged the two worlds of Irishand French-Canadian Catholics were education, and in particular the

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battle for school rights in Manitoba, the Northwest, and Ontario; and the control over ecclesiastical infrastructures in the West, which was fought out over the nominations of bishops. Many of the linguistic battles within dioceses or in even broader areas can be traced back to these tensions. There is a way in which an injustice at one level – for example, the attempts in Manitoba and the Northwest to whittle away at the rights of religious and linguistic groups – leads to tensions throughout society, including among the various victims of those injustices, in this case the “Irish” and the “French.” The climate of war as 1914 approached would exacerbate those tensions and draw other ethnic groups into the fray. The tensions in the Catholic Church in Canada had really shifted from strife among factions in the French-Canadian wing of the Church to strife between ethnocultural and linguistic groups.

o ntari o Even though developments in western Canada and expansion in the West led to a climate of suspicion between the two principal ethnic groups in the Catholic Church, local developments in Ontario also fed that suspicion. The accusations and opinions regarding “the other side” could at times reflect strong tensions at the grassroots level, in the parishes and Catholic schools, for example, perhaps even at work, or, in the case of Ottawa, at the administrative level regarding schools. But these local tensions must be seen in the context of broader fears, prejudices, and hostilities in Ontario. English Catholics were influenced by what an alarmist minority of Protestants had to say about a perceived “invasion” of the eastern portion of the province by FrenchCanadian Catholics between 1890 and 1920.52 This expansion was part of Quebec’s great migration, to the New England states in particular, but also to eastern and northern Ontario. Irish Catholics felt discomfort at being associated with those whom their Protestant neighbours were attacking. Toronto Archbishop Neil McNeil informed Archbishop Stagni in 1915 that Ontarians “in the mass do not distinguish between French and Irish Catholics. To them they are simply all Catholics.”53 Thus any attacks against the French could be deflected onto the Irish as well. Protestants also could not rest easy with the fact that the percentage of Catholics of French origin was rising significantly in the province and particularly in eastern Ontario, in the dioceses of Ottawa and Alexandria. The French-Canadian clergy, despite

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their insistence that migration out of Quebec be contained through the development of colonization areas in Ontario, also saw the move to that province as part of a providential plan stemming from the virtue of their Catholic flock. Cardinal Bégin argued that population growth would ensure that “les canadiens-français, grâce à leur merveilleuse fécondité,” would continue to “déborder dans les provinces voisines et notamment dans l’Ontario, ce château-fort du protestantisme.” Cardinal Bégin felt he could not say the same thing about the Irish Catholics because they, “au contraire, pour des raisons légitimes sans doutes, ne pratiquent plus le précepte divin du ‘crescite et multiplicanimi et replete terram.’”54 But population growth was not enough for any affirmation of Catholicism, let alone French culture, in Ontario. Nor would the migration of Quebecers to Ontario give francophones a stronger position in the Catholic Church there. A high proportion of francophones in a diocese did not necessarily ensure that a francophone bishop or even many French-speaking priests would be assigned to this ecclesiastical division. The francophones in Ontario discovered this in two ways, by casting a glance on developments in the Canadian West and also through their own failed attempts at a greater representation among bishops and priests in various dioceses in Ontario. Predictably, tensions grew between the “Irish” and the “French” in Catholic Ontario, and not only in larger centres such as Ottawa and Sault Ste Marie, where there was a significant representation from both linguistic groups, but also in smaller centres. In these tensions we get a glimpse of the images the two groups had of each other. The francophones were not always considered mean-spirited, but they often were looked upon as backward by the anglophones of Irish or Scottish extraction. In the mission of Crysler, in the diocese of Alexandria, for example, a petition from French-Canadian parishioners requested the removal of the Irish priest and his replacement by a bilingual priest. The Bishop of Alexandria, William Macdonell, argued that it was only a few fanatics who were causing race hatred, and in particular, but not only, the francophone newspaper editors in Ontario who were “given to hysterical screams that the French were the victims of a grinding tyranny at the hands of the ‘Irlandais.’” He claimed that another group of offenders were French-Canadian priests in the Ottawa Valley who used their pulpits to preach “race hatred.” “The result of this,” he wrote, “is that well-meaning but unsophisticated people have been in many cases led to believe that everything

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that is not French is tinged with heresy; and that English-speaking bishops and priests are losing their sleep devising schemes ‘pour écraser les canadiens-français.’”55 The Catholic populations in numerous towns in the dioceses of Ottawa and Alexandria, or London, got caught in a vortex of ethnic slurs and prejudices, ostensibly over schools or parish issues. Predictably, a group of French Canadians would argue that an Irish pastor was not addressing their interests, or English-Canadian petitioners might seek recourse from the Apostolic Delegate, complaining that their children were receiving a poor education at the hands of a francophone teaching brother or sister. Bishop Macdonell was advised by Stagni in 1913 to be prudent and not to deny the sacraments to a dozen French-Canadian families in the parish of St Raphael in the town of Alexandria who had abandoned the separate school in order to establish a public bilingual school, even if he was within his rights to do so. Such a drastic move would be imprudent during the raging controversies over bilingual schools and would expose episcopal authority to open disobedience.56 At the base of the tensions was a belief that the “other section” was somehow hampering the efforts of each group to reach its goals. The goals of the respective linguistic groups might be expressed in different forms but each group had a fundamental goal. For francophones, it was linguistic freedom in the public sphere, the right to use the French language in public institutions outside the province of Quebec. For the “Irish,” it was to be perceived as an integral part of English-speaking Canada and its culture without having to worry about any fallout from their religious association with francophones. In Quebec, it was common during World War One to say that the Prussians were not across the ocean but next door, in the province of Ontario.57 We could also say that in the years leading up to that war, the Catholic Church was something akin to a Balkan powder keg. The two main ethnic groups within it strove for national self-determination, and a host of smaller ethnic groups lobbied to maintain a discrete identity in the fray.

a c a nad i an v ers i o n o f c a h e n sly i sm ? But why did language matter so much in the religious sphere? Religion and language were certainly closely linked among immigrant groups in North America in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth as well, including franco-americains and French Canadians outside of

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Quebec or Acadia. German Catholic immigrants in the United States were the most vocal exponents of the necessity to maintain the mother tongue as a means to preserve the faith. Indeed, from the 1850s, German missionaries popularized the slogan in their co-nationals’ communities that “language saves faith.”58 Beginning in the 1880s and especially in the early 1890s and even beyond, the German Catholics in the United States fought hard against liberal Irish Catholics, or the “Americanizers,” in an attempt to maintain a distinct identity. Philip Gleason has noted that the division in the American Church was ideological but that in fact German Americans fell squarely into the conservative camp and opposed the more liberal Catholics, who were primarily of Irish background. The Germans did not want to be enveloped in the programs and parishes of Irish-American Catholics, to the point that in 1891, following the so-called Lucerne Memorial, German Catholics in the United States asked for the appointment of German and other national bishops in the United States, as the need warranted. Under such a plan, which in any case was never implemented, these bishops would act as national prelates and their dioceses could overlap those of territorial bishops.59 The prime agent behind this movement was an exceptional German layman and member of the Prussian diet, Peter Paul Cahensly, and the movement to preserve the national identities of Catholic immigrant groups in the United States is still referred to as Cahenslyism. A fundamental tenet of Cahenslyism was that language and faith were intimately connected. If the immigrant and later generations were to preserve the faith and not be lost to Protestant or atheist America, it was indispensable that the Old-World language be preserved. In the United States, the episcopacy was divided on the question. Conservative Irish bishops sided with German bishops on the need to preserve the Old-World culture through national parishes, but the more liberal Irish bishops, while they accepted the national parishes, especially because Rome had insisted on them in an 1888 letter to United States bishops, nevertheless viewed those parishes as a necessary step on the way to full assimilation.60 Italian immigrants in the 1880s also became a test case for how the American episcopacy would handle other ethnic groups beyond the Irish. With the Italians, there was not only the question of language and national parishes but also the problem of accepting different religious sensibilities, especially with regard to pious practices.61 The story was slightly different in Canada. If German immigrants

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had set the parameters of the battle against Irish Catholics in the United States, in Canada it was not immigrants but francophone inhabitants of the country, one of the so-called two founding peoples (at the time), although we might argue that these included French-Canadian immigrants to parts of Canada outside Quebec and Acadia. In this case the Irish were the relative newcomers, but by the turn of the century the third generation of the famine migrants had moved up the social ladder and could identify with English Canada even as they maintained a particular Irish Catholic identity. It is interesting how the same language used by Cahenslyites in the United States was repeated in French Canada. If in the famous memorial written by Father Peter Abbelen on the German question in the United States in 1886 and forwarded to Propaganda Fide in Rome by Michael Heiss, the Archbishop of Milwaukee, it was argued that the “Americanization” of German immigrants through the wholesale adoption of English as the language of pastoral care would lead to a “truly deplorable falling away of them from the Church,” a couple of decades later, Bishop Langevin commended the work of the committee that was setting up the first Congress of the French Canadians of Ontario, warning that “The canadiens lose their faith in losing their language ... as English enters the home the faith diminishes. How sad it is!”62 We can find countless examples like this on the Canadian and American scenes. Cahenslyism, therefore, was certainly an American phenomenon, but it was also to a great extent a North American phenomenon. And the French-Canadian Church – prelates, priests, and some lay people – were certainly aware of efforts of German Catholics in the United States. The famous Lucerne Memorial of 1890 resulted in what was to become a highly controversial memorandum on safeguarding the faith of immigrants of various nationalities after they landed in the United States. The document was signed by delegates from various Catholic emigration societies at a meeting in Lucerne and was to be presented to Pope Leo xiii. Honoré Mercier, the Quebec premier, his finance minister, Joseph Shehyn, and thirteen other Canadian Catholics were in Europe at the time and they were also among the fifty signatories to the memorandum along with Cahensly, who would be seen as the instigator of this document.63 We also know that the ultramontane Jules Tardivel was an ardent defender of Cahenslyism in his newspaper, La Vérité. Like Mercier, he was alarmed by the falling away of FrenchCanadian emigrants from the Catholic Church in the United States. In

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a survey of the religious situation in the United States in 1900 he estimated that ten million Catholics had been lost to the faith in that country.64 And just as the Ontario bilingual schools question was beginning in 1910, Cahensly himself took a tour of Canada, beginning with the International Eucharistic Congress in Montreal, where he delivered an address on the immigrant aid organization he had founded, the St Raphael Society. Two German American bishops in favour of preserving the mother tongues of immigrants seconded his proposals there. He then toured German Catholic colonies in western Canada and also stopped in Toronto.65 Bishop Fallon was aware of Cahensly’s influence, although in 1910 he saw it as a remote phenomenon. In a letter to Archbishop Stagni he compared the “problem” of German-American Catholics with that of their French-Canadian counterparts and argued that Canadian bishops should not allow the movement to go on “unrebuked,” as was the case in the United States.66 What might appear strange or certainly incoherent is that a bishop like Adélard Langevin, who so much shared the argument that faith cannot be preserved without the mother tongue, was not prepared to apply this concept magnanimously to the many ethnic groups and immigrants within his own diocese of St Boniface. He established national parishes for Germans and Poles, for example, in farming colonies and in Winnipeg, but he also was suspicious of these parishes and certainly even more so of the Uniate Catholics.67 We have already discussed his position on English-language parishes in his diocese. The ethnic groups were like pawns in Langevin’s hopes for a strong FrenchCanadian Catholic presence in the West. They became a numeric counterweight to the English Catholics of the diocese. One could always count the “ethnics” as discrete groups – even if they tended to become anglophones within a generation – in order to show how small was the presence of English Catholics in the West. One can understand Langevin’s attitude. If Canada was conceived as a bilingual country or a pact between two nations or peoples, then the maintenance of the French mother tongue should not have been a problem anywhere in Canada. In a sense, French Canadians in the West and especially in eastern Ontario had the attributes of immigrants. Their patrie was Quebec, the nerve centre for Catholic missionary work in North America carried out through the dispersion of French Canadians across Canada and the United States. In the strict sense of the word, French Canadians living west of Quebec were not immigrants, in particular if they perceived Canada as a bilingual and

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bicultural country or the West as a patchwork of nationalities under the tutelage of French and English Canadians. As French-Canadian prelates and priests and the Apostolic Delegate himself affirmed, they could not be placed on the same level as new immigrants to the country. Why then should they have had the same perspective on the preservation of language – that it saves the faith – as these immigrants, if they were not immigrants themselves? One concept that might help us to understand this dilemma better is that of the diasporic imagination. The field of diaspora studies has become very influential in recent years, and numerous works have examined North American (as well as other) immigrant groups as diasporas. The term has a range of meanings. According to Thomas A. Tweed, in its most restricted sense it refers to “a group with some shared culture which lives outside the territory that it considers its native place, and whose continuing bonds with that land are crucial for its collective identity ... the displaced share a language even if some members of the group also speak another tongue as well, and they appeal to common symbols, even if they struggle among themselves over their meaning.”68 The members of a particular diaspora might have a sense of exile, either political, economic, or social. We can see how many immigrant groups in North America and their struggle to maintain group consciousness through language use, sociocultural activities, and religious solidarity can be reconciled to such a model as that of the diaspora. Through these activities, immigrants could constantly “invent” their ethnicity, not in the sense that the ethnicity was totally in the mind but in the sense that the notion of the identity of the group was constantly changing and being “reimagined” by its adherents in the vicissitudes of daily life. It should be pointed out, however, that there is a difference between an immigrant group per se and a diaspora. Even if the latter term refers to the dispersion of a people, it is one strongly bound by a collective (even if ever-changing) memory tied to a homeland and to language. An immigrant or ethnic group might have these characteristics as well, but not necessarily. We can apply the term “diaspora” to the French-Canadian presence in Canada outside of Quebec and Acadia (and even in the United States).69 There was indeed a dispersion of these people throughout the continent over the last 250 years. And there were and have been discoveries and rediscoveries and reimaginations of French-Canadian ethnicity in various parts of North America. For francophones in eastern, western or northern Ontario or Manitoba, Alberta, or Saskatchewan,

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the concept of territory was similar to that of the other immigrant groups, with one significant difference: the patrie was in Canada, whereas for other groups the homeland was overseas. And there were consequences to that distance. The older generations of Irish Canadians, for example, at the outset of the twentieth century might still have been tied to their homeland, but that geographical space was receding evermore in the public memory of the younger generations, which were much more tied to the Canadian political context.70 The French Canadians in Ontario and the West had a sense of the patrie as being Quebec, but at the same time they developed “new” territories in the various francophone settlements. Francophones in the West identified with the Prairies in Manitoba or Saskatchewan and franco-ontariens with Ontario. This was natural because they perceived themselves as one of the two founding peoples within the Canadian polity. While other diaspora groups from overseas might reimagine an ethnicity to maintain a sense of identity tied to their homelands and to other fellow nationals, French Canadians could reimagine their ethnicity in order to affirm their presence in their new territories and maintain their status in a bilingual, bicultural country. This of course adumbrated a vision that would be more politically acceptable by the 1960s, even if Henri Bourassa had been its primary exponent decades earlier.71 The Irish diaspora could always revert to the theme of being exiled from their homeland by Protestant landlords as a motif to galvanize a collective identity. The French-Canadian diaspora acknowledged Quebec as its patrie; however, the regions of settlement outside that province or outside old Acadia would become new territories for French Canadians. The Irish immigrants and their descendants either adopted or in most cases had already adopted English upon their arrival in Canada. They maintained a group identity but sought to assimilate with the host culture. French Canadians in Ontario or the West did not see the need to assimilate. They were a diaspora but did not consider themselves immigrants to Canada, like the Irish. They sought to maintain an equal status for French Canadians with English Canadians outside of Quebec: thus the need to affirm a strong presence in English Canada. What would the mechanism be, at least within the French-speaking Catholic Church in Canada, for affirming that presence? Above all, the emphasis would be on language maintenance. Language would be the litmus test for whether French Canadians would be true partners in the Canadian polity outside of Quebec. If the French language could be

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shown to have a significant influence in the social and institutional life of Ontario and the Prairies – in this case, in the Catholic Church – then it could be said that the French-Canadian people truly participated as equal partners in the life of the Dominion (or in this case in the Catholic Church in Canada). And so, what was usually one of the attributes of a diasporic group, a common language beyond the one of the particular locale in which the group found itself, became a symbol in itself of the identity of the group. This perhaps led to confusion between the group’s identity and all that impinged on it – its history, religion, and culture, for example – and one mechanism for preserving that identity, language. More and more, the French-Canadian identity within the Church in the early part of the twentieth century would include a memory of the struggles not to be dominated by the “Irish” or the English-speaking side of the Catholic Church in Canada, by English-speaking “newcomers” who took the side of the dominant language group on the continent. This was understandable, but was it enough to constitute an identity? In an address on the Catholic writer in the South delivered forty years ago, Flannery O’Connor stated that “[t]he South is struggling mightily to retain her identity against great odds and without knowing always, I believe, quite in what her identity lies. An identity is not made from what passes, from slavery or from segregation, but from those qualities that endure because they are related to truth. It is not made from the mean average or the typical but often from the hidden and the extreme.”72 Identity, for French Canadians, understandably (given the continuous injustices which they encountered, in particular between 1885 and 1918) came to be linked with “what passes,” the struggle to maintain the mother tongue. The tool for struggling to maintain an equal status with English Canada, language, became central to the people’s identity. Thus, religious and language issues were more easily confused in such a context, in particular as it became clear that the aspirations of equal status for the French language west of Quebec were fading. In the case of the Ontario bilingual schools question, Rome recognized this confusion and asserted that it was a matter of language and not religion.

th e r epo rt o n bi l i n g ua l sc h o o l s Francesco Stagni, who was born in 1859, joined the Servites at the age of fifteen and would take the name of Pellegrino. He would spend most of the next twenty years in England because of the 1873 Roman law

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which suppressed religious orders. He came back to Rome in 1893 to teach philosophy at the Urbanianum College and in 1901 was elected general of his order. Both as a young novice and, later, as general of an international religious order, Stagni was well aware of the gravity of church-state relations. He served as Archbishop of Aquila from 1907 to 1910 and was destined to become a “casualty” of Pius x’s program for a more pastoral Church: the pontiff wished to have former generals of religious orders and not career diplomats working as representatives of the Holy See. Thus in late 1910 Pellegrino Stagni was named Apostolic Delegate to Canada.73 Archbishop Stagni’s report to Rome on the situation of bilingual schools provides us not only with an opportunity to understand how Rome’s representative viewed the burning issue of the day, the so-called “race question,” but also how his position was thought through, how he situated the problem in the Canadian polity and perceived Rome’s usefulness in defusing it. What is clear from the very beginning of the report is that the Apostolic Delegate understood the difficulty of discerning immediately what was the real issue in the crisis: even if “the matter ... deals with race and language ... it is difficult to give an exact idea of an issue which at the same time and under different appearances presents itself as constitutional, political, pedagogical; as an issue of race and even as a religious question.” For this reason, Stagni deemed it important to give his superiors a broad background on the political constitution of Canada, and in particular how it dealt with education and language, including the French language in Ontario schools (which of course, it did not). He was of the opinion that French Canadians in the province would have a better chance with their cause if they were to argue not on the basis of constitutional rights but on their “special position as a contracting party in the federative pact .” For the Apostolic Delegate, therefore, the political foundation on which to advance an equitable solution was the Canadian federation viewed as a pact between the two founding “races.” This was also the moral basis for a solution: the French Canadians “cannot be placed on the same level as other immigrant nationalities in this country. They are one of the two great peoples who formed this confederation with a solemn pact ... no one with common sense can deny that they have strong reasons to be treated with special consideration.” Stagni gave a brief historical synopsis of the current situation, beginning with the Congress of the Association of French Canadians of Ontario held in 1910, the political fallout from this event, and the role

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of Mgr Michael Fallon, Bishop of London, in exacerbating a volatile situation through his indiscreet comments. The delegate’s examination of Regulation 17 was followed by an analysis of French-Canadian resistance to this administrative rule. After he gave this broad background, Stagni came to what he thought was the crucial question as far as Rome might be concerned: was this a religious issue? He came down on the negative side, but at the same time thought that the Church should be solicitous towards those affected by the crisis because they were virtually all Catholics. The other pressing concern for the Apostolic Delegate was the behaviour and discipline of Church officials during this period of acrimony between anglophones and francophones. This is why the final sections of the report reviewed the attitudes of the ecclesiastical authorities from both linguistic groups during the crisis, including any excessive zeal, or ... excessive silence. In particular, Stagni was sensitive to the Holy See being drawn into the equation without prior approval.

wh at d i d th e report f i n d ? First of all, the Apostolic Delegate believed the immediate instigator behind the bilingual schools question to be the Congrès d’éducation des canadiens-français d’Ontario, which gave rise to the Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario (acfeo). True, he conceded, French-language schools did not have the legal right to exist in the province, but they were fully tolerated. Stagni argued that they “were French schools in which as much French was taught as French-Canadian parents could desire.” Thus, “we cannot deplore the fact that the French Canadians of Ontario should not have been content with the exercises of rights and conveniences which they enjoyed.” After all, Ontario Catholics had learned to avoid raising the ire of “Protestant fanatics” when it came to separate schools by not making more demands of the government, even though they hoped for better conditions in the long run. However, the Congrès was not “as wise and moderate in judging the situation.” Its delegates demanded that the status quo become formalized, that bilingual schools and classes be legally recognized in Ontario and that a bilingual inspector be appointed for such schools, that both languages be legally recognized as teaching languages, and that students of French origin be considered bilingual students. Archbishop Stagni was aware that the tensions of 1915 had been sparked by the release of a memorandum written by the Hon. W.J.

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Hanna recording the negative comments on Ontario bilingual schools made by the bishop of London, Ontario, Michael Fallon, in a private conversation with him. A private secretary to the only Franco-Ontarian cabinet minister released the memorandum in 1910; thus Stagni did not blame Fallon for spreading his ideas. We can cite this as evidence that Stagni was no different from his predecessors and had greater sympathies for the “Irish” than for the “French.”74 Otherwise, how could he not devote a greater portion of his report to Bishop Fallon after having come down hard on the Quebec bishops and the Congrès? No doubt, Stagni subscribed to Rome’s anglophile perspective, but he also understood that Fallon, though quick with his tongue, was much more complicated than contemporary defenders or critics might make him out to be, and that he expressed views to which English-speaking Ontario bishops subscribed, including those expressed to W.J. Hanna. As a delegate who continued to negotiate for better terms for Catholic education in the West, he understood the possible threat to Catholic schools in Ontario as well. Hence he would have held that Fallon’s remarks, even if immoderate, should be given serious consideration, if their intent was to safeguard Catholic separate schools. He found the demands of the Congrès to be a more serious political threat to these schools. The heart of the matter, though, was not a bishop’s comments, but Regulation 17, the ministerial regulation passed in June 1912 and modified in August 1913, which was the main guideline for EnglishFrench schools. Stagni had a very clear opinion on the position of the acfeo As far as he was concerned, their calls to parents to encourage schools to teach all courses in French, contrary to Regulation 17, was tantamount to disobedience of the laws of the province. And much more serious was the response of the Association to the regulation’s provisions that an English and a French inspector be appointed for bilingual schools (under the original guidelines, the English inspector was to be superior to the French, but this hierarchy was eliminated in 1913). The Association called for students to leave the classroom in protest upon the visit of the English inspector, for his visit was considered religiously odious. Again, Stagni took issue with what he saw as an act of disobedience to the state and its laws. He also questioned the truth of the Association’s claims with regard to the inspector. After all, Regulation 17 did not impose a Protestant inspector on the bilingual schools, but an English inspector. He might be Protestant, but not necessarily. In any case, the Apostolic Delegate wished to know how the

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Catholic character of the English-French schools could possibly suffer with such a short and ultimately harmless visit: ... with Catholic teachers and very often religious sisters or brothers in our schools; with some of the school books Catholic and rest not particularly objectionable; with the teaching of Christian doctrine and the carrying out of religious practices; with the crucifix hanging outside the school building and Catholic emblems and sacred images on the walls of their classroom; with the atmosphere of the school absolutely Catholic; with all of this, is it at all possible that an annual or semi-annual visit in an English-French separate school by a Protestant inspector who has absolutely no authority to modify or to abolish any of the items mentioned above and whose principal mission it is to watch over the effectiveness of the teaching – is it at all possible, I say, that this is enough to change the Catholic character of the school?

As this extract of the report indicates, Pellegrino Stagni had a realistic and reasonable view of the Catholic’s position in a pluralistic society. Even if a Protestant inspector were to enter a Catholic school, there was no need to be alarmed, given the parameters within which he was operating. In the same way, Stagni could not understand why the anglicization of French Canadians (which he did not condone, but which did not directly concern his office) should necessarily lead to the decline of Catholic practice. He blamed this logic on what he called the “great maxim” (again from the German Catholic experience in the United States) that language safeguards the faith, or that it is indeed “la meilleure et la seule sauvegarde de la foi.” It was this same realism that made Stagni refute the proof brandished by nationalists that the French language preserved the faith: the frequency of mixed marriage among English-language Catholics. Although he viewed mixed marriages as unfortunate, he also realized that the probability of such marriages would be much greater in a religiously pluralistic world in which Catholics were outnumbered by as high as ten to one, as was the case in Toronto. But even this disproportion, counselled Stagni, could be viewed as an opportunity because it allowed Catholics to inform Protestants about “the truth and holiness of the Catholic Church.” Indeed, he guessed that just as many Protestants had converted to Catholicism in Toronto as Catholics had entered a mixed marriage.75 No, it was not language that would safeguard faith, and neither would separate Catholic settlements be an answer to preserving the faith in a

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pluralistic world.76 Thus it was useless to “expend energy in beautiful theories; we are dealing with facts and it would simply be utopian to hope to impede or to change them entirely.” Archbishop Stagni argued that the bilingual schools question was “not essentially a religious matter” but that it “strongly and intimately touches a certain category of Catholics regarding interests which to them are very dear; and in this sense, this matter merits and demands the sympathy and the benevolent help of those who by office must be their guides in religious matters.” He felt that bishops therefore had a moral duty to intervene on behalf of franco-ontariens, even if any interventions might have to be very discreet. Except for Mgr Latulipe, Vicar-Apostolic of Temiscaming, Stagni concluded that the Ontario bishops did virtually nothing for francophone Catholics in this stressful period. Stagni saved his harsher judgments for the Quebec episcopate, for speaking out on affairs that did not come within their jurisdiction. He was clearly not at ease with the appearance of Archbishop Bruchési (the Montreal ordinary) at a public gathering in Montreal to examine the bilingual schools question, even if he found the bishop to have been moderate in his statements, or with an open letter on the topic by Cardinal Bégin. He found interventions by other bishops to be naïve and politically dangerous. He clearly understood the jealousy with which provinces guarded their rights: if the provinces took any “interference from sister provinces or even from the federal authorities themselves as an affront,” then “Quebec gatherings [organized or involving the participation of the Church and the hierarchy of Quebec] ... to protest against the Ontario law were not precisely the most effective way to bring comfort to the French Canadians suffering in Ontario.” Such actions could only fan the flames of the anti-Catholicism of Orangemen and others. To make matters worse, an English-language pastor in the diocese of Ottawa, M.J. Whelan, published a letter in the press which, for Stagni, represented the English-speaking Catholic perspective on the crisis. By attacking the Quebec hierarchy and telling them to stay out of Ontario matters because that province’s hierarchy would deal with its own problems, Whelan publicized the rift within the Canadian Catholic Church. The rift only became deeper in July 1915, when all French-Canadian pastors in the Ontario portion of the diocese of Ottawa signed an open letter condemning Regulation 17, an action followed a month later by an open letter from their English language counterparts upholding the regulation. Stagni found it reprehensible

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that priests should pronounce themselves publicly on an issue on which their bishops had decided to maintain silence. At the same time he concluded that “the episcopal authority failed completely in the face of the situation.” The Apostolic Delegate also wrote about his own role in the crisis, which was to persuade the Ontario bishops to seek an equitable solution behind the scenes. He had outlined a four-point plan for them in late 1913, which could serve as a basis of negotiations with the Ministry of Education. Stagni’s political realism meant that he did not expect that any or all of these proposals would necessarily be acceptable to the government, yet he tried to persuade the bishops that they had to take some action because those affected by the crisis were virtually all Catholics, and the bishops could not be even perceived as indifferent to their flock. In any case, the elections of 1914, which reconfirmed the Conservative government of James Whitney, killed all hopes of Stagni’s or any other proposals being accepted by the Ministry of Education. In the final section of his report, Stagni examined the two main organs behind the campaign for bilingual schools, the Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario and its newspaper, Le Droit, which was the most virulently nationalist francophone voice in the province. It is clear that Stagni was not particularly sympathetic to either organ, but he was even more critical of the clergy being associated with either. Le Droit might have been uncharitable towards English-speaking Catholics, but the two priests most intimately involved with the paper, the Oblates Charles Charlebois and Albert Lortie, should have known better.77 Stagni could only conclude that “the spirit of excessive nationalism clouds their intellect to the point of making them forget the spirit of Jesus Christ.” It would be much better if they and other priests kept out of matters of race and language because the laity would have fewer occasions for division. The delegate’s harsh criticism of the clergy was not only a question of discipline but a moral one as well. The clergy’s meddling would only give a religious aspect to the crisis, as would the methods of strident leading Catholic laity, such as the speaker of the Canadian Senate, Philippe Landry, who was president of the acfeo and whom Stagni described as “one of those dangerous beings, more orthodox than the Pope, who have no scruples about being critical of ecclesiastical authority.” A religious aspect to the question could put all Catholic schools in jeopardy, and not only in Ontario. In this sense, then,

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Stagni certainly was in accord with the Ontario bishops with regard to what was one of the most valuable rights to safeguard.

o ttawa The criterion of protecting Catholic schools also guided the Apostolic Delegate in a second report to Rome the following month, this time on the more specific matter of separate schools in Ottawa. The report is a model narrative of the events surrounding the Ottawa crisis: it is economical in its description yet touches on all the main issues. Stagni naturally deplored the divisions among Catholics on the board, and he revealed a slight suspicion that the laity was much too involved without proper ecclesiastical supervision, in questions which touched on religion. This also meant that the delegate was aiming his criticism at the Archbishop of Ottawa, Mgr C.H. Gauthier. Stagni saw the need for charity and conciliation between Frenchand English-speaking Catholics in the archdiocese, but he was of the opinion that the financial crisis of the separate school board was a decisive factor for the divisions between the two opposing groups. He recommended to Rome that they inform Archbishop Gauthier of the need to resolve the financial fiasco. Although Stagni thought highly of the bishop as a person and a pastor, he also thought that Gauthier was paralysed by his fear of worsening the already critical situation between linguistic groups by taking a step in any direction. Stagni indicated that the diocese had to do what other dioceses in the province did: it had to bring the separate school mil rate down to the level of the public school rate in order that Catholics would not have a financial reason not to support Catholic schools. He also argued that the diocese must make up for any shortfall in the school commission’s budget and look for any possibility of cost-cutting. The two reports went off to Rome in late 1915 and the Sacred Consistorial Congregation took them up in February 1916. Cardinal Giovanni De Lai, the head of the Consistorial Congregation, reported that its members found the controversy regarding Regulation 17 to be a very grave danger for the system of separate schools and for religion in general. The intervention of the Quebec hierarchy in a matter that concerned Ontario was also a very serious matter. Donald Tremblay has given an excellent summary of the events following the two reports in his doctoral dissertation, and it remains for us to give the highlights.

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The Consistorial Congregation adopted Stagni’s reading of the problem, that is, squaring provincial requirements that all students be instructed in English with the franco-ontariens’ fundamental rights that their children receive instruction in the French language. Although the Consistorial Congregation proposed a public statement from the Ontario bishops, Stagni astutely pointed out that this could cause a backlash from the Quebec hierarchy. In the spring, his request for an intervention from the Holy See as the only possibility for a solution to a conflict whose parties were so far apart was accepted by the Consistorial Congregation, and in September 1916 Benedict xv released his letter Commisso divinitus to Canadian bishops.78 The bishops of Ontario followed up the Pope’s call to meet together and work out a statement. The encounter took place in Ottawa in late January 1917, and the bishops seemed to be working towards a peaceful resolution, despite the fact that the papal letter seemed to support the “Irish” position. One snag in this encouraging moment in which a pastoral letter was drafted was a report brought to the meeting by Mgr Fallon, which outlined the history of the Ontario bishops’ actions on Ontario bilingual schools. That memorial made it to the Frenchlanguage press. Together with a civil suit brought on by an Irish Catholic lawyer in Ottawa against the French-Canadian chairman of the Ottawa Separate Schools Commission, the report proved to be the undoing of the position of “Irish” bishops in Ontario. The backlash from the Quebec episcopacy was so strong that Pope Benedict xv was forced to reserve the question to himself. The Apostolic Delegate asked Canadian bishops whether the application of Regulation 17 was just or whether it could be opposed. The French-Canadian episcopacy found it unjust. The Quebec bishops also refused to accept that FrenchCanadian claims would threaten separate schools, since the bna Act protected them. Their strategy was to revive a plan proposed by Bishop Stagni in 1913, which he had urged on the Ontario bishops in vain. The plan called for the withdrawal of Protestant inspectors from the bilingual schools, for a Catholic normal school, for instruction in French in the first form, and for instruction in French in certain subjects in later forms (see Stagni’s letter to Ontario bishops in the heart of the report). The Quebec bishops also asked for catechism instruction in French. The strategy worked. Stagni wrote a second report to Rome and it was followed by a second letter by Benedict xv, Litteris apostolicis, in June 1918, which arrived in Canada in October. The

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letter implicitly found Regulation 17 to be unjust and recommended the proposals that Stagni had proposed five years before.79 Although the schools questions would go on for another decade in Ontario, the loud opposition to Regulation 17 came to an end.

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re p o rt o n e The Bilingual Schools Question in Ontario, 1915

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2 Archbishop Stagni’s Reports

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3 Bilingual Schools in Ontario

The Bilingual Schools Question in Ontario, 1915 To His Eminence Cardinal Giovanni De Lai – Secretary of the Sacred Consistorial, Rome

Ottawa, 19 November 1915 Most Reverend Eminence, In conformity with the wish expressed to me by Your Eminence in your venerated letter of the 13th of September 1915, number 1188–15, I write to you on the question of bilingual schools in Ontario. This is a task that I begin with great hesitation, not only because the matter is most delicate, since it deals with race and language, but also because it is most difficult to give a precise idea of an issue which at the same time and under different appearances presents itself as constitutional, political, pedagogical, a matter of race and even a religious question. For this reason, Your Eminence will permit me to give you some background, which at first glance might seem very remote from the issue.

th e po li ti cal c o n st i t u t i o n o f cana da The Dominion of Canada is a federal union of nine states called provinces, that is to say, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Manitoba, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. These states or provinces are practically autonomous, that is to say, each of them has a lieutenant-governor, a cabinet of ministers, and a legislative body called a provincial legislature. These provin-

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cial legislatures not only have the right to legislate in certain determined or specified matters of a local nature but – and this is important – they are all-powerful in their sphere. Besides the provincial governments, there is also a federal government composed of a governor-general named by the King of England, a House of Commons, or a chamber of deputies, elected by the people, and a Senate whose members are nominated by the Crown, that is by the minister in office pro tempore. This federal parliament legislates in matters of a general character which regard all of Canada, that is, the post office, customs, the militia, the marines, etc., and it is equally omnipotent in its larger sphere. Its areas of competence are clearly more important, vaster, and more universal than those which come under the jurisdiction of the provincial legislatures, but – and this must be well borne in mind – it has no power over matters reserved to legislative bodies of the provinces, nor can it involve itself in them except in certain circumstances specified by the constitution. The constitution, which fixes such a form of government and assigns to each office its functions and attributions, is an act, a law, which was ratified by the parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the year 1867, and it is known under the title of the British North America Act. This act was passed at the request of the colonies of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick and thus takes on the character of a pact or a convention between the same. It decreed the union of a confederation to be called the Dominion of Canada, and provided for the admission of other English colonies in North Americai to the confederation, as well as for the creation of other provinces should circumstances warrant it. In fact, by virtue of this act the province of Manitoba was created in 1870; that of British Columbia joined the Dominion of Canada in 1871 and Prince Edward Island in 1873; and the two provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan were erected in 1905, formed out of territory which, not being organized or inhabited in 1867, except for a few Indians, was subsequently ceded by Great Britain to Canada in 1870 and equipped with a provisional government until the above-mentioned year of 1905. The British North America Act is thus the constitution of Canada. It will be necessary, therefore, to consider carefully some arrangements or intentions of this act in order to understand better the issue at hand. i The island of Newfoundland is the only British colony in North America which has not yet entered the Canadian confederation.

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pub li c i nstruc ti on The British North America Act has the following arrangement with regard to public instruction: 93. In and for each Province the Legislature may exclusively make Laws in relation to Education, subject and according to the following Provisions: 1. Nothing in any such law shall prejudicially affect any Right or Privilege with respect to Denominational Schools which any Class of Persons have by Law in the Province at the Union: 2. All the Powers, Privileges, and Duties at the Union by Law conferred and imposed in Upper Canada on the Separate Schools and School Trustees of the Queen’s Roman Catholic Subjects shall be and the same are hereby extended to the Dissentient Schools of the Queen’s Protestant and Roman Catholic Subjects in Quebec: 3. Where in any Province a System of Separate or Dissentient Schools exists by Law at the Union or is thereafter established by the Legislature of the Province, an Appeal shall lie to the Governor-General in Council from any Act or Decision of any Provincial Authority affecting any Right or Privilege of the Protestant or Roman Catholic Minority of the Queen’s Subjects in relation to Education: 4. In case any such Provincial Law as from Time to Time seems to the Governor General in Council requisite for the due Execution of the Provisions of this Section is not made, or in case any Decision of the Governor General in Council on any Appeal under this Section is not duly executed by the proper Provincial Authority in that Behalf, then and in every such Case, and as far only as the Circumstances of each Case require, the Parliament of Canada may make remedial Laws for the due Execution of the Provisions of this Section and of any Decision of the Governor-General in Council under this Section.

This legal text has certain consequences that are important to keep in mind above all for our present task: 1. That public instruction (education) is a matter that comes under the jurisdiction of provincial legislatures; 2. That the jurisdiction of these provincial legislatures is exclusive (“may exclusively make Laws in relation to Education”), circumscribed, in any case, by certain limits or conditions; 3. That these limits are aimed at safeguarding or protecting the rights or privileges regarding denominational (confessional) schools that the Protestant or Catholic minority, according to the locale, had by law in any province at the time of the union, or could from then on by law acquire.

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This is enough regarding the general law of Canada on matters of education or public instruction. Indeed at the time of the union or confederation, that is in the year 1867, confessional or separate (as they are called here) schools existed by law for the Catholic minority in the province of Ontario and for the Protestant minority in the province of Quebec; but there was no legal provision for separate or confessional schools for the minority, in both cases Catholic, in the two provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Consequently article 93 of the British North America Act cited above was aimed at guaranteeing the religious schools of the minority in Ontario and Quebec so as to render ultra vires any legal arrangement of either province which might prove injurious to the said schools, and worse, suppress them.

th e legal po s i ti o n o f l a n g uag e s i n cana da The British North America Act states the following with regard to languages: 133. Either the English or the French Language may be used by any Person in the Debates of the Houses of the Parliament of Canada and of the Houses of the Legislature of Quebec; and both those Languages shall be used in the respective Records and Journals of those Houses; and either of those Languages may be used by any Person or in any Pleading or Process in or issuing from any Court of Canada established under this Act, and in or from all or any of the Courts of Quebec. The Acts of the Parliament of Canada and of the Legislature of Quebec shall be printed and published in both those Languages.

As will be clear to whoever reads it carefully, this legal arrangement refers to four institutions: 1. to the parliament of Canada; 2. to the courts or tribunals of Canada; 3. to the legislature of Quebec; 4. to the courts or tribunals of Quebec. And the meaning of the article is: A. That the two languages are optional: 1. in the debates of the House of Parliament; 2. in the debates of the Legislative Assembly of Quebec; 3. in any written document or trial emanating from any court or tribunal in Canada; 4. in any written report or trial emanating from any court or tribunal in Quebec.

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1. 2. 3. 4.

B. That the two languages are obligatory: in the proceedings of the House of Parliament in Canada; in the proceedings of the Legislative Assembly of Quebec; in the publication of the Acts of the Parliament of Canada; in the publication of the Acts of the Parliament of Quebec.

There are two or three points which you would do well to note with regard to this legislative provision: 1. Only Canada and the province of Quebec are named. Now there are eight other provinces beyond Quebec and nothing is said about them.ii Thus the simple exception made for Quebec would seem to mean something. 2. The two languages are not declared official; but the use of the two languages is declared obligatory in certain specific reports or functions of parliament and of the Canadian courts as well as in the legislature and the courts of Quebec. If the two languages were simply said to be official, then it would follow that both should be used in all official acts, that is to say in all executive, administrative, and judicial acts of the federal government of Canada and of the provincial government of Quebec; but the specific mention of certain functions or acts in which they can or must be used exposes the legal provision to a rigorous interpretation according to this strict letter. 3. It is therefore easy to form a clear and exact idea regarding what must really be understood when it is said that “Le Canada est un pays bilingue”; and what is the value and the objective significance of the phrase once used by His Eminence Cardinal [Louis-Narcisse] Bégin [Archbishop of Quebec] in a letter to your Sacred Congregation: “These two languages are absolutely official and recognized by the constitution, the British North America Act.” (cf. 1741/14). This point has led to much ambiguity and exaggeration in both speech and written material. The true legal position of the French language in Canada is explained extremely clearly by the Hon. N[apoleon] A. Belcourt, senator of Canada and past president of l’Asii To be very precise, I must point out that in the creation of the province of Manitoba, French and English were declared optional or obligatory (ut supra); but later the same provincial legislature abolished in practice this right with respect to the use of the French language in the legislative house, in the minutes, and in the courts.

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sociation canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario, in a speech of his, tempore et loco non suspecto, to the Congrès du parler français celebrated in the city of Quebec in June 1912. I take the liberty to send Your Eminence an extremely long extract from that speech in the first enclosed document, but its substance could be summed up in the following paragraphs: The true fact, regrettable as it is, is that there is no constitutional equality of the two languages except in the federal domain and in the province of Quebec. Only in the Dominion parliament, in the Quebec legislature, in the federal courts, and in the Quebec courts does the French language have the same rights as the English language. Section 133 of the British North America Act, which proclaims equal French- and English-language rights before the federal chambers and courts and the Quebec legislature and courts, and section 93 of the same Act, which gives provincial legislatures exclusive powers to legislate in educational matters, constitute the sum total of the recognized official, legal rights of our language. They are the only ones that cannot be taken away from us without the consent of the imperial parliament, the only ones guaranteed formally by the constitution or the law; the only ones that the law allows us to demand and gives us the means to exercise.

th e place o f th e fr e n c h l a n g uag e i n th e s c h o o ls o f o n ta r i o ac c o r d i n g to th e c o ns ti tuti o n From what we have said thus far we can conclude the following: 1. by virtue of section 93 of the British North America Act, the province of Ontario, like the other provinces, has the exclusive power to legislate in matters regarding education or public instruction; and 2. by virtue of that same article, that power is limited as far as religious schools are concerned, in the sense, that is, that no such act must bring prejudice against those schools; 3. it is not, however, limited, by virtue of either section 93 or section 133, in what concerns the language of use in such schools. In order to clarify this last point, it would be worthwhile to repeat that French and English have a legal recognition according to the con-

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stitution both in the federal dominion of Canada and in the provincial dominion of Quebec. However, since there is no mention whatsoever of the French language with respect to Ontario and the other provinces, and Ontario being on the other hand an English colony and province whose vast majority is English, then clearly we must conclude that the French language has no official position in the schools of Ontario just as it has no official position in the province.

th e present sch o ol si t uat i o n i n o nta r i o This point should be dealt with under two titles, that is, 1. Religious Schools and 2. Schools of a Special Race or Language. I: Religious Schools Catholic schools, both primary and elementary, exist in Ontario, and they are commonly known by the expression “separate schools,” in order to distinguish them from what are commonly known as “public schools.”iii Both one and the other are recognized by law and are subsidized by the government of Ontario. The legislative act which gave the Catholics of Ontario the right to establish their own schools, conforming to their religious faith, was passed in the then colonial legislature in 1863, four years before Confederation. That law then was in effect when the federal pact was sanctioned. If we keep this in mind it will be much easier to understand the arrangement of the above-cited British North America Act, which prescribes that the province, in the exercise of its exclusive rights to legislate in scholarly matters, can do nothing which will prejudice any right or privilege regarding confessional schools that was enjoyed by law by whatever class of persons in the province at the time of union. Thus the right to open and maintain Catholic schools cannot be taken away from the Catholics of Ontario. Any legislation which would attempt to remove such a right would be of itself ultra vires of the provincial legislature. iii According to the official report of 1914, there were in Ontario 513 separate schools with 61,297 students. Of these, the French or bilingual schools number 223 and those of English Catholics number 290. The bilingual question concerns the teaching of French in the 223 schools. It does not change their religious character and does not affect at all the other 290 schools.

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The Separate School Act, or the Separate School Law of 1863,1 which conferred upon Catholics the right to confessional schools – a law that is still in full force in Ontario – is a very fair and very just measure. That God should will that in many countries known to us in Europe there be at least similar legislation!2 Although not an altogether perfect law, it appeared so good to the Ontario bishops of 1863 that it was accepted by them as the final solution regarding the school question in the province. Only after a great deal of agitation and many aborted attempts was this measure won by the united action of the electorate and the Catholic populace.3 In order to give Your Eminence an idea, I need only say that by virtue of this law the Catholics of any locality can separate (it is from here that we have the word separate) from the public schools which exist there: they can elect a board of trustees (school commission) which becomes, ipso facto, a legal entity, with powers to organize and administer a school – or even more than one school – in a locale, when circumstances or the number of children warrant it. This school commission is also authorized to fix and demand school taxes in the amount required for the building and administration of the school or schools, always in proportion, however, to the value of the property of each Catholic ratepayer. And Catholics, by paying their taxes to separate schools, are thus exempt from any contribution to the public schools. In other words, the taxes that are imposed upon Catholics are used for the maintenance of Catholic schools and it is precisely with the moneys from such taxes, to which is added a supplementary subsidy from the provincial government, that Catholic schools are maintained. The school commission of the separate schools also has the power to choose teachers, male or female, who can use a series of books of Catholic readings that are recognized, naturally, by ecclesiastical authorities and authorized for separate schools by the Department of Education. To sum up, by virtue of the Separate Schools Act of 1863 Catholics have the right to schools for their children, to elect a Catholic commission to govern those schools, to pay taxes for their own schools, to be exempt from any other tax for any other schools, and to employ Catholic teachers to use books of Catholic literature, to teach Catechism and religious practice how, when, and to the extent they desire. As a consequence, many of these schools – in fact, almost all the schools of the cities and the towns – are directed by religious sisters or brothers or teachers, and the classroom is decorated with religious emblems; in a word, the school, and the entire atmosphere, could not be more Catholic. Among the persons authorized by law to visit these schools,

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are “the minister of education, all the judges, members of the legislature, the heads of the municipal bodies of the respective locale, the inspectors of the public schools, and the priests of the Roman Catholic Church.” Ultimately, however, the Catholic priests are the only visitors, and the action of the school is carried out under their care. Separate schools (Catholic), like the public schools (neutral) and in the same measure, are under the direction and subject to the inspection of the government and its officials. This being a point of some importance, it would be good to cite verbatim the following arrangement of the school law: The Roman Catholic Separate Schools (with their registers) shall be subject to such inspection as may be directed from time to time by the Chief Superintendent of Education, and they shall be subject also to such regulations as may be imposed from time to time by the Council of Public Instruction.4

It would be worthwhile to note that in this provision there is nothing which says that the inspector of the Catholic separate schools must be a Catholic. According to the text, the minister can send any person whom he chooses, Catholic or Protestant, to inspect these schools. In fact, in 1863, and for the following few years, the Catholic separate schools were officially inspected by the inspector for the public schools, who was almost always a Protestant; that is to say, an individual was chosen to inspect the schools in a determined district and his mandate comprised separate and public schools. In any case, with the passage of time, the minister of education, making use of the discretionary power conceded him by the above-cited text, began to nominate Catholic inspectors with the task to inspect exclusively the Catholic schools. II: Nationalistic Schools of One Race or Special Language5 The law in the province of Ontario does not provide for schools of this type. Separate Catholic schools, just like public ones, are not schools of a special race or nationality. And, apart from their religious character, they do not differ at all from ordinary public schools. To confuse the separate school with the French school, or to make the terms Catholique and française convertible, is a manifest error from the legal point of view.

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In any case, while the law does not provide racial schools – let us call them thus – a regulation (a circular, an ordinance) from the Department of Education contains the following facilitating clause: In school sections where the French or German language prevails the trustees with the approval of the inspector may, in addition to the course of study prescribed for the public schools, require instruction to be given in French or German reading, grammar, and composition, to such pupils as are desired by their parents or guardians to study either of these languages.6

Under this sanction and with the sufferance of the department of public education in the French districts, schools were being established, some public, some separate,iv in which not only French literature, grammar, and composition were taught in French, but all classes were conducted in French, so that the language of communication between the teacher and student was French, even though in every school English was one of the teaching subjects. Such schools came to be known as bilingual English-French schools and, given their special character, the Education Department nominated a French-Canadian inspector to oversee and inspect them. Officially the government has never recognized such schools as a class apart. Officially they were public or separate schools and they were called English-French simply because, as far as the government could see or wanted to see, French was taught there according to the regulation on this point cited above.

th e c o ngr es s o f fre n c h c a n a d i a n s o f o nta r i o This was the state of things at the beginning of the year 1910 when a Congrès d’éducation of the French Canadians of Ontario took place in Ottawa. This congress, which had received the warm approval of the late Mgr [Joseph Thomas] Duhamel [Archbishop of Ottawa], as well as that of Mgr [N.Z.] Lorrain, Bishop of Pembroke, and Mgr [ElieAnicet] Latulipe, Vicar-Apostolic of Temiscaming, was carefully prepared for an entire year before it took place and was to deal with that complex question of education or public instruction with regard to the French-Canadian population of the province of Ontario. It was held in iv According to the last available statistics, there were in Ontario 122 French public schools and 223 French separate schools.

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Ottawa on the 18th, 19th, and 20th of January 1910, with twelve hundred delegates from different French groups in Ontario, among them numerous priests and the leading French-Canadian laity of the province. The Congress began its sessions by taking note of the present school situation. The following citation from the official minutes confirms what had been said above: French Canadians in Ontario have at their disposition for their children’s education: 1. A truncated primary course in which they teach children aged six to eleven almost exclusively in French, and without official authorization, they teach eleven- to fourteen-year-olds half in English and half in French. Most children quit school permanently at that age without knowing either language sufficiently.v 2. A complementary course in the initial planning stages with no determined goal other than preparing the students for the admission exam for the bilingual normal school. 3. A bilingual normal school aimed at training for a third-class teaching diploma.

And shortly after: 4. No systematic bilingual teaching is officially authorized and there is no rational bilingual program. 5. We do not take the French language at all into account in the official examinations except in the administration examination of the bilingual normal schools.7

Even if English-French bilingual schools did not enjoy any legal recognition they were nonetheless fully tolerated. On the other hand, in fact, they were French schools in which as much French was taught as French-Canadian parents could desire. In view of all that happened afterwards, we cannot but deplore the fact that the French Canadians of Ontario were not content with the exercise of rights and advantages that they enjoyed. The fact is that they were not conv Two admissions should be noted: 1. That in 1910 they had a fairly good French course. Then perhaps if they had been content with that ... 2. That students did not learn sufficiently either one language or the other, by which, unwittingly, they admit that the government is right.

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tent with that. The Congress made claims for official recognition on the part of the government of English-French bilingual schools; for the expansion of the system; for the creation of secondary bilingual schools, as well as bilingual normal8 schools for the formation of bilingual teachers. And here it is useful to note that the Catholics of Ontario, as such, do not have secondary separate schools or separate normal schools, even though, with the consent of the law, part of the teaching normally given in secondary schools is given in the elementary or primary schools. A great deal is asked of our colleges to make up for that deficiency, even though in many cases Catholic boys and girls attend public high schools or normal schools. In fact they must go to the latter if they wish to obtain a teaching diploma for schools under the government. Moreover, the bishops have always been so satisfied by the excellent system of Catholic primary schools in which our children, under Catholic direction, are secure as far as religion is concerned until the age of fourteen or fifteen years, that they have always abstained from making greater demands upon the government in order not to irritate Protestant fanatics and thus run the risk of losing their recognized advantages. Instead, given these lacunae in the law, they have preferred to impose voluntary sacrifices upon themselves and the faithful. The Congrès d’éducation des canadiens-français d’Ontario, however, was not so wise and moderate in judging the situation. Among the eighteen demands addressed to the government and registered in the official minutes, we need only cite the following: 1. That the category of schools or classes virtually recognized as bilingual schools and classes be so explicitly and legally. 2. That in those bilingual schools and classes English and French be authorized as teaching languages. 3. (a) That a school in which the majority of pupils are of French origin be declared bilingual. 3. (b) That in a school in which 25 per cent of the pupils are of French origin, they be taught French reading, spelling, grammar, composition, and literature effectively. 3. (c) That the inspection of the said schools in (a) and (b) be carried out by a bilingual inspector. 6. That the bilingual primary course be followed by a bilingual secondary course.

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11. That a normal school or branch of a bilingual normal school be opened as soon as the infrastructure has been set up by the bilingual schools or classes.9 Etc., etc., etc.

Such a large congress, adorned with kiosks and public gatherings, naturally awakened a certain interest in the entire province and did not escape the vigilant attention of the Orange Lodge and of other ultraProtestant societies, which are relatively more numerous here than in any other part of the British Empire. The final work of the Congress was the birth of the Association canadienne-française d’éducation de l’Ontario, having as its object “the just revendication of all the rights of Ontario’s French Canadians and untiring vigil over their interests.” And it is in fact this association that is directing the present campaign for bilingual schools in Ontario; and the memoir that Your Eminence has in your hands on this question is signed by Mr [A.T.] Charron, until recently president of the same.10 I will have to come back to this association further on. I said above that the Archbishop of Ottawa at that time and his two suffragans, both French Canadians,11 whose sees are situated in Ontario and who also have jurisdiction over a vast territory in the province of Quebec, gave the Congress their approval. We can deduce what the other bishops of Ontario thought of the conference, that is to say the bishops of the two ecclesiastical provinces of Toronto and Kingston – all of them English-Canadians – from the resolution that they adopted unanimously in a meeting held seven months after the Congress, that is, on the 15th of August 1910. The resolution, which naturally was not made public, goes like this: Resolved: that we are alarmed for the future of our Catholic Educational System in Ontario, because of the agitation that culminated in the French-Canadian Congress in Ottawa in January 1910; and that the Right Reverend Bishop of London be delegated from this meeting to interview Sir James Whitney, Prime Minister of Ontario, and represent to him our entire opposition to the educational demands of the said Congress.

th e po s i ti o n taken b y m g r fa l l o n , b i sh o p o f lo nd o n Your Most Reverend Eminence will naturally note the mention of the Bishop of London. And since Mgr Fallon is often accused by French

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Canadians of being la cause de tous nos malheurs, it will not be out of place here to say precisely what role he had in this controversy. Mgr Fallon was consecrated Bishop of London on the 25th of April 1910, that is, four months after the celebration of the Congrès d’éducation mentioned above. He had very precise views on the inefficiency of bilingual schools and on the threat, according to his judgment, they constituted against the security of our system of Catholic schools. Indeed, one month after his consecration, on the 22nd of May 1910, on a pastoral visit, he had occasion to meet with a member of the government of Ontario, the Hon. W.J. Hanna,12 whose attention he called to “the unsatisfactory character of education imparted in the bilingual schools and the probable consequences that would result from any direct attempt to extend the workings of that system of education.”13 From this interview with Mgr Fallon, Mr Hanna prepared a memorandum with the goal of placing it in the hands of his colleague, the minister of education. And here it is not necessary that I express an opinion on the views of the Bishop of London or on the action which he felt it was expedient to take. What matters now – and it seems incredible – is that the memorandum containing the bishop’s ideas was stolen by a FrenchCanadian employee – a Mr Henri Maisonville – private secretary to the only French-Canadian cabinet minister in the government of Ontario.14 Vile and unworthy as this perfidious act was, not a word of reproach against its author appeared in the French-Canadian press: and I say this in passing in order to show how low these extreme nationalistic agitations can get in order to achieve their goal. The minister’s memorandum was stolen by Mr Maisonville but it was not immediately made public. Mgr Fallon’s report on what happened then is the following: “I can add that the missing memorandum was kept relatively secret for three and a half months before it was published: that it was communicated to four priests of the Diocese of London: that it was the object of discussion among a limited number of Church men during the Eucharistic Congress of Montreal (1910): and that, as I learned from Mgr [Charles-Hugh] Gauthier, Archbishop of Ottawa, it was presented to Mgr [Adélard] Langevin, Archbishop of St Boniface, who advised its publication.”15 Whatever one might think of the authenticity of this account, the fact is that the memorandum was published in September of 1910, first in the French newspapers of the province of Quebec and then in the English newspapers in Ontario.

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It cannot be surprising that such a publication should have produced a tremendous sensation. Mgr Fallon instantly was at the centre of an extremely violent storm. The French press denounced him in outrageous terms; the English press supported him, invoking the government to hold a rigorous inquiry into the bilingual English-French schools in the entire province. The opposition to bilingual schools, already awakened by the French-Canadian Congress of January 1910, now reached its climax. If that Congress, with the noise and the publicity that surrounded it, had been deplorable, the theft and especially the publication of the Hanna memorandum was most deplorable. The Bishop of London must naturally take responsibility for his ideas regarding English-French bilingual schools in Ontario, but he is not responsible for divulging those ideas. Your most Reverend Eminence can deduce from what has been stated who is responsible for that. Instead of blaming Maisonville or those who made the memorandum public, the French press from Quebec allowed itself comments such as the following: If the government of Ontario finds itself forced to abolish bilingual schools and to proscribe the French language, our compatriots have Mgr Fallon to thank. (La Patrie of Montreal, 24 March 1911)

th e gov ernment i n q u i ry i n to b i li ngual sch o o ls And now we enter another phase of the question. Giving in to insistent demands, the Ontario government appointed a Mr F.W. Merchant to carry out a full inquiry into the English-French bilingual schools of the province. Moreover, at the beginning of 1911, in the session of the provincial legislature which immediately followed the events which I have just mentioned, the following extremely significant resolution was adopted by the House: That the English language shall be the language of instruction and of all communication with the pupils of the public and separate schools of the province of Ontario except where, in the opinion of the department, it is impractical by reason of the pupils not understanding English.16

It would be impossible to carry out a detailed examination of the report presented by Mr Merchant to the government in February 1912, nor is it necessary. We only need to say that his conclusion was:

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it is evident from an examination of all the tests applied that the EnglishFrench schools are, on the whole, lacking in efficiency.

In any case, from a careful reading of the report, which incidentally is not averse to English-French schools, it is very evident that inefficiency was neither universal nor due to causes which would dishonour the French Canadians of Ontario. Inefficiency referred in particular to the teaching of the English language; and such an assertion before a public which was on the whole hostile to the French forced the government of Ontario to take some action. This came in the form of a regulation (a circular, instruction) from the Department of Education, known under the title of Regulation 17. Thus we finally come to the heart of the matter. It is precisely around Regulation 17 that the present storm is raging. Even for Your Eminence that reference should not be new and it would also be useful for Your Eminence to know its weight.

r egulati o n 17 This regulation or ministerial circular has to do with the EnglishFrench schools, public or separate, recognized and subsidized by the government.vi It was passed in June 1912 and once again with some small modifications in August 1913. The 1912 text can by summed up as follows: 1. In Ontario there are only two categories of primary schools – public schools and separate schools (Catholic). The epithet “Englishvi As I said above, there are 223 separate bilingual French schools in Ontario. There are also 122 public bilingual French schools. Despite the legal right of Catholics to establish separate schools, not always and everywhere have the English and French taken advantage of this. In particular, in the rural districts where we find groups of a not insignificant size and not mixed in to an equal extent with the Protestants, they have established public schools which are practically Catholic schools, that is to say, with Catholic practices and teaching, even if by law they are officially neutral schools. The government knows this but turns a blind eye. Bishops also know about the state of these things but for various reasons they have not believed it necessary to intervene in order to oblige Catholics to have their own separate schools, that is, Catholic schools by law and not by simple toleration.

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French” is applied for convenience’s sake to certain schools of one or the other category. The regulations and programs of study which now exist in the public schools will from now on be in force in the separate schools: with the exception that in the separate schools the provisions for the instructions and exercises of public schools will not be applicable, and books of Catholic literature may be used in separate schools instead of those used in public schools.vii With French-language students where it is necessary French can be used as a language of teaching and communication in first form (that is for the first two years of school and possibly three). In the other schools years (usually five or six), after first form, French literature, grammar, and composition can be taught for not more than one hour a day in each class. For the English-French schools, there shall be two inspectors, one called the “supervising inspector,” the one charged in particular with examining the efficiency of the teaching of English; the other is simply called “inspector,” and must examine the efficiency of the teaching of French.

The same circular, as I have already said, renewed in August 1913, contained some modifications, which would be useful to note here immediately: 1. Instead of limiting French to the language of teaching and communication exclusively in the first year, it added that, with the approval of the chief inspector of the schools, it would be possible to use it as the language of teaching and communication with those students who beyond the first year might be unable to speak and understand the English language. 2. Instead of restricting the study of the French language in high school to the first year, to one hour a day in each classroom, it vii The so-called readers (reading manuals) are the only special Catholic books authorized by the government for Catholic schools. In ordinary Catholic schools, besides these manuals, books authorized for public schools are also used. As far as I know, they are not to be faulted: at least I have not heard anything to the contrary. In the English-French bilingual schools, according to Dr Merchant’s report, the use of books not authorized by the Department of Education was extremely common.

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added that it should not exceed one hour a day, except where the school day was lengthened by orders of the chief inspector. It was stated as well that this teaching could take place in the French language. 3. The distinction between superintendent and inspector having been removed,viii the two were placed on equal footing, the one and the other being charged to report on the general state of the schools. The preceding summary is necessarily incomplete; but it is sufficient to give Your Eminence a precise idea, I believe, of this famous Regulation 17.

french -c a nad i an r e si sta n c e to r egulati o n 17 As soon as it was made public, the Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario sent a circular to all French Canadians in Ontario, to trace out for them the line of action to follow. 1. It invited the board of every English-French school to protest Regulation 17 and to send a copy of the protest to the minister of education. 2. It invited French-Canadian parents to enjoin their school commissions “to have French taught in all the courses, to assure that French be the language of use in all relations between teachers and students and in teaching, except for those hours in which English is taught.” 3. It invited parents to show the teachers “leur volonté expresse” that they follow the same norms with regards to “the teaching and use of the French language.” 4. Finally, it invited the school commissioners to pass a motion to the same effect, and to post that same motion in every classroom. These recommendations were repeated when Regulation 17 was published again in August 1913, and they were largely, if not universally, put into effect. Your Most Revered Eminence will certainly not miss observing that we have here a definite refusal on the part of the French Canadians of Ontario to obey the law of the province regarding their schools. It was

viii Naturally, the superintendent charged with overseeing the teaching in English was English; the inspector simply responsible for overseeing teaching in French was French-Canadian. This subordination was understandably odious.

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a declared and open war. Beyond the disobedience to the ordinances of Regulation 17, with regard to the teaching and use of French, the French Canadians adopted another mode of protest even more spectacular. Resistance to the English Protestant Inspector. As can be seen from the preceding summary of Regulation 17, a double inspection of English-French schools was prescribed – one inspector to survey the efficiency of the teaching of English, another for the efficiency of instruction in French. This is the same as having an English inspector and a French inspector, and, according to Regulation 17 in its first text, the English inspector was superior to the French one. (This was later changed in the revised text of August 1913, when the two were placed on an equal level.) This double inspection was naturally odious to the French Canadians. But it became, if I can express myself thus, religiously odious, when the government nominated English Protestant inspectors. Such a nomination gave, or was exploited in order to make it give, a religious aspect to the question, and we will deal with this in greater depth below. What we must note here is the French Canadians’ impatience to protest ever more against Regulation 17. L’Association canadiennefrançaise d’éducation d’Ontario “recommended that parents have their children leave the school upon the arrival of the Protestant inspector,” certainly a bold move intended to place the government in an embarrassing position. Thus as the English Protestant inspector presented himself in school, all the children previously instructed by their families would get up en masse and leave the school. This tactic could not be better described than in this passage from Le Droit of Ottawa of 6 November 1913 (weekly edition):

the protestant inspector The trustees of Catholic School no. 2 of Masson and Cosby do not want any at their place. (From our correspondent) Ouellette, Ont., 3. – The inspector of the White-Leblanc schools recently visited our school, Separate School no. 2 of Masson and Cosby.

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The parents and trustees had followed the instruction of the Education Association. Precise instructions had been given to the teacher and pupils. As soon as the inspector arrived the children greeted him politely and then left. Seeing the children leave, the inspector said to the teacher: “I think they are taking off and I deeply regret this for them.” The teacher, Miss Amanda Laporte, remained and discussed the matter with the inspector, who insisted on explaining all the advantages of Regulation 17. The inspector understood nothing.

unluc k y mr s ummer b y He goes to Bourget and tries to convene the school trustees without success. (Le Droit) Bourget, Ont. 5. – Mr Summerby, the Protestant inspector of bilingual schools, visited our village, he did not try to visit any school but he tried to convene the school trustees, which he was unable to do. He left without giving his views; he even avoided mentioning the matter of the schools to those with whom he had the occasion to speak.

Before recalling a few other incidents which only served to make the controversy ever more serious, it would be good to examine briefly and carefully the arguments on which the French Canadians base their opposition to Regulation 17.

th e mo ti v es b eh i nd t h e r e si sta n c e o f th e fr enc h c a nad i a n s to r egulati o n 17 i. The first is that Regulation 17 is unconstitutional, that is, ultra vires of the provincial legislature of Ontario, and therefore null and void. To prove this they invoked: a) the Treaty of Paris of 1763 by which Canada was ceded by the King of France to the King of England; b) the Quebec Act of 1774, adopted by the British Parliament, which preserved for the French Canadians “their civil laws and rights”; c) and finally the British North America Act of 1867, in particular the two articles

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93 and 133 cited at the beginning of this report. Whether the said regulation be constitutional or not is a legal question to be decided in the Canadian courts and ultimately by the Privy Council, the highest court of justice in Great Britain. With regard to the necessity and especially the expediency of a recourse to the courts, individual opinions are of little value: in any case some notable French Canadians, some bishops among them, told me that it would be foolish for the French Canadians to bring the controversy to the supreme courts, having already lost the case in the Ontario courts, and it is all too clear that they do not have a good case. Nonetheless the lawyer for the French Canadians in this matter, who is advising them to bring the case to the Supreme Court, is the same Hon. [Napoleon A.] Belcourt, a Catholic, a federal senator, a distinguished lawyer, perhaps the most distinguished of French Canadians of Ontario, past president of the Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario. Tempore non suspecto, that is, in June 1912 at the Congrès du parler français in Quebec, when Regulation 17 had not yet been drawn up, he pronounced publicly the words which we already cited above and which Your Eminence will see further developed in the first appendix to this document. Now the legal position of the French language in Ontario is the same, neither more nor less, as that of the French language in the schools of Ontario. In June 1912 in Quebec Mr Belcourt spoke as a man of the law; here and now in Ottawa where he resides he acts and speaks as a lawyer. Nonetheless the unconstitutionality of the regulation is a question that certainly cannot concern us, that is to say, the supreme ecclesiastical authority, and I write about this only so that Your Eminence might have this information. ii. The second reason for resistance is that Regulation 17 is manifestly unjust and no one is bound to obey an unjust law. They say that it is unjust then because it is contrary to natural law, “because of this first principle that parents are the only ones who can choose the method to educate their children.” In order to determine the true value of this mode of reasoning it is necessary to consider two things: 1. That Regulation 17 does not take away from French Canadians in Ontario the right to speak and even to teach in French as they wish, where they wish, and as much as they wish; it restricts only their right to teach French in schools which are established and organized according to law and subsidized by the

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state;ix 2. That Regulation 17 neither removes nor reduces the right of French Canadians in Ontario to a private school, or a school financed or maintained by voluntary contributions, where they would have the greatest absolute freedom and ease to teach all the French that they would like without any inspection on the part of the state. These are two important reflections and it is important to keep them in mind, if we wish to give a just weight to the contentions of the French Canadians. On no other point has their been so much sophistry. When the objection was made to the French Canadians that if by law and by nature they have the right to French schools in Ontario, then so do Germans, Poles, Italians, and other nationalities which come to Ontario have, by the same law, a right to national schools of their language, and that we would thus come to a true babelic confusion, the response was: As for Germans and other people who have immigrated here or who have arrived later and established themselves in Canada, they do not have such a right. On the contrary it is clear that by coming here voluntarily and establishing themselves and living here in Canada, they abandoned, renounced, and put aside the natural right to speak their native language. (Senator Belcourt, before the Supreme Court of Ontario, Le Droit, Ottawa, special edition of 12 March 1915)

I refrain from entering into a discussion on this point. I will simply observe that following that standard, if the French language does not have a legal position in Ontario then the French Canadian who from the province of Quebec emigrates to Ontario would not seem to find himself in a better position than a German or an Italian, etc. iii. The third reason for French-Canadian resistance to Regulation 17 is that it is a pedagogical monstrosity and damaging to the efficiency ix When French-Canadian memoranda speak “about the schools built and maintained with our tithes and at the cost of great sacrifices,” this really means that just like all other citizens, French Canadians pay their school taxes, which are self-imposed through their school trustees, according to local needs recognized by themselves. The government helps them to demand the tax and also grants them a supplementary subsidy. They do not pay taxes for other schools as do Catholics in the United States, for example, who are taxed for their public schools and then must build and maintain their own schools.

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of their schools, and that it increases the cost of instruction of their children. A number of people have placed great importance on this point and they cite pedagogical authority in their favour. This is also a point which does not concern us and on which evidently there can be a difference of opinion. iv. The fourth motive for resistance is that Regulation 17 takes away from bilingual separate schools the characteristic of a Catholic school: 1. By introducing the neutral public school books in the Catholic separate schools; 2. By placing separate schools under the inspection of Protestants. Let us look at the value of these reasons.

first . In the preceding summary of Regulation 17, I referred to school books or manuals. In the law regarding separate schools in Ontario there is no provision for a series of books for Catholic schools. In practice, however, and by request of the bishops, the Department of Education has approved a series of Catholic reading books. Aside from these readers, the ordinary Catholic English schools use manuals prescribed by the public schools for arithmetic, geography, etc. These books are normally unobjectionable and never anti-religious or atheist. It is a sore point, however, that there is no Catholic text available at least for the history of England and Canada. Instead the French schools, contravening the law, have often and in many places used a number of French manuals for the above-cited subjects that were not authorized by the department. Now Regulation 17 changed nothing regarding this matter: it simply reiterated what always conformed to law. Had the regulation been obeyed by the bilingual schools, the same school books used by Catholic English schools would have been used by the bilingual schools as well. These books might not be Catholic to the point that we would desire, but the fault does not lie as much with Regulation 17 as with the Separate School Act itself, which does not provide for a special series of school books for Catholic schools. All the same, this has been the case since 1863, and to say that the introduction in French separate schools of books used by public schools can be attributed to this regulation and “changes the very nature of separate schools” – to say this is not only a belated complaint but also an exaggeration. In fact if this

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contention were true it would be the same as saying that we have never had Catholic schools in Ontario.

second . On no other point has there been so much exaggeration as on the one regarding the Protestant inspector. To be precise, Regulation 17 does not impose or introduce a Protestant inspector: it simply says that English-French schools are subject to a double inspection, an English one and a French one. The same law regarding separate schools does not mention inspections or a Catholic inspector; it simply declares that the separate schools are subject to a government inspection. In fact even if this was not the case from the beginning, the government nominates Catholic inspectors for Catholic schools but it is not obliged to do so. In any case it is true that recently the government sent Protestant inspectors to the bilingual English-French schools, but Regulation 17 does not say that they have to be Protestant. I think that what I have heard a number of times is true, that the government looked for English Catholic inspectors but for one reason or another was unsuccessful in finding any. Whatever the case, the fault does not lie with the regulation but, if there be a fault, with the Separate School Act, which has been in effect since 1863 without any protest and which should be amended in order to prescribe that Catholic schools be inspected by Catholic inspectors.x Now, leaving aside this pious desire, the fact is that after Regulation 17, and not because of it, Protestant inspectors were destined to English-French schools, either separate or public. Now, things being as they are, what should one think about the entry of a Protestant inspector into a Catholic school? I have here a study on “La position juridique de l’école bilingue,” published in Le Droit, organ of the Association d’éducation, and sent to me by the president of the same association, in which it is said: As for the inspection by Protestants, we cannot conceive of a separate Catholic school placed under the direction of a person imbued with anti-Catholic ideas. This direction upsets its organization and work. It would be like saying that we could have an Anglican, a Muslim, or a Buddhist as bishop in our Church. You only have to mention this in order that the absurd position of the Protestant inspectors be apparent to anyone in good faith. x From my own personal experience in England, I know that during my stay there and maybe even now voluntary Catholic (confessional) schools subsidized by the government were inspected by ordinary inspectors who were normally Protestant and never did I hear that the bishops objected to this.

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It is clear that all of this is exaggerated and even false when we reflect that the inspection lasts one half-day, two times a year, in each classroom; that it has to do with the manner and the efficiency of the teaching; that its goal is to invigilate the observance of the school law and of the government regulations regarding educational matters. In fact the guidelines emanating from the Department of Education describe thus the duties of the inspector: The (inspector) shall research and examine in the way he shall find most expedient the qualifications and the efficiency of the teachers, the sufficiency and the adequacy of the classrooms, and the progress of the classes and all that concerns the health and the well-being of the pupils.

The inspector cannot change the law or the regulations. He cannot become involved in the teaching of Catechism or in the carrying out of religious practices. Even if he were anti-Catholic and full of religious prejudices, he would not dare to attack the religious character of the schools, and even if he tried, I cannot see what great damage he could do in two annual visits which last only a few hours each. Much was made of the ministerial instructions to the inspectors, in which it was said that “they have supreme authority in the school.” This said, the French Canadians add that Regulation 17 assigns Protestant inspectors to separate bilingual schools. Thus Protestant inspectors have supreme authority in Catholic schools, which destroys the Catholic character of these schools. Here is the great argument that French Canadians believe is paramount, and which until a couple of months ago they did not get tired of repeating. I said until a couple of months ago and I shall explain why this is the case further on. In order to give the argument its just weight, it is important to observe the complete text of the instructions, which is the following: Every inspector when he officially visits a school in his area has supreme authority in the school and can command teachers or pupils with regard to school exercises.

This last item – either through forgetfulness or intentionally, I am not sure which – is always hushed up by French Canadians. And yet this item is clearly important. It is necessary in fact to note that: 1. This supreme authority of the inspector lasts for the time of his official visit, that is two half-days a year. 2. This supreme authority consists sub-

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stantially in the following: that he is pro tempore head and superior of the school and can direct not only the students but also the teachers in the exercises of the school. We could not conceive of a government inspector being sent to a school without this kind of supreme authority: and from my side I am not able to see in his visit such danger as to justify so extraordinary and grossly insolent a way of protest, which is, as I mentioned above, the mass exodus of pupils – boys and girls – from their classes at the arrival of the Protestant inspector. I cannot view this fact as other than a boorish insult to a public official who is legitimately carrying out his duties, and as an open challenge to the government. But Your Eminence will judge this much better than I. I have placed before you all the legal texts and all the facts. In order that no injustice be done to anyone in any case, Your Eminence will permit me to cite, as we say, the point of view of the French Canadians, which is found in a long memorandum of forty-four pages sent to me in February of 1914 by the Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario: Briefly, the inspector is the master of masters and it is he who, by virtue of his functions, marks the movement and direction of teaching in the school ... Through his ideas, mentality, education, and preconceptions he is the adversary if not the sworn enemy of what in our schools is the fundamental element of true education: the Catholic religion. If he acts in conformity with his convictions and preconceptions then he becomes, in the name of the government in which he holds his mandate, the persecutor of our religion, in the very bosom of our schools. If, on the contrary, he has the discretion to keep himself exclusively on neutral soil, to exercise his functions leaving aside all religious preoccupations, then he becomes, in the eyes of the students and teachers, the living affirmation of the principle of neutrality, which makes religion an extra subject beyond the normal school curriculum. And the more the inspector appears to be neutral, polite and reserved with respect to the religious convictions of teachers and students, the greater the danger. From whatever side we look at it the normal Protestant inspector constitutes a grave, imminent and inevitable danger for the integrity of our children’s faith.

All of this would be most just and very well put if Protestant teachers had been imposed on our schools, but with Catholic teachers and very often religious sisters or brothers in our schools, with some of the

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school books Catholic and the rest not particularly objectionable, with the teaching of Christian doctrine and the carrying out of religious practice, with the crucifix hanging outside the school building and Catholic emblems and sacred images on the walls of every classroom, with the atmosphere of the school absolutely Catholic – with all of this, is it at all possible that an annual or half-yearly visit in an EnglishFrench separate school by a Protestant inspector who has absolutely no authority to modify or to abolish any of the items mentioned above and whose principal mission it is to invigilate the effectiveness of teaching – is it at all possible, I say, that this is enough to change the Catholic character of the school? But there is yet something else. This presence of the Protestant inspector, seen by French Canadians as something so damaging to our schools, always appeared to many as a vain reason, in sum a pretext to cover up a national prejudice. Unfortunately the passing of time has shown that the latter were right. In the month of September, this very year, the government of Ontario removed one of the Protestant inspectors, replacing him with an English Catholic inspector.xi And this happened right here in Ottawa and its surroundings where the agitation is most acute. And so what happened? Everyone said that the opposition would die down immediately. Instead that was not the case – not at all, in proof of which I need only cite for Your Eminence the following extract from the daily Le Droit (Ottawa, 13 September 1915), organ of the Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario: The Education Association hopes to have all parents whose children attend bilingual schools know that absolutely nothing has changed with regard to the line of conduct to be followed regarding the inspectors. Whether these inspectors be Catholic or Protestant does not make a difference in the present situation. The double inspection is pedagogical nonsense, an obstacle to the serious progress of our schools, an exceptional measure and consequently injurious to French Canadians. Therefore it does not have a raison d’être; therefore the defenders of the bilingual schools must not and cannot recognize it. The schools do not refuse to receive the representative of authority. The French-language inspectors are welcome and the general inspector is equally xi This served to confirm what I stated above, that it is true that Regulation 17 imposes a double inspection on bilingual schools, but it does not necessarily impose a Protestant inspector.

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welcome. However, what is impossible for us to bend to without having any other guarantee of protection is the inspection that has as its goal the imposition of Regulation 17, whether the inspector in charge be Catholic or Protestant or even French Canadian. It is the principal that we wish to safeguard and no concession can be made on this point. Obstinate but respectful resistance must continue as in past years, for it is more eloquent and effective than any demonstration.

First a Protestant inspector was not desired because he was Protestant; now an English inspector is not desired because he is English. I must add, however, that the mass exodus of the children from the schools was not repeated with this new English inspector. I must also add, to be fair, that these exoduses as far as I know did not take place this year with respect to the Protestant inspector either. In the preceding pages I have tried to give the reasons for FrenchCanadian resistance to Regulation 17, examining them in the light of the facts, no matter how minor, in order to understand them adequately. And now, almost spontaneously, comes the important question:

i s th i s a reli gi o us m at t e r ? Some French Canadians – not many – would agree with Senator Belcourt, who publicly made this declaration: I wish to take this opportunity to say that the bilingual question is a purely linguistic matter not having a religious character and as far as I am concerned it shall remain a linguistic question and not a religious one. (Letter of 19 March 1915 to the Evening Journal in Ottawa)

But the opinion that is much more in fashion among French Canadians claims that it is a religious question, foncièrement Catholique, and the French-Canadian press does its best to present it as such. From this point of view I could not quote a more moderate and at the same time more authoritative exposition than that of Mgr Latulipe, the Vicar-Apostolic of Temiscaming, from whose letters written to me I quote the following extract: It is clear to me that this is as much a religious matter as a national [ethnic] one ... to sum up, Regulation 17, in my humble opinion, directly attacks a

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Catholic principlexii in as much as it places our schools under the immediate direction of a heretic, and also indirectly in as much as it leads to the anglicization of our people, which as experience proves will fatally lead many to lose their faith.17

I also underline the words “directly” and “indirectly.” As for the Catholic principle being attacked directly, I have already said more than enough for Your Eminence to form a judgment. As for the indirect attack upon the same Catholic principle, that is, anglicization, I shall note that the words of Mgr Latulipe implied two assertions which are more or less true and more or less false: a. That Regulation 17 leads to anglicization of French Canadians and b. That this anglicization leads a significant number to lose their faith. Now if Regulation 17 was truly designed by its authors to anglicize French Canadians, and if it is such that it produces this effect, I cannot affirm or deny, nor is it my duty to do so. If things were as the French Canadians say they are, they would be perfectly right to use every legitimate civil means at their disposal to defend and protect what they rightly and so ardently hold dear. In doing this, however, they should be moderate and remember that they live in the English province of Ontario and not in the French province of Quebec; and that as a consequence they cannot expect that their language should be held in the same regard and accorded the same importance in the schools here as in the province of Quebec. But even if we admit that Regulation 17 aims to bring about the anglicization of French-Canadian children, the anglicization itself per se would not necessarily have any religious character or appearance. It takes on this appearance only in as much it can lead, as the good bishop affirms, to the loss of faith “pour un bon nombre.” The great maxim in fact, which is invoked opportune et importune by French Canadians in this matter, is that “la langue est la sauvegarde de la foi,” while the most ardent and extreme of them go one step further by saying that it is “the best and only safeguard of the faith,” or affirming in fact that French is “une langue Catholique,” and that English is “une xii It is always the same imprecision of concept and language. Regulation 17 does not submit the Catholic schools to an inspection by a Protestant but, like the separate school law, only prescribes a government inspection. The fact of the Protestant inspector came afterwards, but not by force of either the law or the regulation.

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langue Protestante et Protestantisante” [a Protestant and Protestantizing language]. And then to improve the efficacy of the French language in preserving the faith they hardly ever tire of citing the frequency of mixed marriages of English-language Catholics. Now that such marriages are unfortunately frequent we cannot deny. But to insist on this fact as if it were Catholicism’s only criterion does not seem right.18 We are told, for example, that in the city of Toronto, where the population is of the English language, in the year 1912 there were 265 mixed marriages; whereas only three such marriages were celebrated during the same year in the county of Prescott and Russell (eastern Ontario), whose population is of the French language and numerically almost equivalent to the Catholic population in the city of Toronto. Nothing is said, however, about the fact that in Toronto Catholics find themselves mixed in with the Protestant masses in a proportion of one to ten, whereas in Prescott and in Russell counties the masses are Catholic and Protestants are very few. Neither is anything said about the number of conversions from Protestantism that have taken place in Toronto and in Russell and Prescott counties during the same period. I do not have official data on this pointxiii but I do not believe that I would be far from the truth if, reversing the above-stated numbers, I were to say: in the year 1912 in Toronto 265 people converted to Catholicism and in the counties of Prescott and Russell three people converted to Catholicism. Would it be just to take these numbers as an index of Catholicism in those locales? Would they not be perhaps as misleading as those of mixed marriages? If the mixing in of English-language Catholics with Protestants exposes them to certain dangers, at least it gives them the opportunity to make known at the same time, with word and example, the truth and the holiness of the Catholic Church. Thus, to sum up the situation, in my humble view, a. It is not so much language as the environment that constitutes the principle defence and protection of those who are weak in the faith. xiii I have official data for two parishes in the diocese of London where English-language Catholics are mixed in with a great Protestant majority. I have no reason to believe they are an exception to the general rule. The parish of St Mary’s, London, over nine years had 14 mixed marriages and 126 conversions to Catholicism; the Parish of the Holy Angels, St Thomas, over nine years had 6 mixed marriages and 87 Catholic converts.

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b. It would be a great safeguard for Catholics to establish themselves in groups separate from Protestants. But we must not waste our energies on beautiful theories: we are dealing with facts and it would simply be utopian to hope to impede or to change them entirely. c. Without a doubt there are French Canadians who have lost their faith, especially in the great cities of the United States; but even in the cities of the province of Quebec there are those who have lost their faith, even if they have not gone as far as becoming Freemasons and anti-Catholics. What are the causes? No cause on its own can explain such facts. On the other hand, there are French Canadians who speak not a word of French and have remained excellent Catholics.

th e atti tud e o f ec c l e si ast i c a l auth o r i ti es o n the p r e se n t m at t e r up to th i s po i nt I think I have said enough to show that the bilingual schools question is not essentially a religious matter and that Regulation 17 cannot be condemned on religious grounds. However, it is a matter which deeply and intimately touches a certain category of Catholics regarding interests which to them are very dear; and in this sense, this matter deserves and demands the sympathy and the benevolent help of those who by office must be their guides in religious matters. Nonetheless, there might be good reasons why such sympathy and benevolent aid cannot be extended or at least manifested openly. This being said, the following questions arise: 1. What has the episcopate done in the present controversy? 2. What has the Apostolic Delegate done?

i . wh at h ave th e b i sh o p s d o n e We must immediately distinguish between the bishops of Ontario and those of the province of Quebec. The Bishops of Ontario The Ontario episcopate comprises the three ecclesiastical provinces of Toronto, Kingston, and Ottawa. It is clear that if the bilingual question

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called for the attention or intervention of the episcopate, the duty fell primarily, if not only, on the bishops of Ontario. And yet none of them, except Mgr Latulipe, Vicar-Apostolic of Temiscaming, took any action, either public or private, for or against the bilingual schools, beyond what has been stated in the initial part of this report. Mgr Latulipe has been the only notable exception. He wrote, spoke, and took action in a totally unambiguous manner. His attitude was clearly and frankly in favour of bilingual schools and he did not hesitate to declare publicly that “the sacred cause of our schools is for us also the cause of our holy religion.” In brief, he identified himself in public and private with l’Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario. Beyond his public declaration and acts, he opened negotiations with the government with the intention of arriving at some solution to the question. I must also add here that at least once Archbishop [Neil] McNeil invited him to Toronto and accompanied him to the Department of Education, helping the efforts of the good bishop towards the same intent. But unfortunately these negotiations led nowhere. Mgr Latulipe’s excellent intentions and perfectly good faith are irreproachable.xiv The Bishops of the Province of Quebec If the episcopate of Ontario abstained from any action in the matter, the same thing cannot be said of the Quebec bishops. On 21 December 1914 a great public gathering was held under the auspices of the Association catholique de la jeunesse canadienne-française in Montreal with the goal “of understanding Montreal opinion on the situation of French schools in Ontario.”19 The Bishop of Montreal, Mgr [Paul] Bruchési, was present at the gathering with his auxiliary, Mgr [Georges] Gauthier, and Vicar-General Mgr [Emile] Roy. Mgr

xiv It is difficult to consider his use of the word “boches” [krauts] appropriate, as he applies it to the authors responsible for Regulation 17 in Ontario. I can add that the expression “les boches d’Ontario” was anything but rare in the extremist French-Canadian press, and that the situations of the French Canadians of Ontario was described in the papers as “en plein régime prussien.” Phrases of this type in the press naturally did not contribute to calming people down.

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Bruchési, who was invited to speak, gave a brief talk in which he explained his presence at the gathering with the following words: If the Auxiliary Bishop, the Vicar-General, and I come to this meeting organized by the Association catholique de la jeunesse canadienne-française, it is in order to affirm forcefully that we are in favour of all just claims.

We must recognize that Mgr Bruchési was very guarded in what he said and his speech was not lacking in moderation and good sense. A few days later (29 December 1914), his Eminence Cardinal Bégin took his part in the affair. He addressed an open letter of congratulations to Mgr Bruchesi in which, after having announced the “droit fondamental et primordial” that everyone has to speak in his own tongue, continued: And which language, Monsignor, do we wish to banish from the domain where the spirit and heart of childhood are formed? The same one which is the guardian of our beliefs and the instrument of our culture. We certainly understand and can explain to ourselves without difficulty the indignation that arises among the minority in Ontario with respect to the unjust and vexing measures which they lament. Those measures reach our brethren and co-religionists at the very source of their intellectual and religious life.

Other bishops in Quebec followed the example and not always with that exact understanding of the real state of things – of the legal rights of the French language in Ontario and of the true weight of the school law and Regulation 17 – which would have been desirable. Mgr [Michel-Thomas] Labrecque, Bishop of Chicoutimi, to cite only one of them, asked “as a French Canadian, British citizen and member of the Catholic hierarchy that respect be shown for the sacred rights” of the French-Canadians of Ontario and declared, with phenomenal naïveté, that “(peace) can never be re-established except through the restoration of the legal rights of our brethren in Ontario, which are based on natural law, the law of peoples, treaties, the Constitution, the secular traditions of our country, and, if this will not do, on the most elementary rights to personal freedom of any individual.”

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These “legal rights” being extremely doubtful and according to [Napoleon] Belcourt, absolutely nil, I leave the rest to Your Eminence ...xv Mgr Bruchési’s speech and Cardinal Bégin’s letter can be found by Your Eminence in the second appendix. It is not easy to define what goal the bishops of Quebec had in intervening in a dispute outside their jurisdiction – getting themselves mixed up especially in such an open and clamorous way in great public meetings, with the intention of protesting against “the situation of French Canadians in Ontario” and collecting money in order to help the “blessés d’Ontario” in the battle against Regulation 17. If His Eminence and their Most Reverend Lordships aimed to help the French-Canadian minority of Ontario, I don’t think that they could have chosen a more apt means to frustrate their aim. The various civil provinces here that are so tenacious in their autonomy take any interference from sister provinces or even from the federal authorities themselves as an affront. The very fact that gatherings were being held in Quebec to protest against the Ontario law was not exactly the most effective way to comfort French Canadians suffering in Ontario. Thus Your Eminence can imagine the effect produced on the fanatical Protestant societies so numerous and widespread in Ontario, especially upon the Orangemen, anti-Catholics par excellence, by the news spread by the press that the French bishops of Quebec were in favour of bilingual schools. You didn’t need anything else to multiply the hostility of Ontario and to give a new impetus to Protestant resistance against the so-called “usurpations of the Church of Rome” and the “domination by the hierarchy.” The denunciations against the bishops of Quebec and especially against the Most Eminent Cardinal Bégin resounded throughout the length and breadth of the province. To add fuel to the fire, an open response to Cardinal Bégin sudden-

xv Even the late Mgr Langevin, Archbishop of St Boniface, intervened with a letter on 6 February 1915, written to the Association d’éducation from Texas, where he was convalescing, in which he sent his offering of one hundred dollars to support it in the battle, and he said of the bilingual question, “if in this moment it is a question of language and sacred national rights, it is definitively a religious matter.” The letter was published in Le Droit, 20 February 1915.

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ly came on the scene,xvi written and signed by an English-language pastor of the city of Ottawa, the Reverend M.J. Whelan20 – a letter which, like the protests of the above-mentioned bishops, was very strongly publicized in the newspapers of the province. It was a disgraceful letter and thus, at least in the eyes of Protestants, had the appearance of rebellion against constituted ecclesiastical authority, a challenge, that is, to a Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church launched by a simple priest. And the worst was that it contained a scandalous attack against the late Mgr Duhamel, Archbishop of Ottawa, describing him as one of the most aggressive nationalists. Apart from these grave shortcomings, Reverend Whelan’s letter contained a very obvious intimation to the cardinal that it was up to the bishops of Ontario, if need be, to give directives in this matter. We [the English-speaking Catholics] protest against their [the French Canadians of Ontario] dragging religion into their language agitation. We protest against their identifying their cause with that of the separate schools. We have shown their methods to be anti-Catholic. We assert that only the united Catholic hierarchy of Ontario has a right to declare a religious war against a law or a regulation of the Ontario government. The united hierarchy has not done so. In fact, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church of Ontario (including Bishop Guigues and Bishop Pinsonneault)xvii accepted the Separate School Act of 1863 as final, which placed separate schools under the control of public regulations and public inspection, just like the public schools.

This passage can be seen as representative of the point of view of the English Catholics of Ontario, and I have cited it as proof of their offence at the interference of the bishops of Quebec. ixvi To be precise, the open letter was also addressed to the Hon. Sir Lomer Gouin, premier of the provincial government of Quebec, who at about the same time spoke in the public legislature on the bilingual question in Ontario and who also made a bad impression in this province. xvii Two French-Canadian bishops in Ontario in 1863: the first was Bishop of Ottawa; the second was Bishop of London. There were at the same time only three bishops of the English language in Ontario. It is important to remember that these five bishops accepted the school laws of 1863 as a final solution to the problem of Catholic schools in the province. We also need to note that none of the rights accorded by that law were attacked by Regulation 17.

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If such was the effect of the intervention by Cardinal Bégin and his Quebec colleagues on the public in general, then we need hardly observe that it was very different with regard to French Canadians. If we follow Le Droit, they welcome the words of “the highest ecclesiastical authority in the land” as “a brilliant justification of the resistance of the French Canadians of Ontario.” But most important for us is the impression produced on the bishops of Ontario by such an intervention. They were bitterly offended, as if this was an unjustified interference in their jurisdiction. Fortunately none of them publicly showed any bitterness. Some of them, however, told me in no uncertain terms that every intervention by the bishops of Quebec on racial matters in Ontario makes the governing of the Ontario dioceses extremely difficult. And in the present case, if we are to say that the question is religious, it was not the duty of the bishops of Quebec to become involved with it. If instead the question is civil or political then the Quebec bishops would have done better not to get involved. In any case, if they meant to intervene in favour of their compatriots as Canadian citizens then they should have declared openly the position they were taking. From the preceding facts Your Most Reverend Eminence will easily form a judgment regarding the differing attitudes of the bishops of Ontario and Quebec. That the non-intervention of the first was not pleasing to the extreme nationalists becomes evident in the following passage from a speech by Mr Henri Bourassaxviii delivered in a public gathering in Montreal on 19 May 1915: It is time, very well time, that they know in Rome that by supporting the cause of the oppressed, our bishops (His Grace, the Bishop of Montreal, His Eminence, Cardinal Bégin, and their colleagues) do not only fulfil a duty of justice and charity … Our bishops, by lending their support to the cause of the Ontario minority, do nothing other than fulfil their pastoral duties. As for those prelates and priests (English-language bishops and priests in Ontario) who unite themselves with the worst enemies of the Church in order to tear away from French Canadians the free exercise of their natural rights that are guaranteed by history, the Constitution, and practice of civilized nations, they xviii This is the same Henri Bourassa who made the famous speech at the Eucharistic Congress of Montreal in 1910 against certain observations made by His Eminence Cardinal Bourne. Your Eminence will not miss noticing that Bourassa has not lost the art of giving lessons to bishops.

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are negligent of their double duty as Catholic pastors and Catholic subjects. They are flatterers of the tyranny of crowds and I dare to believe that they walk in the footsteps of the courtier bishops who served the base passions of Henry viii against justice and morality, the dominating spirit of Louis xiv against the Catholic tradition, the wild ambitions of Napoleon against the legitimate freedom of the Church and peoples, etc., etc. (Le Devoir, Montreal, 20 May 1915)

From all this I am almost certain Your Eminence will come to the conclusion that the episcopal authority failed completely in the face of the situation created by the present agitation. If we need another argument in proof of this, we could not have a better example than the one furnished us by the public division of the clergy. On 5 July 1915 the French-Canadian pastors of the city of Ottawa – seven in number – made a public collective declaration regarding Regulation 17. We hold that the regulation violates the most sacred rights of the French-Canadian parents of Ontario by practically abolishing with little warning the teaching of French; that it violates their constitutional rights to truly Catholic schools by imposing non-Catholic inspectors on them, etc., etc. ... We are firmly convinced that this regulation cannot be accepted even on a trial basis and under protest. We rank it among those things that are so odious and disastrous that we can never try them.21

This strong declaration was renewed a few days later and signed by all the French-Canadian pastors of the diocese of Ottawa residing in the province of Ontario. A few weeks later, on the 29th of August, another collective declaration signed by the English-language pastors in Ottawa (five in number) was read by them in their churches. Taking advantage of the upcoming opening of the school year, they reviewed the situation created by the government’s recent nomination of a special commission authorized to administer separate schools in the city of Ottawa, thus replacing the elected trustees, who were utterly opposed to Regulation 17. They disapproved of the behaviour of these same trustees, and alluding to Regulation 17 they called it “a wise and necessary regulation of the Department of Education.” Thus, as things stand, we have the priests pronouncing themselves publicly left and right on such a delicate and controversial point and at the same time the episcopal authority is silent. On the one hand the French parish clergy denounces the regulation as a violator of the most

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sacred rights; on the other hand the English clergy qualifies it as a wise and necessary measure.xix In any case it is not principally this difference of opinion in the clergy which should be noted here. Rather it is the fact that the priests have arrogated – have dared to arrogate – to themselves the task of publicly pronouncing on a matter on which their bishops have maintained, and continue to maintain, rigorous silence. I include in the third appendix the published text of the declaration of the French-Canadian pastors. I would also send along the one from the English pastors: but beyond my having to translate it, it has nothing but the points that I report above regarding the bilingual question. The rest has to do with the special difficulty of Ottawa.

i i . wh at h as th e apo sto l i c d e l e g at e d o ne? Leaving aside conversations which I have held with individuals, in which I have often applied myself especially to recommend moderation and charity, I shall speak of two acts which I carried out, we might say, officially. 1. In the month of November 1913, Mgr Latulipe wrote me complaining bitterly not only that the English bishops of Ontario did not extend even the slightest aid to French Canadians in the battle, but that the Irish-Catholics in Ontario, far from helping their brothers, took on the role of traitors, stabbing them in the back “au plus forte de la mêlée.” I thought this was a good opportunity to advise Mgr Latulipe principally on two points: 1. that the matter was not in fact so clearly religious that one had to place the onus on others to decide who was right or wrong; and 2. as far as the FrenchCanadian behaviour against the Protestant government’s inspectors was concerned, it was at least doubtful whether it should be approved or condemned. Here is in part what I wrote to him at the time: It is perhaps very difficult to specify the wrongs and responsibilities. It is also difficult in such matters that involve passions and racial prejudices to say up xix It should be noted that the school controversy in Ottawa is distinct in certain respects from the general question of bilingual schools, even if the two are connected. It should be dealt with apart in a kind of appendix to the present report.

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to which point we are in the right. Several Ontario bishops spoke to me about this matter with great sympathy for the French Canadians. But their Excellencies also find themselves in an embarrassing position and they fear that any direct action on their part will lead nowhere and might even compromise the legal position of our Catholic schools. As far as I know, they acknowledge the right of French Canadians to preserve their language and even to defend that right in any legitimate way. They ask themselves, therefore, if all the means used towards this goal – for example, the children’s exodus from the school upon the arrival of the Protestant inspector – can truly be approved. I swear to you Monsignor, that I am not so sure myself.22

Mgr Latulipe’s response was to affirm more explicitly his conviction that we were dealing with a religious matter and that the means of resistance adopted by the French Canadians were the only ones possible. Fathers of families have only to choose between accepting the present state of things with the consequences that I have tried to expound upon or passive resistance as we have undertaken.

He then concluded with the words that I reported above, which summed up perfectly all his thought and which Your Eminence can reread on pages 30–1, “To sum up, Regulation 17, etc.” 2. On 18 December 1913 there was supposed to be a meeting of archbishops and bishops of Ontario in the city of Toronto. Having heard about that meeting a little in advance, I thought it was an excellent opportunity to bring the bilingual question to the attention of the bishops. I therefore addressed the Archbishop of Toronto with the following letter: Ottawa 12 December 1913 Most Reverent Neil McNeil, dd Archbishop of Toronto My dear Monsignor Archbishop I have learned with pleasure that there is to be a meeting of the archbishops and bishops of Ontario at Toronto on Thursday the 18th instant, and I understand that among the subjects to be discussed is that very important one of obtaining a share in the taxes on public utilities for the separate schools of this province.

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This seems to me to be a favourable opportunity to bring before the consideration of the bishops another question not wholly unconnected with that already mentioned. I refer to the bilingual school situation as affecting the Catholics of French speech throughout Ontario. Whatever may be the individual opinions or differences existing in the Catholic body, the bishops cannot remain neutral about a matter in which a very large portion of their flock is concerned. The question in any case is, in my opinion, of sufficient gravity from a Catholic standpoint to call for attentive consideration, for large-hearted sympathy, and, as far as may be, for such united action on the part of the spiritual leaders as may result in removing legitimate grounds of complaint and guiding aright those entrusted to their pastoral care. Or, must we confess that no solution can be found for the present difficulty? Before resigning ourselves to such a barren prospect, it may not be amiss to consider whether there be not some reasonable compromise, which, endorsed unanimously by the bishops of the province, could be urged by them upon the provincial government as a practicable measure, which would alleviate the real hardships of the present situation and yet not unduly conflict with the policy or program to which the government is more or less committed. May I outline for the consideration of their Lordships the following proposal, which has been suggested to me as a working basis upon which the government might be approached: 1. That the Protestant inspectors, whose visits are so odious to the FrenchCanadians, should be withdrawn, at least in the French English bilingual separate schools. 2. That the regulation be maintained which declares that the language of instruction in the first form may be exclusively French. 3. That the regulation which allows one hour for French in the other forms be so modified as to permit the use of French as the language of instruction in the following subjects: French reading, spelling, grammar, and literature, as well as history and geography; while the English language must be used in the teaching of English reading, spelling, grammar, literature, arithmetic, and any other subjects ordered by the Department of Education. 4. That at least one normal school be established in some convenient centre for the special training of teachers for the French-English bilingual schools. The above is put forward very tentatively and I am personally not committed to it in any way. The bishops who are so familiar with the school laws and the present situation will probably be able to improve upon it. I only beg them to bear in mind that the French Canadians of Ontario, who very justly love their

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own tongue, could scarcely be expected, especially in view of the attitude they have taken, to be content with less. If these or similar resolutions were unanimously supported by the episcopate of Ontario, it might not be too much to hope that we would be within a measurable distance of a satisfactory settlement of the present difficulty. At all events, this sympathetic effort on the part of the bishops would go a long way towards softening a certain bitterness and removing not a few misunderstandings. May I ask Your Grace to let me know in due time the result of Their Lordships’ deliberations on this point. I need hardly add a request that the fact of this communication as well as the matter thereof should be treated confidentially by the bishops. With sentiments of esteem and devoted regards, I remain, My dear Lord Archbishop, Yours sincerely in Xto.,

The meeting took place on the above-mentioned date. Seven bishops took part, that is, those of the ecclesiastical provinces of Toronto and Kingston, except for the Bishop of Alexandria; and also Mgr Latulipe of the province of Ottawa.xx My letter was read and discussed. The conclusion of the meeting was the following: it is not prudent to tie the bilingual school question to the other request concerning all the Catholic schools which, as I indicated above, the bishops wished to make to the government of Ontario.xxi In any case, despite Mgr Latixx Mgr Gauthier, Archbishop of Ottawa, and Mgr Lorrain, Bishop of Pembroke, could not attend. The latter was ill but could have sent Mgr Ryan, his auxiliary, to represent him. xxi A most important request which could mean a great deal to Catholic schools. The request was that a portion of school taxes be paid by public utilities, that is to say trains, streetcars, electricity, gas, etc, for our schools. These public utilities here do not belong to the state: they belong to private companies and the school taxes which are paid go entirely to the public schools. If our schools were to receive their portion it would be very advantageous for them. For years the bishops have quietly insisted on this demand to the government. In 1910 the government had formally promised to take the matter into consideration but it found a convenient excuse and pretext in the Congress of Education of French Canadians of Ontario to draw itself back: the Congress was held that year in Ottawa in the month of January, as was stated above.

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ulipe’s protests, they decided to defer consideration of my letter to a later meeting to be held probably the following May. In May, however, the meeting did not take place because many bishops were absent, for the ad limina23 visit. On the other hand, I did not want to abandon the question in this fashion, and on 22 July 1914 I sent a circular to the bishops of the ecclesiastical provinces of Toronto and Kingston, in the following tone: Would it be advisable to hold the postponed meeting now? I am personally convinced that some action on the part of the episcopate would be most desirable, for two reasons: 1. that the question itself demands it, affecting as it does a large portion of the Catholic flock and being intimately connected with the efficiency and progress of the separate school system; and 2. that the suspicion, or the accusation, false though it be, may be removed, namely, that the episcopate of Ontario is, to say the least, indifferent to the situation. Nevertheless, the bishops were not of the same view. In appendix 4 I send to Your Eminence two of their responses to my circular: they will illustrate the bishops’ reasons better than any comment of mine. It is enough here to observe that their reasons were serious and not without foundation, and I would not want to take the responsibility of saying that their decision was not after all the best, given the circumstances. In my second letter to the bishops, as Your Eminence will have noted, I purposely used some energetic and forthright expressions in order to make an impression upon them and to induce them to move themselves. But I recognized that their reasons for hesitating to take a step were grave. In any case, between my first letter and the second the situation had changed. In the meantime provincial political elections had taken place. The French Canadians, standing in opposition to the government, had done all that was possible to have the government defeated. Instead the government remained in power, having a very strong majority in its favour. It is not difficult to understand that its disposition towards French Canadians certainly did not improve. Your Eminence has already noted my proposal for a solution in my letter to the Archbishop of Toronto. My secretary and I worked on it here at the delegation without any cooperation from the outside. It was a direct attempt to get equal time in bilingual schools for English and French with a certain weight in favour of French. I now have two observations regarding this project: a. I never had the illusion that the government would have accepted it as is even with the unanimous

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support of the episcopate. It probably would not have been accepted then, but, whatever the probability in December 1913, there is now no possibility that this or any similar scheme of accommodation might be welcomed; b. at the time I thought that this project represented a reasonable measure and, given the circumstances, was even generous towards French Canadians. But neither then nor since have I ever been able to get any sort of hint from the few French Canadians with whom I have met confidentially that this would be acceptable to them. In fact from what followed I have reason now to believe that it would never have been so. In any case, my goal in proposing it to the Ontario bishops, as can be seen in my letter, was to arrive possibly at an equitable solution with the government and to remove any matter which, even if not religious, disturbed the harmony among Catholics. In case of failure, then, I was hoping that at least the English bishops’ manifest sympathy through this means might serve to mitigate French-Canadian bitterness towards them, upon which the press too often remarked. I was saying before that such an accommodation would not have satisfied the French Canadians. I did not say this casually. In fact in the month of June 1914, a little before the provincial elections, Mgr Latulipe was advised or induced by politicians to visit the premier of the province, trusting that some sort of accommodation might be reached. In his meeting with the head of the government he presented a basis for a solution whose principle points were: a. English will be taught effectively in all the schools, in every class and to all pupils. b. In schools in which all or almost all the pupils are of French origin, French will be the language of communication and teaching. c. In the schools frequented by pupils of both French and English origin, if there are two or more classrooms, the French students will be grouped together in separate classrooms; if there is only one room, the French pupils will form one distinct section. In these classrooms or sections assigned to French pupils the language of communication and teaching will be French. d. The inspection of French schools or of the French class within a school or of the French sections in a classroom will be made by the French inspector (cf. Le Droit, special edition, 12 March 1915). This was the solution suggested by Mgr Latulipe. But there is not even the shadow of a fair and mutual agreement here. In fact purely

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French schools, classrooms, and sections are being demanded with everything to be taught in French. Yes, English has to be taught “effectively,” but the judges of this effectiveness are to be the French Canadians, not the government, since an English inspector cannot be sent to a French school, classroom, or section to verify the effectiveness of such teaching. What more could the good Mgr Latulipe have demanded? Even the smallest rural school with fifteen or twenty children, some English and some French, would have to be divided into two sections, one taught in English and the other in French. As might have been expected, the government rejected Mgr Latulipe’s proposal because it was contrary to the deliberations of the provincial legislature of March 1911xxii and because it would create a new category of schools based merely on race. Mgr Latulipe’s response to the premier, which was made public, was a veiled threat to the government. In substance he said that he had taken this step towards the government, hoping to impede or hold up the activities of a strong coalition of French Canadians against the government, and that as a consequence of refusing the accord the government should expect to take the consequences. If Mgr Latulipe’s requests are to be seen as representative of his idea of a solution, Your Eminence will easily understand how I was not wrong to suppose that my humble plan would not have met with favour among the French Canadians of Ontario. I would in truth be delighted if they could obtain all the freedom that they desire regarding the teaching of their native language in the schools of this province. Whatever be the constitutional rights of the French language in Ontario, there can be no doubt that the French Canadians have for many reasons a right to special consideration. They cannot be placed on the same level as other immigrant nationalities in this country. They are one of the two great peoples who formed this confederation with a solemn pact. Even if by this pact equal rights with the English are not assured to their language in every part of the Dominion, no one with common sense can deny that they have very strong reasons to be treated with very special consideration. According to my humble opinion, the political authorities of Ontario would make a gesture of good government if they were to accord French Canadians the greatest freedom in the teaching of their language in the schools. However, judging from xxii See the text earlier in my report. It prescribed that English had to be the language of teaching and communication in all the schools of the province.

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the temperament of the people in this province, as far as I have been able to understand it, I see absolutely no hope that the French Canadians might obtain by law or by regulation what Mgr Latulipe was demanding. I believe that French Canadians would be better advised to base their cause not on constitutional rights, which they probably do not have, but on their special position as a contracting party in the federative pact. They would thus appeal, I believe, to the English part of the population with better luck. The place of French in the schools of Ontario before Regulation 17 can indicate the extent to which the government and the people of Ontario would be disposed to concede to the French language in the schools by practice or by sufferance. However, they will absolutely refuse these same measures, unfortunately, if as extreme nationalists French Canadians make unreasonable demands or apply pressure to have the measures granted by law. As a conclusion to this section, I think Your Eminence will acknowledge that I have quietly done my best to facilitate implementing the ideas which I have exposed above. But the matter is principally civil or political, and whatever our desires or ideas, I cannot see how the bishops or the ecclesiastical authorities can enter into this matter openly or publicly. Unfortunately the French Canadians contend that the bishops and even the Holy See should intervene publicly in their favour.

suppo sed o r c lai me d a p p rova l o f bi li ngua li s m of t h e sc h o o l s o f o ntari o o n th e pa rt o f t h e h o ly se e The daily newspaper Le Droit, organ of the Association canadiennefrançaise d’éducation d’Ontario, made a very serious declaration on this point. The following statement appeared in its 12 October 1915 issue: Our enemiesxxiii have spread the rumour that Rome is going to condemn the xxiii From a later issue of Le Droit it is evident that the allusion here is to Irish Catholics. The claimed rumours regarding the Irish never reached my ears. They could not have spread that much, since there was no reference to them in the English-language press, Catholic or not. Who knows if we are not dealing with that little newspaper game once again (trial balloons) in which certain political men often appear in order to invent some hearsay, that is, so it can be discussed.

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attitude of the French Canadians in the battle that they have undertaken to preserve their bilingual schools. We are able to affirm that this rumour is completely unfounded. Not only does Rome not condemn us but it encourages our efforts to preserve our holy religion and our language in our schools and among our people.

Once again, then, in the 18 October issue the same paper, Le Droit, wrote: It was said with satisfaction in certain circles that our resistance was not appreciated in higher circles and that our condemnation would be only a question of weeks. We have already said it, not only will we not be condemned but we have the certainty that our resistance is not unappreciated in higher circles, and indeed that wish expressed by His Holiness Benedict xv beneath the prayer of Joan of Arc – “We wish that this prayer obtain very soon what it asks for” – is undoubtedly a sign that our Pope knows about our struggle and approves of it.

In truth, nothing could be more precise and explicit: “Le Pape connaît notre lutte et l’approuve.” These declarations appeared almost immediately after Mgr Latulipe’s return from Rome and might have been based on some affirmation he had made. I do not believe, however, that such was the affirmation made to him in Rome that he would have the right to draw such conclusions. To be honest, the Holy Father’s blessing on a prayer to Blessed Joan of Arc (appendix 5 reproduces a facsimile) does not justify at all the assertion that His Holiness approved of the French-Canadian resistance in Ontario. Nor does the fact that this prayer was written by Mgr Latulipe and that it is recited every day in the bilingual schools change the nature of the Holy Father’s blessing, even if it can lend to the prayer a meaning it does not have. Whatever the case, the information contained in the excerpts cited from Le Droit was carried by wire to all the newspapers in Canada. The secular newspapers in Toronto, to give an example, highlighted the passages with headlines such as the following: “Supported by the Pope. Roman Authorities Want Bilingual Schools in Ontario.” This was the appearance that the supposed news took on before the Protestant masses of Ontario. Now even though the Catholic Church enjoys in this province the greatest measure of freedom, it would be difficult nevertheless to find another place where Protestant bigotry and prejudice

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can be more quickly ignited.xxiv Consequently the information that the Pope should favour bilingualism did not at all help the cause. Furthermore, as the Bishop of Sault Ste Marie a while back observed in a letter to me (see appendix 4), “Five-sixths of the population of Ontario (the Protestant population) firmly believes that the education of the children belongs wholly to the state, and there should be only the national school system and one national school program, that the legalized existence of separate schools is a deplorable mistake.” According to them it is a mistake because, in their opinion, such a school system militates against national unity, against the coalescing of races, and so on. Even putting aside such excessive statements, we can be certain of one thing and that is that if Catholics had not already in 1863 won their separate schools they would indeed not be able to win them nowadays, given the present mood. Had those same schools not been guaranteed by the Constitution, their existence would have been in danger many times since 1863. It is thus worthwhile to note that such a guarantee must not be exaggerated and that it would not impede the provincial legislature, were it embittered, from passing restrictive measures to make it difficult, if not impossible, to operate the system. Until now we can say that the government has dealt fairly with the separate schools. It would thus be a duty of Catholics to conform with every legitimate ordinance of the government and to maintain their schools at the highest level of efficiency, avoiding as far as possible any cause for friction and every protest so as not to place in danger, if not the existence of separate schools, at least the just treatment enjoyed until now. Now the bilingual question is just such a cause of discord and fomenter of acrimony; since the Protestant population already accepts the existence of separate schools so begrudgingly, even less so will it wish to accept bilingual schools. And it is on this point that the attitude of the Ontario bishops can be explained, in their not wishing to xxiv There was a most awful agitation here, for the decree Ne Temere and the Eucharistic Congress of Montreal gave rise to a storm of indignation. Ed. note: On the controversy surrounding Ne Temere in Canada and Stagni’s handling of the case, see Donald Tremblay, “Mgr. Pellegrino Stagni et l’Église Canadienne, 1910–1918” (Ph.D. dissertation, Université Laval 1992), 217–30.

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associate themselves with the bilingual movement. They do not want the bilingual schools’ cause to be identified with the cause of the separate schools, nor that it be presented to the public as a religious matter. From their point of view, the question is nothing more or less than a matter of race, an unpopular question that should remain distinct and not be confused with the separate school system or the Church in order to build up support. The false claim of the pontifical support of bilingualism did not help the separate schools, nor did it increase the prestige of the Church in the minds of the Ontario public. The Catholic Register of Toronto, official organ of the archdiocese (and likewise of the Church Extension Society), which always kept itself apart from the bilingual question, immediately became aware of the possible effects of the tendentious announcement of the Pope’s prise de position in favour of the bilingual schools of Ontario. It hastened therefore to announce the following: Whoever was responsible for having injected the name of the Pope in the politics of Ontario must answer before God ... there is in fact no foundation for the affirmation that the Holy See has taken sides in this racial debate.

th e two o rga ns o f t h e m ov e m e n t This already very long report would nevertheless be incomplete if I did not say something else regarding two organs which seem to be at the heart of this campaign in favour of bilingual schools, and they are the Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario and Le Droit, official newspaper of the same. 1. L’Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario. The foundation and the goal of this association have already been described above: both are perfectly legitimate. It is an organization made up largely of lay people. Its principal supporters are members of the clergy. If the priests were to retire, I believe that the Association would soon cease, which can also be said about the entire movement. a. Some of the Association’s activities do not sit well with the bishops. To give an example regarding financial resources, at the time of the Association’s foundation, it was decided – and this came from a

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proposal made by a priest – “that each parish or mission (that is to say the French parishes and missions of Ontario) pledge to contribute each year the amount determined by the executive committee of the Association.” This was followed by a circular from the Association, signed by the then president, the Hon. N.A. Belcourt, in which appeared this significant paragraph which I reproduce here: Counting on your devotion and your disinterested patriotism, we have the firm trust that you will send us your generous contribution by 15 December. We beg you as well to insist with your parishioners in order that they show their generosity, which they will no doubt do once you have made them understand the importance of our cause.

I do not know and neither do I assume that funds from parochial holdings were diverted towards that end, nor that there were any collections made in the churches; but even admitting that this was not done, the very method seems to me equivocal, if not dangerous. In any case this should not be done without the approval of the respective Ordinaries. The said circular gave Mgr Fallon grounds for complaint, and I think not without reason. b. In appendix 6 I include a copy of another circular addressed by the same association to French-Canadian pastors, in which, to use the words of Le Droit, it is asked of children “to celebrate in a worthy way the feast of the Sacred Heart and to ask Jesus the Host, through a fervent communion, that the school question be regulated.” Here also I think we are more or less entering an area until now reserved for episcopal authority. c. The president of the Association is the Hon. P[hilippe] Landry, Speaker of the Canadian Senate.xxv It is truly deplorable that this responsibility should have ended up in the hands of a man who is so prone to exaggeration and incapable of giving the organization that wise impulse, that prudent direction which it needs so badly xxv Speaker or president of the Senate is more a position of honour than responsibility. He is named by the government for the duration of Parliament, four or five years. It seems to me that the Senate here is less important than in Italy. The House of Commons is much more important.

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in order to achieve its goal. He is a good Catholic but one of those dangerous beings, more orthodox than the Pope, who have no scruples about being critical of ecclesiastical authority when it has the misfortune of not acting according to their ideas. In a public speech which he held at a national celebration of the French Canadians last June, he did not hesitate to declare that “the arrival of an Apostolic Delegate in Canada (Cardinal Merry del Val) served to muzzle the French-Canadian clergy”; and he gave himself the glory of having “taken on the delegate.” I will let Your Eminence judge his disposition to fulfil that role and to “give a lesson” to the present representative of the High Pontiff, after reading appendix 7. 2. Le Droit This is a daily newspaper and it is the organ of the Association d’éducation. It owes its existence to the French-Canadian clergy, from whom it also receives the bulk of its means of sustenance. Even though there are a few lay people among its directors, two Oblates of Immaculate Mary, Fathers C. Charlebois and Lortie,24 give it their most assiduous attention and participate in it most actively. It goes without saying that the newspaper has taken on a campaign to champion and defend the claims of French Canadians in Ontario, and nothing can be said against this. I have my doubts, however, about the wisdom of the ways in which it carries out its campaign. I hold it responsible and not in small measure for the excessive bitterness in the existing disagreement among Catholics of the two elements in this city. From its birth every day, every week, every month it has done nothing but pour venom upon English-language Catholics with phrases such as “nos pires ennemis,” “alliés avec les Orangistes,” “pire que les Orangistes,” and too many other such compliments. According to Le Droit, the mentality of English-language Catholics has suffered from their association with Protestants; their Catholicism is not “intégral”; the Church has no hope in English-language Catholics; their losses in the United States and in Ontario have been enormous; mixed marriages, which are so numerous among them, lead them to apostasy; and so on and so forth in this vein, day after day, in most injurious terms. I would not know how better to qualify this behaviour of Le Droit

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than to say it is absolutely void of even the most elementary Christian charity. And the fact that two priests, two religious, are so strongly tied to it only aggravates matters. If they act in good faith, as I charitably wish to assume is the case, then this means that the spirit of excessive nationalism clouds their intellect to the point of making them forget the spirit of Jesus Christ. The only consoling aspect in all this disgraceful and disparaging campaign I find in the complete reserve of the English Catholic press before such a great provocation. The English Catholic newspapers have completely ignored the insults of Le Droit; some have only made a slight allusion to the bilingual question and even those few have done so very rarely. Your Eminence will often have heard said and will naturally desire to know if it is true that the English Catholics of Ontario – or the Irish, since that is what they always call themselves – are in league with the Orange Order against the French Canadians in their battle for bilingual schools. There is absolutely no league or alliance in the true sense of the word – of a pact, that is, either written or oral. In fact a certain number of English-language Catholics have publicly espoused the cause of the French Canadians. Others even conspicuously have shown and show sympathy. Others, it is most true, do not admit the claims of the French Canadians and hold that Regulation 17 is a just and reasonable measure.xxvi The vast majority of English-language Catholics I believe would be disposed to be just towards the French Canadians and to meet them in their desires as far as possible,

xxvi Your Eminence will see Regulation 17 qualified thus by Mgr Scollard in his letter to me in appendix 4. Even Mgr Fallon called Regulation 17 “an eminently just and reasonable measure,” in a letter of response to a member of the Quebec assembly, the Hon. Mr Keane, an Irish Catholic. Disgracefully, even this letter came to the knowledge of the Association d’éducation, which did not miss the opportunity of circulating it. It was in fact the same Association which sent me a copy. Who knows how many others received a copy? While Mgr Fallon can have the right to this opinion, it is deplorable that some of his communications, by accident or otherwise, come to be placed in the public forum, and it is also even more deplorable that he should so easily write such letters.

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in as much as the reasonable interests of both sides permit it or require it.xxvii It is my conviction, based on this and on other facts, that as long as the Association d’éducation follows the present path, and Le Droit continues on with the same tactics it has used until now, there is no possibility of arriving at any peaceful accommodation regarding the bilingual question in Ontario. The French Canadians, under this leadership, continue to repeat that they will fight right until the “complète revendication de leurs droits.” whatever they mean by them, and that they shall bring their case right to the Privy Council of England, right to the foot of the throne ... Fine, they might even go there; and so? It pains me to say it: unfortunately they will lose.25 And in the meantime their leaders do not foresee, or pretend that they do not foresee, that erunt novissima (illorum) peiora prioribus,26 and that in such a case they will not even be left with the benefit of the doubt. All the better for their opponents who will then say: You appealed to the courts; you will therefore stick to the decision of the courts. And if, as will unfortunately happen, the highest courts of justice say that the French language has no rights in Ontario, nothing will be easier for the governxxvii In certain parts of Ontario, especially in the countryside, English and French Catholic children are mixed in the same school. Now, to declare such a school bilingual brings on above all great difficulty in finding a teacher who is perfectly competent in the two languages and in any case diminishes the time given to teaching if the students have to be divided into two groups. To the French child, the English language in Ontario is necessary; instead, to the English child, who will not go beyond elementary school, the French language is more or less as useful as Greek. Therefore for the English-language pupils the bilingual schools represent semi-efficient schools, or at least English Catholics contend that this is the case, and it is for this reason that they are adverse to this system. They maintain that they also have their natural and innate rights. Now the weakening of the efficiency of their schools through the introduction of another language in a province where English is universally spoken will help us to understand that this can constitute for them a grievance, and they feel the effect of this. In any case, for Le Droit and for a certain number of the leaders of the FrenchCanadian movement, their inability to agree with them on every point in this matter makes them their enemies or, as Senator Landry wrote to the Apostolic Delegate, “those who are not with me are against me.”

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ment, forced by an even more hostile public opinion, than to find itself constrained to withdraw those same facilities conceded by Regulation 17 regarding the use of French in schools and totally abolish the teaching of French in any elementary school of the province which depends on the government. This is precisely the danger to be feared for French Canadians according to their more perceptive friends. On the other hand, the government of Ontario has been patient and tolerant in face of the refusal of some of the French Canadians to submit to Regulation 17, and while it cannot revoke it, it has nonetheless given some unambiguous signs that it is ready to interpret the results in broad and generous terms and even, as it is said, to turn a blind eye. One last word regarding the clergy. It is a universal conviction that the clergy, both French and English, are the principal cause of the discord among Catholics, and in this country these discords seem to have more or less always existed, and from time to time they become more acute. I hate to say it, but I am convinced that if priests kept themselves completely outside this and similar matters of race the occasions for disagreement among the laity would be much rarer. It will not be useless to add here that French-Canadian priests and even religious, especially in Ottawa, go to other dioceses in Ontario not infrequently to give speeches at nationalistic meetings, to take censuses and to make investigations, etc., always with the same intention to keep alive the agitation or to awaken it after it has died down, and with little spiritual advantage to the population, which left to itself would remain calm.

c o nclus i o n Summing up thus far I think we can affirm the following points: a. That the matter of bilingual schools in Ontario is primarily a matter of race or language; b. That it is also a political or constitutional question; c. That it takes on the appearance of a religious question only in as much as it interests a certain category of Catholics in what humanly they hold dearest; d. That it does not involve Catholic schools in as much as they are Catholic; e. That it only regards the amount of French – whether it be one, two, or more hours a day or the entire day – to be taught daily in certain

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so-called bilingual schools, many of which are officially Catholic, the others being officially neutral, but all of which in fact are Catholic. Should the Holy See intervene in such a question? It is up to others better than I to judge this. For my part I will only say that, if the Holy See finds it opportune to act, it should first of all, in my humble opinion, clearly emphasize the key points enumerated above. From one point of view it would be good that the Holy See intervene in some way. We have in fact here a matter that has badly divided the two great ethnic groups that constitute the Catholic population of Canada. Both groups are made up of excellent Catholics; both are devoted to the Holy See; both reverently look to the Holy See for direction and leadership. Furthermore there would not be a shortage of reasons for such an intervention. Even though the question is not religious it still has various moral aspects: a. The dangerous backlash that a protest of this kind – conducted persistently in the name of religious interests – might have on the legal existence and operations of Catholic schools in all of Ontario, with likely repercussion in other provinces; b. The arguable rectitude of the open challenge to the government launched by the mass exodus of children from school upon the entry of the Protestant inspector; c. The effect that such contempt of the law or of public authority can have on the same children; d. The effect that such an attitude on the part of Catholics can produce on the Protestant element; e. The ultimate and inevitably ruinous impression on the Christian character of the population produced by a campaign based on race hatred, like that conducted by Le Droit. But inasmuch as these motives or reasons are already sufficient for an intervention, I believe that there is a major reason for removing or at least attenuating this source of discord in the Canadian Catholic family as much as possible. From the nature of the matter itself, which I have attempted to expose, it is clear that there are grounds for differing opinions between Catholics on this question. Even if Englishlanguage Catholics do not fully agree on this matter, and indeed they

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do not agree with their French-language brothers, it is not a reason for the latter to denounce the former with injurious terms and to put in doubt their Catholic sincerity. If, on the other hand, French-Canadian Catholics hold so dear the teaching of their own language to their children in the schools, neither is this a reason for which English-language Catholics should not on their part show their brethren at least a great sympathy. It is simply a matter of having good sense and a Christian sense on both sides. Furthermore it is up to the French Canadians to determine for themselves if it is worthwhile or not to accept Regulation 17 – a small minority among them are of the view that they should accept it at least on a trial basis – but if they persist in not wishing to accept it, then with the legitimate means accessible to all in the system of government under which they live, they should seek to have it changed or even revoked without at all dragging into the fray other Catholics and especially without exposing them to damage or injuries of any kind. Let them use charity and moderation in the revendication of their rights, appealing to intelligence and to the sense of justice of their fellow citizens without blaming or insulting anyone, always showing, as is said to good Catholics, the highest respect and the most sincere obedience towards constituted authority, not any less to the civil than to the religious. All these admonishments would be useless if nothing were done to stop the clergy. No matter how legitimate such racial movements be, priests should remember that, as such, they are first and above all called to serve the altar of God rather than the so-called altar of the fatherland. In truth they would be much better off not belonging to nationalistic societies except in the role of chaplains or ecclesiastical assistants, solely to guide and moderate them and always with the express approval of their respective bishops. It would also be better to let them know that without the consent of the bishop they must not travel to dioceses to which they do not belong in order to make speeches in public assemblies or to carry out investigations regarding matters which are more or less parochial or diocesan. Furthermore it would also be good to tell them to abstain from writing in newspapers on such questions because it is a much more important job to preserve peace and Christian charity among men than to found empires. I said that the two Oblates, Father C[harles] Charlebois and Father [Albert] Lortie, must hold themselves largely responsible for the virulence of the campaign conducted persistently in Le Droit. Their

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superiors in Rome could be warned and advised to move them to other areas, because their presence here in Ottawa constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to moderation or to a possible accommodation on the question.27 They might be personally very good religious, but we could say that they are victims of a kind of obsession regarding this matter. Thus to send them to some place where they cannot disturb the peace would be a very wise act. They are not the only ones who are blameworthy, but they have made themselves conspicuous enough to merit a special provision in their regard. In appendix 8 I enclose a brief summary of the school situation in the other provinces of the Dominion, according to the desire of Your Most Reverend Eminence. And with this I end this very long report, submitting everything to the great patience of Your Eminence and to your enlightened judgment, and warmly beg of you that this piece of writing not fall under indiscreet eyes. I kiss the Sacred Crimson and I have the honour to say of myself with profound veneration to be Your Most Reverend Eminence’s most humble, obedient, and devoted servant, P.F. Stagni osm, Archbishop of Aquila, Apostolic Delegate.

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ap p e n d i xe s

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ap p e n d i x o n e Extract from a speech by the Hon. Senator N.A. Belcourt at the Premier Congrès de parler français held in Quebec in June 1912

th e legal r i gh ts of t h e f r e n c h language i n cana da The subject that has been entrusted to me is as vast as it is delicate. It is loaded with difficulties and open to interpretation. I have neither the time nor the competence required to deal with the subject in its various aspects. In any case, in order to do a useful and practical job, I cannot go beyond my own capacities in dealing with the title assigned to me. French-language rights in Canada, in their application outside the province of Quebec, where French enjoys complete equality with the English language in law and in fact, have not been defined as neatly and recognized as explicitly as we would wish and have the right to. We all well know what the Treaty of Paris could and should have been and what it unfortunately was not with regard to one of the best parts of our ancestral heritage. Had we been allowed or were we now allowed to redo it or amend it, we all now know how we would do it, “and the words to say it would come easily.” I must once again express the bitter regret at the loss to which this forgetfulness has led, and at the same time express the hope that perhaps one day the majority in this country will see the evidence and

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acknowledge in a practical way what elementary justice as well as the interests and needs of the common fatherland require with regard to the French language (which is the first one to be planted and the first used on three-quarters of the North American continent, excepting the aboriginal languages): to concede perfect equality to the French language for all French groups in Canada, who compose one-third of its population and who have given to the British flag and institutions the tribute of their constant allegiance and unfaltering loyalty. Nevertheless, this is a hope, and we are not here this evening to lull ourselves in beautiful dreams which I hope will be fulfilled, but to sum up the real situation of the recognized rights of our mother tongue. First of all, let us not fool ourselves with regard to our true means of action from a legal point of view. It would be infantile and even dangerous for us simply to pay lip-service to this. And you would not forgive me any more than our compatriots in Ontario, if I allowed myself to ignore or to misunderstand the true extent of French-language rights in Canada. We from the neighbouring province have too often paid the price of Quebec’s forgetfulness or seeming forgetfulness of the fact that our situation [in Ontario] is different, and we have too often paid the price for claims which at times are too aggressive and at time useless, even if well intentioned. These claims have been made by those who had the least to suffer from the position of our language and they gave us the vain pleasure of enticing us with regard to our true rights and the guarantees which they enjoy. It is thus worthwhile and absolutely necessary that we keep in sight the true legal status of the French language in Quebec, Ontario, the Maritime provinces, and the West if we wish to have a precise idea of the means the law places and does not place at our disposal, or which it leaves to our initiative as individuals or as a race in order to ensure the maintenance and spread of the French language in Canada. We must first of all carefully research and define precisely the truly and officially recognized rights of the French language in Canada. And with regard to recognized rights, we must – this seems certain to me – limit ourselves to those which are legally recognized, only to those which the law expressly guarantees. The text of our constitutional laws – this for me is the domain in which the matter can and must be debated and resolved. We are currently obliged to leave aside our desires and hopes. The legal summary that I have been asked to give does not allow me

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to appeal to natural law or the law of peoples or tradition or custom, except, of course, in the ever-safeguarded domains of the family, Church, and personal and business affairs, in which individual freedom is and will always be the only guide and supreme master; and it would be the ultimate tyranny and utterly useless were the state to try and block or proscribe the use of a language – any language – in the realm of the family, conscience, and personal relationships of any kind. Neither can we invoke natural law in matters of education because the written constitution which reigns over us has itself defined French-language rights in schools controlled or subsidized by the state. It is true that we can base our claims for the extension of our mother-language rights on the powerful themes offered us by natural law, tradition, our invincible attachment to the native soil, our contribution to the development and progress of the Canadian nation, as well as our interest in its expansion, in addition to our role in its present and future prosperity. By recognized rights we must thus understand only those rights which the constitution and law presently and explicitly recognize in the French language in the public domain, that is, in the relations that citizens must have with each other in order to exercise their rights and carry out their civic duties; and here we are again obliged to distinguish between the differing points in our national territory, since those rights are not the same in all provinces. Thus north of the Ottawa River the law recognizes for French what it refuses to recognize south of the river. We must therefore distinguish between the federal and provincial domains and again between the different provincial domains, that is between Quebec and her sister provinces. The true fact, regrettable as it is, is that there is no constitutional equality of the two languages except in the federal domain and in the province of Quebec. Only in the Dominion parliament, in the Quebec legislature, in the federal courts and in the Quebec courts, does the French language have the same rights as the English language. Section 133 of the British North America Act, which proclaims equal French and English language rights before the federal chambers and courts and the Quebec legislature and courts, and section 93 of the same Act, which gives provincial legislatures exclusive powers to legislate in educational matters, constitute the sum total of the recognized official, legal rights of our language. They are the only ones that cannot be taken away from us without the consent of the imperial parlia-

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ment, the only ones guaranteed formally by the constitution or the law; the only ones that the law allows us to demand and gives us the means to exercise. Let us not forget that the Canadian Confederation Act is a pact, a convention, which, like all conventions, binds and obligates the contracting parties. Let us not forget that these are the only rights that we claimed in 1867, or at least the only ones on which we insisted when we gave our consent to the federal pact and entered Confederation. It is without doubt to be regretted that we did not insist on broader and more explicit texts. What I was saying about the Treaty of Paris is equally applicable to the federal convention: if we could do it over again today or amend it, we would well know how to make our claims and obtain more. If our representatives at the deliberations from which emerged the Constitutional Act had foreseen that the French race, at that time confined almost entirely to Lower Canada, would pour into the other provinces and become (or become later) a part of the confederation, it is more than probable that they would have demanded and obtained broader freedoms for the practice and expansion of our language of origin over our entire national territory. That is, in any case, the fact and the truth, the legal situation of French in Canada. It would be childish, I repeat, to misunderstand or forget it. The evil done is not at all irremediable, but, for the moment, the remedy does not exist in law. Perhaps it will be found one day when our English-language fellow citizens no longer have that foolish fear of theirs that the French language might compete with their own, which is spoken in a ratio of nine to one on this continent and with strong commercial, industrial, and financial support; moved by sentiments of justice and generosity, they might carry it for us themselves. Something even less probable could happen – the French minority today become the majority tomorrow. The first part of my task this evening is finished. I have strained myself to define as clearly and briefly as possible what appears to me to be the actual legal situation of the French language in our public domain, and this has been easy for me because I have only to repeat what everyone knows, to make an assertion which is perhaps brutal and regrettable, without a doubt, but clearly necessary on this occasion. In effect it does not seem doubtful to me that if we wish our language to last on the Canadian soil we will have to use means beyond those with which the state is obliged to supply us, that is to say, means,

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or, better still, personal sacrifices, that will inspire our love for our mother language and our determination to perpetuate its existence.

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ap p e n d i x t wo Text of speech delivered by Mgr Bruchési, Archbishop of Montreal, at a meeting held in Montreal on 21 December 1914, under the auspices of the Association catholique de la jeunesse canadiennefrançaise, in aid of French Canadians in Ontario Text of the letter addressed to Mgr Bruchési by his Eminence, Cardinal Bégin, Archbishop of Quebec*

mgr b ruc h és i ’s spe e c h Ladies and Gentlemen, We are facing a grave situation. If the Auxilary Bishop, the Vicar-General, and I come to this meeting organized by the Association catholique de la jeunesse canadiennefrançaise, it is in order to affirm forcefully that we are in favour of all just claims. We are loyal and faithful subjects of the British Empire. We have proved it in the past and today we still give clear proof. We learn and speak the English language and we do not neglect at all to have our children learn it as perfectly as possible. But French has some undeniable rights in this land of Canada. It was the language of our cradle and we see it as the guardian and protector of our beliefs. French is spoken in the House and in the Senate. All our governors have made it a point of honour to know it well. We want to and we must preserve it. And so in the name of which principles would it be banned from our families and schools? Certain regrettable acts are on the verge of degenerating into a war whose consequences could be most disastrous. *Editor’s note: The speech and the letter were printed in La semaine religieuse de Montréal 65:2 (11 January 1915), 18–22.

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It is this war which I wish to see avoided at all costs. Canadians of French and English origin! We are made not to fight each other but to unite ourselves and to work together for the progress and prosperity of our fatherland. Oh how I would want to be heard by those who hold power in their hands, to supplicate them to banish every cause and occasion of discord among our peoples who could be so happy! It would be so easy! We ask nothing other than respect for acquired rights and a legitimate freedom. For the moment it seems to me that we are not dealing simply with a particular question or school regulation. I have in mind the entire matter of the freedom of the French language. If this freedom is not recognized, then let us reclaim it, defend it by all the means allowed by law; but always peacefully, without injuring or insulting any adversary, with the greatest respect for religious and civil authority, as befits every noble battle for the triumph of justice and law. Yes, let the battle be worthy and firm! It need not matter that it be long. I have faith in the future. Triumph is assured and I await it.

h i s emi nenc e, c a r d i n a l b é g i n ’ s l e t t e r To His Grace, Mgr Paul Bruchési, Archbishop of Montreal Monsignor, The newspapers brought me the news of the beautiful and patriotic demonstration organized recently with the aid of the Association catholique de la jeunesse canadienne-française in your episcopal city, where we saw the highest ecclesiastical and political representatives participate in a shared expression of loyalty and justice. It was with profound satisfaction that I read the speeches delivered at this event, and I particularly congratulate Your Grace for having understood so well, and at the same time with such firm yet pondered language, the noble sentiments of our clergy and people, and placing the debated question in its true context. In fact this is not a merely local matter. We are a confederation of provinces associated with each other through close bonds. This creates a necessary solidarity among the sister provinces and their inhabitants. And no less in a moral body than in a physical body can we threaten a part of its composition without harming the entire makeup.

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Appendix Two

“French,” as Your Grandeur said most truly, “has undeniable rights in this land of Canada,” rights which have been won by the boldest efforts and most generous work that have been recorded in the most glorious pages of our history. We do not erase these pages written with the very blood of our ancestors. Every race carries within itself the unwritten right to speak its own tongue. It is an innate tendency and a need that no government can prudently ignore, and a fundamental and primordial right that no human power can violate without consequences. I believe in an immanent justice, and I will not accept – no sensible spirit in a civilized a country such as ours will accept – that the force of strength and numbers should be considered the last word on things. Our civil constitution gives the French language an official place. The men who shaped it wished to found among us a united and prosperous nation. It is to misunderstand their views and to betray the thought of our most illustrious political ancestors to try and choke the spoken idiom of a class of honest and loyal citizens and of their children who try to speak it, a language which can be used in the highest spheres of this country. And which language, Monsignor, do we wish to banish from the domain where the spirit and heart of childhood are formed? The same one which is the guardian of our beliefs and the instrument of our culture. We certainly understand and can explain to ourselves without difficulty the indignation that arises among the minority in Ontario with respect to the unjust and vexing measures that they lament. Those measures reach our brethren and co-religionists at the very source of their intellectual and religious life. And if, through those acts and also through our apathy, this Catholic and French life should be extinguished, who can say that those nefarious influences, guilty of such a crime, should not be at work in the heart of our own province? I abstain from pushing my thought further and going deeper into this troubling problem. It is my trust and conviction that, thanks to the good will and prudent intervention of all men of influence who truly care about the public peace, where minorities suffer and injustice triumphs, the ideas of a more just and healthy programme will soon prevail. The union of the races, the renown and grandeur of our fatherland is at stake. We are – you reminded us of this yourself, Monsignor – and for 150 years we have always been peaceful and loyal subjects of the British Crown. We respect the English language; we teach it and use it when

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Mgr Bruchési; Cardinal Bégin

necessary; in our province we give it all the attention to which it is entitled, and we do not even think of removing the least of its legitimate freedoms. We do not think therefore that we are claiming a favour or something inequitable by asking that the same be accorded to the tongue of Laval, Champlain, and Maisonneuve. If the trial imposed on our Ontario brethren should prolong itself, something unpleasing to God, it would be the noble duty of the French and Catholic province of Quebec to support those who suffer and those who carry on the battle with its influence and all its resources in order that full justice be meted out to them. Monsignor, these are the sentiments which were aroused in me as I read those magnificent speeches pronounced in Montreal this past 21 December. And the day that equitable principles dominate and orientate the programs of all our Canadian provinces will be a day of blessings and health for our patrie. Please accept, Monsignor, along with my congratulations, the homage of my respect and cordial devotion. L.N. Card. Bégin, Archbishop of Quebec Quebec, 29 December 1914

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Appendix 1

ap p e n d i x t hr e e

d enunc i ati o n o f re g u l at i o n 1 7 La Vérité, Québec, 31 July 1915, p. 11

The French-language pastors of the city of Ottawa – the centre of resistance to Regulation 17 – have just published their collective declaration, whose import will not escape any of our readers. It is at the same time one of the most vigorous denunciations of Regulation 17 that has yet been published, and an effective response to the campaigns of denigration that have been led against the leaders of the resistance in the last few weeks. We, the undersigned, the French-language pastors of the city of Ottawa, declare the following: i. During the last three years we have studied with the greatest care and without partisanship the famous ordinance of the minister of education commonly known as Regulation 17. ii. Today as in the early days of its promulgation we hold that this regulation violates the most sacred rights of the French-Canadian parents of Ontario by practically abolishing with little warning the teaching of French; that it violates their constitutional rights to truly Catholic

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Denunciation of Regulation 17

schools by imposing non-Catholic inspectors on them; that it violates their rights to equality before the laws by submitting them to an odious regime of double-inspection; that it would unfailingly condemn those French-Canadian children – experience proves it – to remain ignorant of one or the other of the two official languages of this country, should it be placed in effect. iii. Consequently, now, as then, we are firmly convinced that this regulation cannot be accepted even on a trial basis and under protest. We rank it among those things which are so odious and disastrous that we can never try them. Who would blame the Belgians and the French for not having assented to testing under protest the German invasion? We are better able than others to appreciate the remarkable service to the cause of the Association d’éducation. We can only congratulate it for having fulfilled the mandate that it received from the delegates of all French Canadians in Ontario with such devotion, dignity, moderation, and true spirit of conciliation. To our valiant Association d’éducation, to our good school commissioners and to our dear parishioners we echo with all our heart those words of Mgr Latulipe: “I would wish to have said to our people, to the fathers of anguished families: Have courage! You are not fighting alone, your clergy is with you ... ” and those other words of the distinguished president of the Association: “We ask for justice and we shall obtain it, because it is the programme of England to render justice unto all.” The battle has begun: it will certainly demand sacrifices. Together we shall do it with generosity in order to preserve what to you should be as dear as life itself: the education of your children. We dare to ask all the newspapers that are animated by a pure and generous patriotism to lend us their powerful collaboration in the claims of parents’ rights in the education of their children. L.-N. Campeau, pastor, Notre-Dame d’Ottawa Jos-A. Myrand, pastor, Ste-Anne d’Ottawa Br. E.-A. Langlais, op, prior, St Jean-Baptiste d’Ottawa J.-E. Jeannotte, omi, pastor, Sacré Cœur d’Ottawa Br. Conrad, ofm, pastor, S-Frs-d’Assise d’Ottawa H. Chabot, omi, pastor, Ste-Famille d’Ottawa F.-X. Barrette, pastor, S-Charles d’Ottawa

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Appendix 1

ap p e n d i x f o u r Letter from Mgr William Macdonell to Archbishop Stagni; Letter from Mgr D.S. Scollard to Archbishop Stagni

1 August 1914 His Excellency, The Most Rev. P.F. Stagni osm Archbishop of Aquila, Del. Ap.

Your Excellency, I have hesitated to reply to your confidential circular, no. 11505, because I felt reluctant to oppose what to me seemed your implied wish. After thinking the matter over for some days, I am still in the same frame of mind: I cannot bring myself to believe that a meeting of the bishops of Ontario to discuss the bilingual agitation would be advisable. Should such a meeting take place, the bishops may be assured that whatever course they adopt, they will become a target for insults, scurrilous ridicule, imputation of sinister motives, and often falsehood, if they fail to approve in full of the extravagant and illegal demands of the irresponsible bilingual agitations. Past experience fully warrants this conclusion. In my humble opinion, the proper authorities to deal with the evils deplored are the archbishops and bishops of the ecclesiastical province of Quebec. They could surely, if they wished, put a stop to the cam-

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Mgr Macdonell, Mgr Scollard to Archbishop Stagni

paign of vituperation and of slander, carried on, largely by priests, in the so-called Catholic French press against English-speaking prelates, priests, and laity. They could also “muzzle” their priests who use the pulpit to influence racial hatred by fanatical harangues, and who openly incite the people to disobey the laws of the land and to defy the government. I am firmly convinced that the French clergy are the originators and fomenters of all this agitation, and that if their activity ceased, the movement would collapse. I am moreover equally convinced, notwithstanding all the cant we hear about “la langue et la religion,” that the agitation is purely racial. I have ample proof of this in our own district here. In one of our separate schools conducted by the sisters, where French is taught to the fullest extent permitted by law, there was a clique of very extreme and very aggressive nationalists. None were louder than they in the cry “Il faut garder notre langue pour conserver notre religion.” They were horrified that Protestant supervisors should be allowed to enter separate schools and imperil the faith of the children. They had meetings of protest and indignation, and had Ottawa agitators won to enlighten and direct them. Finally they tried to get control of the school and to foist upon it unqualified French teachers; but being balked in this by the other rate-payers, they separated from the section and started a public school. Under the new conditions, they not only tolerated a Protestant inspector for their children, but they received him with open arms and made him welcome to their homes. In their eagerness to avoid wounding his susceptibilities, the teacher took care to warn the children against anything that would savor of Catholic practice when the inspector made his visits. They were cautioned against making the sign of the cross, against the Angelus at noon, against reciting the “Je vous salue,” and were told to not say the “Notre Père en Catholique.” So much for the cant about “notre langue et notre religion.” Perhaps Your Excellency may not have been aware of the action taken by the archbishops and bishops of Ontario about four years ago, where they placed themselves on record before the government as emphatically opposed to the preposterous demands of the French Educational Association. The bishops were convinced that if these demands were granted, the English-speaking Catholics would quit our schools and join public schools. English-speaking rate-payers know that if the bilingual agitators have their way it will be practically impossible for children from our schools to pass the high school entrance examination. Shut them out of the high Schools and you bar

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Appendix Four

their way to the teaching, the medical, and the legal professions, and to electrical and civil engineering courses. The best Catholics we have, those most devoted to the Church, most submissive to authority, most earnest in support of Catholic education, have expressed themselves very emphatically to me on this subject. In view of the action already taken by the bishops, it would, to put it mildly, be extremely inconsistent to suggest another course now. Had the French appealed to the courts against the constitutionality of the law, they would have been within their rights; or had they petitioned the government for bilingual school boards distinct from those of the separate schools, I would be with them; for I believe this is the proper solution of the difficulty. The course of lawlessness and of defiance of the government which they have seen fit to take is the one best calculated to destroy our separate school system, and to bring about the conditions that now obtain in Manitoba. Such a course we cannot sanction or countenance in any way. I remain, with much regard and esteem, Your Excellency’s obedient servant William Macdonell Bishop of Alexandria in Ontario

13 August 1914 His Excellency, The Most Rev. P.F. Stagni dd Archbishop of Aquila and Apostolic Delegate Ottawa May it please Your Excellency: In reply to Your Excellency’s communication no 11505 under date of July 22nd ult, I may inform Your Excellency that the educational demands made upon the Ontario government by the French-Canadian Educational Association came up for discussion at a meeting of the bishops of the provinces of Toronto and Kingston, held in the latter city on the 15th day of August 1910. At that meeting the following resolution was passed:

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Mgr Macdonell, Mgr Scollard to Archbishop Stagni

“That we are alarmed for the future of our Catholic educational system in Ontario, because of the agitation, which culminated in the French-Canadian Congress at Ottawa in January 1910, and that the bishop of London be delegated to interview Sir James Whitney and represent to him, that we are opposed to the educational demands of said Congress.”

I was unavoidably absent from that meeting but I am wholly in accord with the views expressed in the above resolution. For my part I am perfectly convinced that, should the bishops of Ontario as a body espouse and urge upon the government that it grant the demands of the Ontario French-Canadian Association, the nowsmouldering fires of enmity to Catholic separate schools would become rekindled. Hostile newspapers would agitate and appeal to antiCatholic prejudice, bigoted demagogues would arouse the dormant fanaticism of the populace, and an anti-separate school party could ride into power on this wave of anti-Catholicism and francophobia and, pursuant to its pre-election pledges, could bring in such legislation as would practically abolish the separate school system or render it, to say the least, wholly unworkable. Our French-Canadian friends do not understand Ontario; they fail to realize that five-sixths of the population of Ontario firmly believes that the education of the children belongs wholly to the state, and there should be only the national school system and one national school programme, that the legalized existence of separate schools is a deplorable mistake, and that the separate system militates against national unity and the coalescing of races, etc., etc. Our French-Canadian friends utterly fail to see the facility with which an antipathy born of such convictions on the part of five-sixths of the population could be crystallized into a most formidable opposition. For my part, I am convinced also that the regulations of the department for the teaching of the French language in the elementary schools are quite just and reasonable, and in whatever schools they are faithfully carried out the regulations have worked out most satisfactorily. I am of Your Excellency, The most devoted servant in Xto + D.J. Scollard Bishop of S.S. Marie

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Appendix 1

ap p e n d i x f i v e Prayer to Joan of Arc*

Oh Christ, friend of the Francs! You who through the arms of a humble virgin have already saved France, incline towards us the great mercy of your Sacred Heart. We pray to you, through the merits and intercession of Blessed Joan of Arc, whom we choose as patron, to protect our institutions, our language, and our faith. Oh Christ, our King! We swear eternal faithfulness to you! Let us, nourished by the bread of your Holy Eucharist, grow into “a perfect people” that we might deserve to continue in this land of America the glorious traditions of the “First Daughter of the Church.”i O God of Joan of Arc, save France once again! Save our dear Canada. And you, Blessed Joan of Arc, pray for us. Amen. Pius x’s handwritten comments: Ad probatur 21.ii.1911 Benedict xv’s handwritten comments: We hope that this prayer obtain very soon what it requests. 4.ix.1915 i France. * Editor’s note: This prayer by Mgr Latulipe of Temiscaming was published with Pope Pius x’s and Pope Benedict xv’s comments written over it. Reprinted in Le Droit, Ottawa, 13 November 1915.

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Speech by Senator N.A. Belcourt

ap p e n d i x s i x A Pressing Appeal to Children (Le Droit, Ottawa, 5 June 1915)

The Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario asks children to celebrate in a worthy way the feast of the Sacred Heart and to ask Jesus the Host, through a fervent communion, that the school question be regulated. Letter to French-Canadian pastors Messieurs, The Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario does not want to forget the particular aid and the manifest protection that heaven accords the cause of the French schools with which it has been entrusted; it also remembers with joy the moving sight last year on the occasion of the feast of the Sacred Heart, and even on other occasions, of French-Canadian children of this and even other province approaching the Holy Altar in order to entrust our dearest national interests to our Lord Jesus Christ, King and Master of our hearts. Here is why at the meeting of last 31 May it expressed the desire that all the FrenchCanadian children in Ontario be invited to renew this year, on Friday, 11 June, on the feast of the Sacred Heart, or the following Sunday, the same act of faith and the same ardent supplication. Children’s prayer rises more powerfully and in a more lively way towards the heavens because it is fuller of innocence and purity. It is

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Appendix Six

for their schools, these religious and Christian hearths, that we fight and are ready to fight without respite. The Sacred Heart of Jesus, through the intercession of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, this is what must be our shield and strength in the battles which we uphold for our faith and language, which are inseparably united. The Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario Alex. Grenon, Secretary

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Speech by Senator N.A. Belcourt

ap p e n d i x s e v e n Letter from the Hon. Senator Landry, President of the Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario, to the Apostolic Delegate

Quebec, 18 June 1915 Your Excellency:i I received your letter of 2 June in response to the one I had the honour of writing to you last 28 May. Allow me to say in all sincerity, it was not what I had the right to expect from an archbishop and a delegate. To my pressing request for help to bring back peace to the heart of the Catholic part of Ontario, you answer with a simple prayer to God and the disappointing admission of powerlessness before the matter. The prayer is translated into the banal formula of a wish, and I note your powerlessness in the following sentence, which in itself constitutes the entire message of your letter: “May the good God bring back peace and concord among the different groups which make up the Catholic population of the province of Ontario. Unfortunately, up to this point, Our efforts have not obtained our much-desired result.” This is all Your Excellency was able to come up with as an answer i It would take too long to comment on this letter. It is a fabric of exaggerations, falsehood, calumnies and impertinences. It has no value with regard to the question. I send it to Your Eminence in order that you know whom we are dealing with.

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Appendix Seven

to an appeal with which I concluded my letter of 28 May: “In the name of all we hold most dear – our traditions, our love of the country and Church – we ask Your Excellency to have this difficult language question disappear in order to rally everyone around the principal matter of the preservation of our Catholic schools. This is the humble prayer to Your Excellency, that he help us in the claims for and preservation of our rights as French and Catholics.” Your Excellency speaks of Our efforts, which are unable to obtain this much desired result. Let me say to Your Excellency that I do not know all the efforts that you may have attempted in order to help us preserve what we call our rights. What we know is that a most unjust persecution against the French element is being led by highly placed ecclesiastics in the Catholic hierarchy and that, notably in the dioceses of Ottawa, Alexandria, London, and Sault Ste Marie, the leaders of the flock, the shepherds of souls, denounce the use of French, do not allow the faithful in their charge to have French-Canadian priests teach the word of God to French-Canadian audiences, order the banishment of French in religious communities, refuse priestly vocations when they are offered by French Canadians; in brief, they organize and guide a continuous war against the use of French in those dioceses and persecute in an odious and scandalous manner those priests of theirs who do not want to bend to their demands – and all in full view of Your Excellency. In certain dioceses, terror reigns supreme and is exercised by the episcopate on French-Canadian priests submitted to its jurisdiction. The faithful in eminently French centres are deprived of the religious advantages they could draw upon from the announcement of the Gospel in their language. I know a diocese in which the French Canadians of a parish have vainly supplicated their bishop to accord them a French-Canadian priest, offering to cover his travelling expenses every Sunday in order that he preach to them the truths of religion in the French language. And what are, after all, the efforts which you speak of and have presumably attempted in order to bring back peace? Persecution rages on worse than ever. The appeals to Rome follow one after the other while your presence here seems to block them. No, the truth is hidden from you: you are surrounded by people who do not want to let it reach you.

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Senator Landry to Archbishop Stagni

Who is it that until now has made you note that in such a lively and universal battle in the province of Ontario as the one that divides Irish and French Canadians, it does not befit the Apostolic Delegate to hire a man from either of the two camps as secretary of the delegation? Yet your present secretary is an Irish Catholic. Are not his continual presence by you and necessary and natural interference in all the matters which might be submitted to you an insurmountable barrier between you and the French Canadians? What efforts have been made to free you of this obstacle? Please note that I do not in any way accuse your secretary, but I claim that his nationality is a direct impediment in the circumstances of his nomination. In any case, it has practically become an insurmountable barrier which the French Catholics of Ontario will certainly not get over. They also know your mentality in this regard. If my memory serves me, in 1912 you were called to Quebec to participate in the first congress of the French language in Canada. All of Quebec heard the speech you delivered at the time. It was not a plea in favour of the French language but a hesitant and painful explanation of your presence among us. You made us party to your indecision at the time. Your first sentence was typical: “As Apostolic Delegate,” you said, “I was long undecided on the position to take with regard to this congress of the French language. Should I participate? ... Happily, in that moment I was able to hear the voice of an adviser – one of the wisest and most disinterested that I know. When he learned that it was a matter of delivering a beautiful address to the representative of the Holy See (the address could not be delivered to you in your absence) at the opening meeting of the Congress: ‘oh it would be a pity,’ said he to me, ‘that this act so obliging in devotion to the Holy See of Peter should not be fulfilled by the heirs of the language which was the first vehicle of the Catholic truth in all of North America.’ This wise and grave word, gentlemen, made me decide to take part in your Congress.” This mentality which affirmed itself openly in the city of Quebec, in such an eminently French province, on the occasion of the first congress on its language, that mentality is the same one that we think still exists today and which dictates the answer which I received, that is, that, unfortunately, our efforts were not able to obtain the much desired result. Your Excellency, I repeat to you what I have already said, that the French-language Catholics in Ontario form the majority of the Catholic element of this province. We are greater in number than all the English-language Catholics put together. Along with those of

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Appendix Seven

Italian, Belgian and Polish origin, we make up a population of 334,416ii determined to defend their rights. Let me tell you most frankly that the Irish element in the province of Ontario can in no way impede the French expansion. French families, thanks to their birth rate, progress from day to day and take the place of the Irish families, whose mixed marriages condemn them to a progressive and continual elimination. Without being a prophet but only considering the natural progression of events, I can assure you that the French element will never be subjugated in the present battle and that a race which does not want to perish will not perish despite the religious war it undergoes for the defence of its rights. The trumpet has already been sounded; the most important men according to their social position, knowledge, and true patriotism hear the crying injustice whose victims are our Ontario brethren. In public declarations they affirm without fear their adhesion to the cause which we defend. The entire French Catholic element in Ontario stands up and the province of Quebec enters the fray. If we find the Irish element up against us in this battle that we undertake against the fanatics of a province, then fine, we’ll knock over the obstacle. Was it not Our Lord who said: “Those who are not with me are against me?” We can repeat these gospel words and if Your Excellency, with all the authority you have or are supposed to have, cannot bring peace to the Catholic field in the province of Ontario; if you cannot prevent the pastoral staff from becoming a combat arm against our own; in brief, if the Apostolic Delegate can really do nothing more than declare his powerlessness before the face of growing evil and the scandal which is developing, I express the hope that, notwithstanding all that, Your Excellency in a last attempt with the Ontario episcopate will find the means to have those bishops hostile to us cease a war that will undoubtedly end up in a disaster that they will have caused. We ask for peace and the union of wills in order to save the separate schools in Ontario;iii but we are ready for war if we absolutely wish to iii According to the last official census, French Canadians in Ontario number 202,442; Belgians, 633; Italians, 21,265; Poles, 10,602, adding up to 234,942 in a Catholic population of 484,997. iii Here we have the usual confusion between French schools and Catholic schools. The separate schools are not in danger at this time. Instead, many people believe that the only danger to separate schools will come precisely from this kind of agitation.

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Senator Landry to Archbishop Stagni

have it. And if I write to Your Excellency today it is only to place you on your guard and to assure you that the French element in Ontario has no intention of drawing back from the adversaries who oppose it. I could only reproach myself for not giving you this information in time. Once again asserting my sentiments of filial devotion, I remain Your Excellency’s all-devoted servant. P. Landry

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Appendix 1

ap p e n d i x e i ght The School Situation in the Other Provinces of the Dominion

It is not necessary to enter into a detailed narrative of the school situation in the other eight provinces of the Canadian Confederation, there not being in any of them, for now, any agitation as now exists in Ontario. A brief summary therefore will suffice. Province of Quebec. The elementary schools recognized by the government and sustained by the public purse are all confessional. All the schools are under the high direction of the Council of Public Instruction, which is divided into two committees: one Catholic for the Catholic schools; the other Protestant for the Protestant schools. The majority of these schools are Catholic and French-Canadian, just as the vast majority of the population is Catholic and FrenchCanadian. Thus Catholic books, teachers (very often brothers or nuns), Catholic inspectors, Catholic administration; and the Catholics don’t pay school taxes except for their own schools. Maritime provinces, that is: Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. In none of these provinces are there Catholic schools recognized by the Law. All the schools recognized by the government are officially public or neutral. However, in all three, through a friendly understanding, Catholics, especially in the cities and other population centres, have their own schools, practically Catholic, subsidized by the public purse, with Catholic teachers, religious instruction, and Catholic practice.

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School Situation in Other Provinces

Manitoba. Catholic schools recognized and supported by the public purse existed in Manitoba until 1890, when they were abolished by a provincial law. After that the long and complicated schools question of Manitoba, regarding which Leo xiii of happy memory wrote the encyclical Affari Vos. An article of this law prescribes that “during school hours, there will not be a separation of the children according to their religious denomination.” The schools according to the law are officially neutral. In any case the same law permits religious instruction and exercises (Catholic or Protestant) during the last half-hour of school, that is, from 3:30 until 4:00 p.m., if the parents wish it or if the school commission desires so; but no child is obliged to participate except with the express desire of his or her parents. In rural districts, where the population is entirely or almost entirely Catholic, schools established according to this law can be, and succeed in being, in fact tolerable from the Catholic point of view. The reason for this is that since each district elects its own school commission, and this commission chooses and employs the teacher who administers the school, the situation is not that bad, with the Catholic commission, a Catholic teacher, and all or almost all the children Catholic; with the right, moreover, to impart Catholic doctrine in the last half-hour of school every day, the situation in practice succeeds quite well. It is not like that in other locales, however. In the communities where Catholics are mixed in with Protestants, as in the cities, for example, the situation for Catholics is anything but satisfactory. In Winnipeg and other large centres Catholics have founded parochial schools which they maintain themselves with voluntary contributions while they are forced, like all other citizens, to pay taxes for public schools. They thus pay a double tax for the education of their children. Many attempts – one of which in 1912 or 1913 – were made to obtain a change in the Manitoba law, or at least to come to an accommodation or an understanding such as exists for example in the Maritime provinces, but until this moment every effort has been useless. British Columbia. All the schools recognized by the state are public or neutral. Neither before nor after Confederation were there ever separate schools. In the cities and large centres, Catholics maintain their own schools, as in Manitoba, and they must at the same time, like other citizens, pay their taxes for the maintenance of public schools.

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Appendix Eight

Alberta and Saskatchewan. When in a school district Catholics find themselves in a minority, which is the case in all the cities and important sectors, they can by law establish separate schools and in that case their situation is quite similar to that of Catholics in Ontario. When instead they constitute the majority of the population in a school district (and this, in fact, happens only in rural districts, where Catholics have established themselves in groups, and form not only the majority but even the totality of the population), they cannot establish separate schools and this is different from the case in Ontario. They can only establish public schools. But since they find themselves in the majority they are naturally able to erect a Catholic school commission, which can employ a Catholic teacher. Moreover religious instruction can be imparted in the last half-hour of school, as in Manitoba.

b i li ngual sch o o ls i n t h e sai d prov i nces The juridical position of the French language in the various provinces of Canada is given in the report. In the Maritime provinces, bilingual French schools existed by sufferance, not by law; but the toleration is so great that the French language population seems to be satisfied. In Manitoba the law in vigour is the following: “lorsque dix des élêves dans une école parlent le langue française (ou toute language autre de l’anglais) comme leur langue mère, l’enseignement de ces élêves sera conduit en français (ou telle autre langue) et en anglais d’après le système bilingue.” In Alberta and Saskatchewan the law is: “in all of the schools teaching must be in the English language; but it shall be lawful for the school commission of any district to prescribe the teaching of a primary course in the French language.” In British Columbia there is no provision for bilingual teaching. There are in any case few French people in this province, which is, the greatest majority, Protestant.

gener a l o bs ervati on s There is not a lack of clues, in more or less all of the above-mentioned provinces that with the passage of time a situation can develop similar to what now exists in Ontario with respect to the French language;

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especially if things are left in the hands of extreme agitators without discretion and prudence. Unfortunately here in Ottawa it seems that this affair regarding schools has been completely abandoned to the hands of the separate school trustees, all of them lay people, with little or no surveillance or direction on the part of ecclesiastical authority. The Church has not helped the school board. The consequence of this is that the board is indebted and the tax has been growing enormously in order to meet the growth in expenditures. The present economic situation of the Catholic schools of Ottawa is rightfully an object of anxiety if not alarm. And not only, as we have said, is the tax high but according to every probability it will have to grow even more.i

i The reduction of the tax to nine milrates this year from ten last year, for reasons too long to discuss here, should not be taken as an index of better financial conditions.

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Appendix 1

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re p o rt t wo The Separate Schools Question in Ottawa

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Archbishop Stagni’s Reports

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The Separate Schools Question in Ottawa To His Eminence Cardinal Giovanni De Lai, Secretary of the Sacred Consistorial, Rome, Apostolic Delegation to Canada, 1915

Ottawa, 13 December 1915 Most Reverend Eminence, As a complement to my report #1277a of this past 19 November, I submit to you the present one regarding the Catholic schools question in this city of Ottawa. The question of bilingual schools in Ontario is largely concentrated in Ottawa and it is here that it is made most acute by certain local conditions. The present report must therefore be written as a follow-up to the last one. It will be important to point out here from the very beginning that although Ottawa is the capital of the Dominion, it is nonetheless, in all provincial questions and matters and by consequence, in all that regards education or public instruction, second to the government of the province of Ontario, whose seat is in Toronto. In reality the legal position of Ottawa as a city is not at all modified by its being the capital of Canada, and in its government and municipal administration it depends on Toronto neither more nor less than any other city in Ontario. It goes without saying, therefore, that all the legal texts, all the ordinances or regulations cited in the preceding report in matters of language or instruction, are valid everywhere, even in Ottawa. Ottawa has a population of about one hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom about one-half are Catholic. The Catholic population

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is largely composed of French and English; and also of other nationalities who have immigrated here but who are of much less significance. For many years the two principal Catholic elements have been in disaccord, especially with regard to their schools. Already as far back as the year 1886 the discord between them had become so grave that they decided to divide the separate school board in two sections, one French, the other English; the one to deal exclusively with schools frequented by French children and the other similarly charged for the English schools. For the sake of the greatest clarity, it is helpful to note that, according to the school laws of Ontario, the separate school commission in urban municipalities is composed of members elected by Catholic ratepayers, two members for each ward in the city. In Ottawa there are presently nine wards so that the administrative commission of the separate schools is made up of eighteen members. From the beginning, that is from 1863, the two elements came to an agreement that in each ward one French and one English trustee would be elected. This agreement was discreetly observed until the present. The English Catholics were in a majority before, and now the French are in a majority; so that it can be said that this generous treatment was experienced in turn by both sides. If the same generosity had been extended to the rest of their relations then perhaps the present problems which spoil so much the concord between the Catholics of the two nationalities might never have come about. As I was saying, then, the separate school commission has always been composed of French and English members in equal numbers. In 1886, however, internal disagreements in the commission had become such that it was resolved to divide it in two sections, only that given the tenor of the law such a division was not and could not be recognized. The law in fact does not recognize the French or the English. It recognizes only Catholics. Consequently there cannot be legally more than one board in the city for Catholic schools. In any case, even if there could not be a legal separation, a rather significant separation in fact was possible; in the sense, that is, that the French trustees answered for and acted in all that regarded the French schools and similarly did the English for English schools. This internal and friendly accommodation lasted for many years, until 1903. As long as this state of almost complete separation lasted, we cannot truly say that peace always reigned between the two elements. It was spoiled unfortunately even then from time to time by various incidents. But things never

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were as bad as they are now. From 1903 until the present it would not be an exaggeration to affirm that discord has always reigned. I find that appeals were made to the Archbishop of Ottawa and to the Apostolic Delegate; however, without any permanent result. Discord prevailed more or less until 1912, the year in which the bilingual question emerged to add fuel to the flames. The strongest group of French Canadians in Ontario are to be found precisely in this city of Ottawa. Practically all the main ecclesiastics and lay members of this nationality in Ontario reside here. The Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario has its headquarters here. Here Le Droit, the organ of the same Association, is published. One therefore understands that when Regulation 17, regarding the teaching of French in bilingual schools, emanated from the Department of Education, Ottawa was struck more than any other locality. It was here naturally that this ordinance encountered the strongest and the best-organized opposition. Consequently one cannot be surprised that even the separate school board in Ottawa, half of whose members are French, felt its effects. It is not necessary for me to enter now into the details of what happened. The result was that the separate school board in Ottawa took upon itself the battle in the name of the entire French-Canadian element in the province and soon found itself in a defiant attitude towards the government of Ontario. Almost all the English members of the commission disapproved of such an attitude; some of them, however, placed themselves openly and fully on the side of their French co-religionists. Consequently the majority of the board found themselves on the opposite side to the government. By order of the board, a warning was posted in every bilingual French school, in which teachers were enjoined not to obey Regulation 17. It is easy to imagine how all this served to worsen even more than previously the division between the two Catholic elements with regard to the schools. Catholics in fact divided themselves in general along the lines of the board, the French reinforcing the board in its decision, the English maintaining that the bilingual question was not their affair and that therefore they should not be dragged into it involuntarily. But the divergence on the bilingual question was not the only one that divided the school commission and consequently the Catholic population. In fact, leaving aside the difference in national temperament and the divergence of ideas in matters of education – differences which are naturally permanent between the two elements – financial

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questions emerged within the board and various incidents occurred which embittered the division even more. These incidents were connected with the election of trustees and I don’t think it is necessary to deal with them in detailed fashion, since they are of little importance to us. What is truly serious is the financial or economic question and I must dwell at length with Your Eminence on this matter. The sum necessary for the maintenance of schools in Ontario is obtained annually, through a tax imposed on all the existing property in the school district, and a government subsidy. Every year property is evaluated by a municipal official, and in proportion of the determined value each property is taxed. The law has as a basis that all school taxes go to public schools unless the contributor wished to express the contrary. I said unless there is a wish to the contrary, because, since Catholics have the right to separate or confessional schools, they can declare their will that their taxes, both those on their own property and those on the property which they occupy as renters, or as joint stockholders in industrial, commercial, or other companies, go to the benefit of their schools, that is, separate schools. In the absence of such a declaration on the part of the Catholic proprietor or renter, all his taxes are devolved ipso jure to the public schools. And in this regard it will be useful to observe that while Catholics are by law free to transfer their own taxes from the public to the separate schools, just as they can from the separate to the public ones – a weak point for our schools –no Protestant can order that his taxes go to a Catholic school even if he sends his children to Catholic schools, as is not infrequently the case following a mixed marriage. This is one of the inequities of the school law of Ontario. In the city of Ottawa there is about $20 million of property taxed by the separate schools, while there is more than $80 million taxed by the public schools. Even though the population of the city is about half Catholic and more than half the children are Catholic, there is nonetheless this great divide between property which pays taxes to separate schools and that which pays to the public schools. There are a number of reasons for this discrepancy, but the principal ones are: 1. that Catholics are in general much poorer than their Protestant co-citizens; 2. that Catholics do not always order that their taxes (especially on stocks in companies owned by them) go to the Catholic schools; and 3. that taxes for public utilities, public services (trains, railways, street railways, telephones) go exclusively to public schools. The situation in Ottawa thus is summed up in the following: we

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Catholics have as many children to send to school and perhaps even more than the Protestants but we can only count on the taxes of onequarter of the taxable property which they have; in other words, if the tax were the same for one part as for the other, we would have only one quarter of the money which they have to instruct an equal number of children. How therefore do we maintain Catholic schools in such conditions? The answer is that first of all we have our good sisters and brothers as teachers to whom we pay a much lower salary than that obtained by teachers in public schools. Secondly, given that each school commission, both public and separate, having ascertained on the one hand the total value of taxable property, and, on the other, having fixed every year the amount of expenditures foreseen for the running of schools, given that every school commission is authorized by law to determine what rate of taxes it judges sufficient and opportune, the separate school board in Ottawa found itself demanding of Catholics a tax which was much higher than that imposed upon Protestants by the public school board. Currently, as an example, the tax for separate schools in Ottawa is a mil rate of nine to the dollar (last year it was ten), while for the public schools it was only five mils (exactly 5.4 ) for each dollar of taxable property. In other words a Catholic needs to pay nine dollars for each thousand dollars of property, while a Protestant pays only $5.40. It is also necessary to note that even with a higher tax it is still difficult for separate school boards to balance expenditures with income. The fact that the tax is higher is not naturally an advantage to our schools. If all Catholics were loyal to their schools this fact would not constitute a great danger. But unfortunately, the danger is real in the sense that a Catholic dedicated to his earthly goods or who does not understand well enough the great importance of Catholic schools gasps at the higher taxes and takes advantage of the freedom conceded to him by law in order to transfer his taxes to the public school, thus saving the difference between the Catholic and public tax rates. Let us take, for example, a Catholic of modest means who lives in a home valued at $3,000. The house probably belongs to a Protestant; but it is the renter who determines to which school category taxes should go on that property, that is to say, separate or public. Should the renter allocate the taxes to the Catholic schools he will have to pay $27 a year for schools – that is to say the rent he pays for that house will include those $27; whereas if he declares that his taxes go to the public schools

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he will only have to pay $16.20 annually. The difference is so great as to constitute a very strong temptation for less fervent Catholics. Now this is precisely what has happened in this city of Ottawa. A large number of homeowners who could and should be taxed for the separate schools paid taxes instead to public schools, for the simple reason that the rate for the latter is much lower. The danger of a higher tax is well understood by Catholics almost everywhere in Ontario except, as far as one can tell, in the city of Ottawa. In all the other important cities of the province like Toronto, Hamilton, London, Kingston, etc., everything is done to keep separate school taxes at the same rate as that for public schools; and should it come about that at the end of the year the board finds itself in a deficit, the ecclesiastical authorities see to it that the deficit is met by other means, for example, with collections in the churches, voluntary underwriting, etc. As is obvious, such a provision is most wise, since it removes from Catholics every temptation to apply their taxes to public schools. By such means the separate schools are able to obtain at least all the taxes which by law they can obtain. Unfortunately here in Ottawa it seems that this affair regarding schools has been completely abandoned to the hands of the separate school trustees, all of them lay people, with little or no surveillance or direction on the part of ecclesiastical authority. The Church has not helped the school board. The consequence of this is that the board is indebted and the tax has been growing enormously in order to meet the growth in expenditures. The present economic situation of the Catholic schools of Ottawa is rightfully an object of anxiety if not alarm. And not only, as we have said, is the tax high, but according to every probability it will have to grow even higher,i and movable goods which form the patrimony – lands, school buildings, furniture, etc. – of the separate school board of Ottawa, according to the estimate made by the same, are valued at $640,000, while its liabilities amount to $485,000, which truly does not leave much of a margin. It also seems that the school buildings are, in fact, insufficient in number and that new loans will have to be contracted for the construction of other schools.

i The reduction of the tax to nine mil rates this year from ten last year, come for reasons too long to discuss here, should not be taken as an index of better financial conditions.

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In this financial situation, inasmuch as it might be unhappy, there was nothing that should have divided the commission according to nationality. But, strange to say, even this state of things embittered the friction between the French and the English, and this came about in the following fashion. The French members of the board and the three English members who joined them in opposition to Regulation 17 were of the view that a large sum should be borrowed immediately for the above-mentioned goal. At first they spoke of $350,000 but then the amount was reduced to $275,000. It would not seem that there was a difference of views with regard to the need for the money; however, since the time did not seem right to the English trustees to take a risk in such a large new loan, they opposed it. Then they justified their opposition with the following considerations: 1. that these were difficult times, that there was a shortage of money, and that one could not obtain money except at too high a rate; 2. the commission’s attitude towards the government resulted in the loss of the annual government subsidy of circa $5,000, and who would have had the courage to lend money to a board in conflict with the government?; 3. the growth of the debt would have brought about an aggravation of the school tax, and this meant that a large number of Catholics would have transferred their contributions to the public schools. As far as I have been able to judge, there were good reasons on both sides. However, it is certain that the difficult conditions at the time demanded caution and delay. Instead the French trustees pushed the matter to a conclusion and passed a resolution by which they decided to obtain the sum of $275,000 through a bond offering. The minority on the board, that is to say the six English trustees, had immediate recourse to the courts, so that a so-called injunction might be declared, that is, an ordinance, stopping the board, one, from contracting the loan, two, from paying salaries to teachers who did not have regular government diplomas, and three, from paying teachers who did not obey the regulations of the Department of Education. Since in the bilingual French schools none of the teachers, by order of the same board, obeyed Regulation 17, the court injunction meant that the teachers of the bilingual schools could not be legally paid by the board. Thus the goal of the action taken by the English trustees was directly to impede the above-mentioned loan and indirectly to force the Ottawa separate school board to accept and obey Regulation 17. The injunction was accorded by the courts on 28 April 1914. It was then confirmed in an appeal and it is currently in effect. In such circumstances, if the

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trustees had paid the said teachers, they would themselves have been individually responsible for the illegally paid funds. It is easy to imagine the effect produced by the actions of the English trustees and by the subsequent ordinance of the judge. Naturally, reprisals by the majority of the school board followed. The injunction evidently struck only teachers of the bilingual schools. But the majority of the board then decided that it could not pay any teacher, not even those of the English schools, who in fact did not receive their monthly pay until another ordinance from the courts forced the boards to pay them. In resentment then the majority of the board fired all the teachers in the English schools, warning them that they would not be employed again except at a much reduced salary. In September 1914, the schools were not reopened on the date prescribed by law; thus a new recourse was made to the courts which forced the commission to readmit the above-mentioned English teachers at their regular salaries and to reopen the schools without any more delay. Your Eminence already understands the absolute “chaos” and disaccord which reigned supreme within the Ottawa Catholic school board. It should not be surprising then that the provincial legislature, in view of such a situation, in the March session of this year, sanctioned a law by which the minister of education was authorized to suspend the Ottawa Separate School Board should he be persuaded that it was not conducting schools in a normal manner; furthermore, to nominate in its place a governing board composed of not fewer than three and not more than seven members. Unfortunately there was no improvement within the board. The majority pertinaceously refused to accept or to obey Regulation 17; and before the schools opened this past September (1915) the Department of Education nominated a commission of three Catholics – two of the English language and one of the French – with the task of taking in hand the administration of the Catholic schools of Ottawa. The majority of the old board peremptorily refused to recognize the new board, and attempted a lawsuit in the courts in order to declare the board unconstitutional and illegal. We have already had in these last few weeks a judgment in the first instance contrary to the contention of the old board; but the case will be appealed all the way to the Privy Council in England.1 The point on which the action is based is that, by the law of the separate schools of Ontario passed in 1863, the right was recognized for Catholics to elect in every district a board of trustees and to organize

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and run their schools. And Your Eminence will remember from my very long preceding report on the bilingual schools of Ontario how much the rights and privileges enjoyed by whatever class of persons regarding confessional schools were guaranteed by the Constitution of Canada of 1867. Now the majority of the separate school board of Ottawa holds that by force of the Constitution, the Ontario legislature could not take away from Ottawa Catholics the right to elect the trustees of their schools with the nomination of a governing commission charged to administer them. Naturally, there is room here for disputing for and against. But the argument did not appear that solid to me, for it is not plausible that any tribunal will accept that the replacement of an elected commission with a nominated one constitutes a violation of our rights and privileges regarding confessional schools, especially when we are dealing with a particular case, in a special locale, where the elective board, being refractory, refuses to run the schools in conformity with the law. Whatever the case, however, what we should deplore is: 1. the whole of the circumstances which obligated the government to act in this fashion; 2. the same action of the government inasmuch as it suspends at the discretion of the Ministry of Education a precious right and constitutes a dangerous precedent. This is the situation at the moment in which I write regarding the schools question in Ottawa. The schools are administered by a special board nominated by the government. The French Canadians, that is to say L’Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario and the newspaper Le Droit, oppose themselves to this commission and they call it “la commission bâtarde, la petite commission.” Under the same guide the teachers – a large number of them religious brothers and sisters already at the service of the old board – refuse to recognize the governing commission. In any case the schools are open as usual, both the French and the English. The teachers of the bilingual schools have not been paid since April 1914, not only by virtue of the abovementioned injunction, but even because they do not want to subscribe to the normal contract – which has always been signed by every teacher, who promises to observe the regulations of the Department of Education – and this is the case because this contract is presented to them by the new board. They have been persuaded that to sign the contract would imply recognizing this new board and sacrificing the rights of the French Canadians of Ontario. Where will this all end up? This government and its commission have not been hasty or impatient, but it is easy to understand that such

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a state of things cannot certainly last forever, and that in the end these recalcitrant teachers will necessarily be dismissed. What will happen in such an eventuality no one can foresee. It was only a few months ago at the request of the French-Canadian member of the governing board and with the permission and approval of the Archbishop of Ottawa that Mgr Bruchési, Archbishop of Montreal, came to Ottawa in order to arrive at least at a provisional solution to the most complex tangle. He came twice and he had meetings with French-Canadian pastors and with the principal French-Canadian leaders. He strongly insisted that they tolerate the new board, while the question of constitutionality of the same was being discussed in the courts – “la subir ... en attendant la décision des cours.” Mgr Bruchési had received, to use his words, from the “représantant officiel du Gouvernement de l’Ontario des concessions d’une grande importance,” that is to say: 1. that toleration in fact, of the new board would not in any way have prejudiced, before the courts, the case of the old board against the new, and 2. that the government would have paid all the legal fees incurred by both sides for the submission of the case to the courts. For a while Mgr Bruchési hoped to succeed; but as soon as he had returned to Montreal his wise counsels were abandoned and the conflict started over again just as before. From what has been said up to now Your Most Reverend Eminence will better understand what I was saying at the beginning of this report: that is, the bilingual schools question is largely concentrated here in Ottawa and here it is made most acute by the special local conditions. Now you will ask: what has the ecclesiastical authority done in this dispute? As far as I know I must answer, nothing, absolutely nothing, apart from the well-intentioned aborted attempt by Mgr Bruchési, with the approval of the archbishop here, due to the initiative of a member of the new board. In the month of December 1913, I wrote a long letter to Mgr Gauthier, Archbishop of Ottawa, calling his attention to the grave financial situation of the separate schools of this city. I dwelt a long time on the school taxes, which were too high for the separate schools in comparison to those for the public schools. I said that such a notable difference between the two taxes could not but naturally lead to fatal consequences. I observed how such consequences were already beginning to manifest themselves in the fact that 350 Catholic families in the cities had already transferred their taxes in favour of the public schools

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on total property values of $2.5 million. I therefore asked if it was not possible to find a remedy and I proposed some suggestions for his consideration. I concluded then with these words, “It is not necessary for me to add that whatever assistance I might be capable of rendering in this affair I shall be most happy to offer it. Your Grace can count fully on my cooperation. Inasmuch as it might be necessary, I still think that we can count on the support of the Holy See.” On a number of occasions I spoke with Mgr Gauthier, before and after, on the same matter. He was very well disposed to all of my observations. Any attempt, however, that he may have made without my knowing it has certainly not produced any effect. I am more inclined to believe that, being the timid and peaceful man that he is, he is afraid to attempt the smallest step in order not to be entangled in the knots of the bilingual schools question. On this last question, as with every question which becomes a point of agitation among the members of the school board, he has maintained a constant attitude of “neutrality.” It has always seemed to me, moreover, that the archbishop is not fully aware of the gravity of the financial situation, because it is truly grave. Even if the bilingual question were resolved tomorrow, the financial situation of the Ottawa Catholic schools would remain and would call for a solution; it would continue to be a source of serious unease among the Catholic population of Ottawa and the cause of conflict between the two elements. On the other hand were the economic difficulties absolutely removed I am convinced that not only the bilingual question would not be more acute here or elsewhere but the national friction within the commission would disappear in large measure, if not entirely. In the problem of Ottawa, Mgr Gauthier only sees the bilingual question; whereas at the base of the problem I see the financial situation rendering the same bilingual question more bitter. Moreover the financial situation can be improved: 1. with the increment of income, 2. with the diminution of expenditures, and 3. by balancing the books by means other than raising the burden of school taxes. The income can be augmented by getting all Catholics to pay their taxes to separate schools; and this could be done easily, I would say almost naturally, if the separate school taxes were maintained within suitable limits and did not surpass by too much those of the public schools. Costs can be diminished by employing teachers of religious congregations instead of the secular teachers now employed, and also by reducing the salaries paid to brothers and sisters. There is absolutely no reason for paying teachers in Ottawa a salary that on the

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average is higher than that of teachers in Toronto. And yet if teachers here received the same salaries as in Toronto, there would be a saving of not less than $22,627 a year. And this would not be an insignificant advantage for a corporation like the separate school board of Ottawa, whose income totals $200,000 annually. Finally, if such means do not succeed in balancing the budget at the end of the year, the deficit should be covered in a way other than raising taxes; placing some of the burden for example on parish funds, or by having the same episcopal corporation, which is not poor, assume the debt in the form which will seem most expedient. All of these funds, ultimately, have come, and continue to come in large part from the generosity of our Catholic people; and it does not seem to me a bad thing to deposit some with our schools, which are so necessary to the maintenance of Catholic life and fervour. Mgr Gauthier went to Rome for the ad limina visit in the spring of 1914. He told me a number of times that while there he submitted to the highest authority the bilingual question and the turn for the worse it had undergone in Ottawa. He dealt with the late Pius x, with your Most Reverend Eminence, and with the Most Eminent Cardinal Merry del Val; and, he affirms, everyone perfectly understood the question. The answer that he received and which he repeated to me a number of times was: “De grâce, Mon Seigneur, ne touchez pas cette question.” His reluctance to intervene in the question became ten times firmer, from the instructions that he said he received in Rome. The fact is that from his return until today, he has done nothing in this regard; and he says openly to everyone that he does nothing other than follow the instructions received from Rome. What should we do? As far as I am concerned, leaving aside even the question that, generally, it seems to me neither wise nor opportune for the Apostolic Delegate to get involved directly in such a matter, I am of the view that if I were to take this matter into my hands, not only would I have before me the tacit disapproval of the archbishop, but he too would appear without authority before the clergy and the people. Moreover, I would not even be sure of the success that he could expect as the true and competent ordinary [bishop] and immediate judge, especially if he would, as he could, count on my cooperation and that of the Holy See. I did all that I could, writing to the archbishop a long official letter which I noted above, and speaking to him many times about the matter – once in very strong terms – and exhorting him to promote an understanding between the two sides of the Commission.

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With all this, however, I am far from finding Mgr Gauthier wanting, for he is an excellent and very conscientious prelate. On the contrary, for what has to do with the bilingual question in itself, I understand very well that there are insurmountable obstacles to an effective intervention on his part. But here, as I can see it, beyond the bilingual question, there is the economic matter of the schools, which is serious in itself and more serious in its consequences. There is in fact the scandal of Catholics who support the neutral schools instead of Catholic schools with their money. And then, above all, there is the split among Catholics which divides them into two camps. If the Holy See judge wise and opportune to take some action according to the plan indicated in my report #12778, regarding the bilingual schools question of Ontario, I would be of the humble opinion that a special communication be addressed to the Archbishop of Ottawa which would aim at the following points: 1. That the Holy See is aware of the existing situation in Ottawa owing to various causes; 2. That the most painful aspect of this situation is the profound division that exists between Catholics of the French language and those of the English language.ii 3. That deploring this division, the Holy See recommends urgently that the Archbishop of Ottawa engage himself to promote some convention or understanding with respect to school matters, between these two principal groups of the Catholic population – the kind of understanding which for example existed in the past, which, with due conformity to the civil law, would lead to one or the other exclusive direction in governance of the respective schools, and which, approved and sanctioned by the archbishop, would have internally the strength to oblige in consciousness and honour all Catholics to take an interest in their schools; ii There is in reality less of a reason for this division here in Ottawa than everywhere else, especially as far as school matters are concerned. The French and English children are not mixed in schools here. Each group, being numerous, has its own schools: the French have French schools and teachers; the English have English schools and teachers. Why therefore should there be discord? An understanding of administrative internal separation between the French and English members of the school commission seems to be the only way to obtain peace.

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1. That, in order to facilitate such an understanding, there be an authoritative insistence among Catholics of the English language on their duties of charity to show sympathy towards their Catholic brothers of the French language with respect to the perfect and legitimate desire of the latter to have their native language taught their children in the schools; and that with the same authority and effectiveness Catholics of the French language be reminded that they have no right to implicate their brothers of the English language in any battle which they believe they must fight to defend their rights and privileges with regard to their language; that the separate school board of Ottawa, made up as it is of English and French members, cannot, must not, consider itself anything other than a Catholic school board, and it cannot, without injustice towards one or the other side, in fact take sides in matters of race, language or any other matters which are not of an essentially religious character; 5. That an effort be made to remedy the financial situation with every possible and reasonable means, with the highly desirable goal of keeping taxes for Catholic schools possibly at the same level as those of the public schools; 6. That those Catholics who have applied their taxes to the public schools be urgently induced to revoke them in favour of separate schools. (“Ubi vero per legem civilem licitum sit proprias pecuniae contributiones sive catholicis sive neutris scholis alendis pro lubitu destinare, graviter peccant seque sacramentis indignos exhibent catholici qui, despectis scholis catholicis, neutris aere suo favere non dubitant.” acta et decreta concilii plenarii quebecensis primi. “De Scholis primariis”, canone 287, e.”;2 7. That the separate schools are above all Catholic schools and as such are subject to the jurisdiction of the archbishop, to whom their existence, support, and efficiency must be the object of the greatest pastoral solicitude; 8. That the archbishop, even respecting the civil rights of the school commission, should exercise on the matter that guiding action and paternal moderation which Catholics always expect from their ecclesiastical superiors; 9. That towards this end he should take those measures which seem to him most effective, such that his vigilance on the interests of the Catholic schools never cease, and that the school board not take any important steps without having prior sanction and consent

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from him, charging, for example, a French and an English churchman to be in continuous contact with the same board. Here, Your Eminence, is my way of seeing this delicate and painful question of the Ottawa schools. Placing myself fully in your judgment, I have the honour of submitting to you once more my devoted homage and to confirm myself with the kiss of the Sacred Crimson of your Most Reverend Eminence, Your most humble, obedient and devoted servant, P.F. Stagni

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Letter from His Holiness Pope Benedict xv to the Bishops of Canada, 8 September 1916

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Commisso divinitus

To Our Beloved Son Louis Nazaire Bégin, Cardinal Priest of the Holy Roman Church, Archbishop of Quebec, and to the Other Archbishops and Bishops of the Dominion of Canada – Pope Benedict xv, Our Beloved Son and Venerable Brethren: Greetings and Apostolic Blessings – When divisions that endanger the mutual bonds of peace and concord arise within the Church, the office divinely committed to Our care of feeding the Lord’s flock strongly urges Us to make every effort in Our power to bring them to an end. What is there indeed more harmful to Catholic interests, or more opposed to the divine precepts and to the principles of the Church than that the faithful should be divided up into factions? For “every kingdom divided against itself, shall be made desolate”; and whenever Christians cease to be “of one heart and one soul,” they gradually wander away from that charity which is not only “the bond of perfection,” but is also the first and foremost enactment of the Christian law, since the Saviour of mankind bequeathed it to His disciples as His last will and testament and proclaimed it to be henceforth the sign and proof of the true faith: “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” Then again, such dissension, besides being totally in opposition to the spirit of Christ the Lord, produces also the baneful result of

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deterring more and more from the Catholic faith those who are beyond the fold, just as on the other hand fraternal concord and charity amongst Catholics have always been a great inducement to those outside the pale to enter the Catholic communion. For this reason, Venerable Brethren, the contentions which, for some years past, have been enkindled amidst Canadian Catholics, otherwise so renowned for their faith and piety, are to Us a cause of intense anxiety; and that those divisions have daily grown more bitter and have now been made public, We know from many and from the best sources, and We have learnt also from our own reports. The cause of disagreement is truly manifest. There are Canadian Catholics of French origin and language, and there are those, though not all of one race, who make use of the English tongue, and this constitutes for them a ground of contention and of strife. French-Canadians assert that all proceeds satisfactorily in their province of Quebec; but they complain that in Ontario and in other parts of the Dominion, where there are a considerable number of inhabitants of their race, and where English is the language of the province, there is not sufficient regard for the French tongue, either in the sacred ministrations or in the Catholic separate schools. They wish therefore that priests should be appointed to the churches in due proportion to the number of Catholics of both languages, in such wise that in places where the French Canadians form a majority, a priest of their language and race should be selected, and that in parishes where they are in a certain number, French should be used in preaching and in the exercise of other sacred offices in the same way as English, and finally they desire that in the separate schools the children should be more fully and suitably taught the French language after their own manner. On the other hand, it is put forward that in Ontario and in the other English-speaking provinces, Catholics are in a minority compared to non-Catholics, though in some places French Canadians are more numerous than Catholics of the other speech, that in the appointment of priests those who may and should eventually be converted to the true faith must be taken into account, that due consideration should be given to the language which is proper to the province and to other circumstances of place and of persons, and that the question cannot be settled on the sole basis of a majority of Catholics of one or other race. It is added that too often French-Canadian priests are deficient in the knowledge of English, or speak it imperfectly, or neglect it out of preference for their own tongue, and thus their ministry is of little efficacy

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or unequal exigencies. Then as regards separate schools, it is pointed out that if French were taught in the manner claimed by the French Canadians, it would be greatly detrimental to the proper teaching of English, which is the language of the province, and prejudicial to the parents, who be obliged, either to provide at their own expense that which is wanting in order that their children should be thoroughly and completely instructed in the English language, or else to abandon Catholic schools and send their sons to the public or neutral schools, which would be totally wrong. Finally it is contended that this system of education may provoke the ill will of the state authorities against the separate schools on the ground that they prove inadequate to the needs of the public welfare, and thus endanger the benefit of the law authorizing Catholics to have their own separate schools, which it is in the greatest interest of religion to safeguard and to maintain. And would that all these points were the subject of calm and peaceful debates! In fact, as if the nation or religion itself were at stake, these matters are so bitterly discussed in the daily and weekly press, in books and pamphlets, in private conversations and at public meetings, that men’s minds get more and more passionately inflamed, and the conflict between the two contending parties daily becomes more hopelessly irremediable. It is with a view to furnishing a fitting remedy to so grievous an evil that We desire to open Our mind to you, Venerable Brethren, whom We know to be ever in close union with Us. Rest assured then, that there is nothing you could do more pleasing to Us than that you should make every utmost effort, in peace and charity, to restore agreement and concord amongst the faithful committed to your pastoral care. To use the words of Paul the Apostle: “I beseech you, brethren, by the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing and that there be no schisms among you; but that you be perfect in the same mind and in the same judgment ... supporting one another in charity to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” For we are the children of the same Father, we sit at the same table, we share the same sacraments, and are called to the same happiness: baptized into one body ... and in one spirit we have all been made to drink.” “As many of you have been baptized in Christ, have put on Christ. ... Where there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ is all in all.” If by reason of family or of race there is disagreement amongst the faithful and “the vessels of the flesh are straitened,” then, in

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accordance with the exhortation of St Augustine, “The bounds of charity should be enlarged.” When all cannot be amicably settled, nor solely by the law of charity, there are judges in the Church, placed there by the Holy Ghost, to whose decisions the faithful must submit if they want to belong to Christ and not to be considered as “heathens and publicans.” Hence in the contentions that divide Canadian Catholics regarding the rights and usage of the two languages in their churches and in their Catholic schools, judgment rests with the bishops, and especially with the bishops of the dioceses where dissensions are particularly acute. We, therefore, exhort them to meet together, to carefully weigh and consider a matter of such importance, and, with a sole view to the cause of Christ and to the salvation of souls, let them lay down and decide that which they hold to be just and expedient. If for any reasons the question cannot be settled and finished by their ruling, let them bring it before the Holy See, where the issue will be finally decided in accordance with the laws of justice and charity, in order that the faithful may in future preserve peace and mutual goodwill, as is befitting to the saints. Meanwhile it is necessary that the daily and weekly papers which claim the honour of being Catholic, should not fan the flames of discord amongst the faithful, or forestall the judgment of the Church; and if those who write in them remain patiently and reservedly silent, or even further strive to calm excited feelings, they will surely accomplish a task well worthy of their profession. The faithful, too, should avoid discussing this matter in public gatherings, in public speeches, or in Catholic meetings properly so-called, for it is all but impossible that speakers should not be carried away by party spirit or abstain from adding fuel to the fire already ablaze. Now these injunctions, which We give in Our fatherly affection to all, are laid down in the first place for the clergy. As priests should be “the pattern of the flock from the heart,” it is indeed quite unseemly that they should allow themselves to be wrought up by this storm of rivalry and enmity. We therefore lovingly urge them to set an example to others of moderation and gentleness, of reverence towards the bishops, of obedience finally, especially in matters of justice and of ecclesiastical discipline, and regarding which it is the Church’s own right to decide. No doubt it would be greatly conducive to the spiritual welfare and concord of Catholics of both tongues if all their priests were to know both languages well. Hence, We have heard with notable plea-

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sure that the teaching of French and English to clerics has been introduced in some seminaries, and we would suggest this as an example to others. In the meanwhile, We urge all priests engaged in the sacred ministry to become thoroughly conversant in the knowledge and use of the two languages, and, discarding all motives of rivalry, to adopt one or other according to the requirements of the faithful. But as the bitterest controversy is that concerning Catholic schools in Ontario, it seems fitting that We should mention some special points in that connection. Nobody can deny that the civil government of Ontario has the right to exact that children should learn English in the school; and likewise that the Catholics of Ontario legitimately require that it should be perfectly taught, in order that their sons should be placed on the same level in this respect with non-Catholic children who attend the neutral schools, and that they should not be eventually less fitted for the higher schools or be disqualified for civil employments. Nor on the other hand is there any reason to contest the right of French Canadians, living in the province, to claim – in a suitable way, however – that French should be taught in schools attended by a certain number of their children; nor are they indeed to be blamed for upholding what is so dear to them. Nevertheless, let the Catholics of the Dominion remember that the one thing of supreme importance above all others is to have Catholic schools and not to imperil their existence, in order that their children, while receiving a literary education, should be taught to preserve the Catholic faith, to openly profess the doctrine of Christ, and to live in the exact observance of the Christian law. Love for our children, the good of religion, and the very cause of Christ demand as much. How these two requirements are to be met, namely, a thorough knowledge of English and an equitable teaching of French for FrenchCanadian children, it is obvious that in the case of schools subject to the public administration, the matter cannot be dealt with independently of the government. But this does not prevent the bishops in their earnest care for the salvation of souls from exerting their utmost activity to make counsels of moderation prevail, and with a view to obtaining that what is fair and just should be granted on both sides. In conclusion, Venerable Brethren, We rely so confidently upon your faith and zeal, and We know so well how mindful you are of your duty and of the account to be rendered before the judgment seat of God, that We hold beyond doubt that you will leave nothing undone to put

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an end to the existing evils and to bring about the return of peace. Let all your thought and care be centred, therefore, on the aim that “all may be one and that they may be made perfect in one,” as our Divine Master taught and prayed immediately before going forth to die upon the Cross. Let the words of St Paul the Apostle re-echo in the hearts of the faithful under your charge: “One body and one spirit: as you are called in one hope of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God and Father of all, and through all and in us all.” In their mutual amity let the faithful be “kind one to another, merciful, forgiving one another, even as God hath forgiven you in Christ.” Meanwhile, as a pledge of heavenly graces and of Our paternal love, We cordially bestow upon you, Our Beloved Son, upon you, Venerable Brethren, and upon the clergy and people of your respective flocks the apostolic blessing. Given in Rome, near St Peter’s, on the 8th day of the month of September, 1916, the third of Our Pontificate. Benedictus pp. xv

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Notes

i ntro ducti o n 1 Commisso divinitus (Rome: Vatican Polyglot Press 1916). 2 The oldest study on the question is C.B. Sissons, Bilingual Schools in Canada (Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons 1917). Over half this book deals with Ontario. Robert Choquette’s Language and Religion: A History of English-French Conflict in Ontario (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 1975) examines the Ottawa separate schools question, Regulation 17, and the university question in Ottawa, using invaluable source materials from the papers of Bishop Michael Fallon and from the acfeo. See also his La foi: gardienne de la langue en Ontario 1900–1950 (Montreal: Éditions Bellarmin 1987). Donald Tremblay’s “Mgr. Pellegrino Stagni et l’Église canadienne, 1910–1918” (Ph.D. dissertation, Université Laval 1992) includes a significant sub-chapter on the controversy, the Apostolic Delegate, and the Holy See; see ch. 4:2, 263–347. A version of that chapter has been published as “Benoit xv, le Saint-Siège et la controverse des écoles bilingues de l’Ontario,” Archivum Historiae Pontificiae 32 (1994), 195–251. On the political and social origins of the conflict, see also Margaret Prang, “Clerics, Politicians, and the Bilingual Schools Issue in Ontario, 1910–1917,” Canadian Historical Review 41:4 (December 1960), 281–307, and Marilyn Barber, “The Ontario Bilingual Schools Issue: Sources of Conflict,” Canadian Historical Review 48:3 (September 1966), 227–48. Chad Gaffield’s Language, Schooling and Cultural Con-

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3

4 5

6

7

8 9

10 11

flict: The Origins of the French Language Controversy in Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1987) is a superb study of how relations grew tense between cultural groups at the local level as a result of migration and settlement patterns. The Report of the Royal Commission on Education in Ontario (Toronto: King’s Printer 1950) discusses the controversy in its sixteenth chapter, “History of the French Language in the Publicly Supported Schools of Ontario,” in particular 405ff. See also Franklin Walker, Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario (Toronto: T. Nelson and Sons 1964), chs. 10–11. See Ann Fremantle’s introduction to The Papal Encyclicals in Their Historical Context (New York: New American Library 1963), and Terrence I. McLaughlin’s introduction to The Church and the Reconstruction of the Modern World (Garden City, ny: Image Books 1957). Archivum Secretum Vaticanum (asv) – Delegazione Apostolica del Canada (dac) box 123.3 (1915) and 41.9/3 (1915). On archives pertaining to Canada in the asv see Matteo Sanfilippo, “Fonti vaticane per la storia canadese: la delegazione apostolica in Canada, 1899–1910,” Annali accademici canadesi 3–4 (1988); Monique Benoît and Matteo Sanfilippo, “Sources romaines pour l’histoire de l’église catholique du Canada: le pontificat de Léon xiii (1878–1903),” Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 44:1 (1990), 85–96; Monique Benoît, “Archives de la Sacre congregation de la propagande” (Ottawa: Archives publiques du Canada, Division des manuscrits 1986). Giovanni Pizzorusso and M. Sanfilippo have been preparing an inventory for the period 1903–14. Claudio de Dominicis has prepared an on-site inventory of the asv holdings on Canada up to 1922 (the archives allows researchers access to material up to that date). On the early francophone schools in Ontario see Arthur Godbout, L’origine des écoles françaises dans l’Ontario (Ottawa: Les Editions de l’Université d’Ottawa 1972). Sissons, Bilingual Schools, 14ff. See also Chapter 10 of Robert Choquette, L’église catholique dans l’Ontario français du dix-neuvième siècle (Ottawa: Editions de l’Université d’Ottawa 1984). Sissons, Bilingual Schools, 36ff. It should be pointed out, however, that in 1889 the Ministry of Education no longer authorized the use of textbooks from Quebec in French but replaced them with bilingual readers. See Choquette, La foi, 110–11. Choquette, Language and Religion, 97. Sissons, Bilingual Schools, 99; F.W. Merchant, Report on the Condition

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12 13 14

15

16

17

of English-French Schools in the Province of Ontario (Toronto: King’s Printer 1912). Tremblay, “Mgr. Pellegrino Stagni,” 272. Harold R. Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe: Group Identity and Political Change (New York: Harper and Row 1975), 215–16. J.R. Miller, The Jesuit Estates’ Act Controversy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1979); Doug Owram, Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856–1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980); Paul Crunican, Priests and Politicians: Manitoba Schools and the Elections of 1896 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974); Manoly Lupul, The Roman Catholic Church and the Northwest Schools Question (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974); A.I. Silver, The French-Canadian Idea of Confederation 1864–1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1982); Nive Voisine and Jean Hamelin, Les ultramontains canadiens-français (Montreal: Boréal 1985); Jack Granatstein and J.H. Hitsman, Broken Promises: A History of Conscription in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press 1977). Among others, Doug Owram has shown us that in the West, in order to bolster their case of who was holding up their claim to the new frontier, Ontario expansionists portrayed the Métis less as Native than as French and Catholic. It was their Frenchness and Catholicism that were diametrically opposed to a British Protestant identity. See Promise of Eden, 94–100. On the Orange Order and riots in Canada, see H. Senior, Orangeism: The Canadian Phase (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson 1972); Gregory S. Kealey, “The Orange Order in Toronto: Religious Riot and the Working Class,” in Essays in Canadian Working Class History, edited by Gregory S. Kealey and Peter Warrian (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1976), 13–35, or in the seventh chapter of Kealey’s Toronto Workers Respond to Industrial Capitalism, 1867–1892 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980); Cecil Houston and William J. Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1980) and “The Orange Order and the Expansion of the Ontario Frontier,” Journal of Historical Geography 4 (1978), 251–64. See “Anti-Catholicism in Canada: From the British Conquest to the Great War,” in Creed and Culture, edited by T. Murphy and G. Stortz (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1993), 25–48; “AntiCatholic Thought in Victorian Canada,” Canadian Historical Review 66

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18 19

20 21 22 23

24 25

(1985), 474–94; Brian P. Clarke, Piety and Nationalism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). Franklin Walker, Catholic Education and Politics in Ontario (Toronto: T. Nelson and Sons, 1964), 2:228–30. Roberto Perin, Rome in Canada: The Vatican and Canadian Affairs in the Late Victorian Age (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1990), 34–5. For an interesting overview of ethnic tensions in the Church, see Choquette, “English-French Relations in the Canadian Catholic Community,” in Creed and Culture, edited by Murphy and Stortz, 3–24. Perin, Rome in Canada; Silver, The French-Canadian Idea of Confederation. Bégin to Gotti, 2 June 1907, Archivum Propaganda Fide (apf) ns v.462 r.154. Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe. See Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, in particular ch. 10 and the conclusion. On the relationship between religion and ethnicity, see Hedva Ben Israel, “The Role of Religion in Nationalism: Some Comparative Remarks on Irish Nationalism and on Zionism,” in Religion, Ideology and Nationalism in Europe and America: Essays Presented in Honor of Yehoshua Arieli, edited by H. Ben Israel et al. (Jerusalem: Historical Society of Israel and Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History 1986), 331–40. Bégin to Gotti, 2 June 1907, apf ns v.462 r.354. That relationship would change as the francophone settlers in the West increasingly viewed their adopted territories as home and become francoontarois, fransaskois, and franco-colombiens. Marcel Martel argues that the French fact outside of Quebec was increasingly maintained by active institutional networks. See Le deuil d’un pays imaginé: rêves. Lutte et déroute du Canada français (Ottawa: Centre de Recherche en Civilisation Canadienne-Française, Université d’Ottawa 1997), 174–5; Gratien Allaire, “La construction d’une culture française dans l’Ouest canadien: la diversité originelle,” in La construction d’une culture: le Québec et l’Amérique française, edited by Gérard Bouchard and Serge Courville (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval 1993), 343–59. André Lalonde observes that in the period following the Great War, the fransaskois realized that they could not rely on Quebec to increase their population through migration schemes. Survival would depend on regrouping, organization, and attachment to the land. Even the Abbé Groulx noted in his 1928 visit to francophone communities in the West the “affaiblissement du lien sentimental avec la vieille province

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26 27

28

29 30

31 32 33

34 35

d’origine.” See Lalonde, “Le Patriote de l’ouest and French Settlement on the Prairies, 1910–1930,” in The Quebec and Acadian Diasporas in North America, edited by Pierre Savard and Raymond Breton (Toronto: mhso 1982 ), 129–31. A bibliography of recent research on these groups can be found in Linda Cardinal, Jean Lapointe, and J.-Yvon Thériault, État de la recherche sur les communautés francophones hors Québec 1980–1990 (Ottawa: Centre de Recherche en Civilisation CanadienneFrançaise, Université d’Ottawa 1994). On homeland concepts see the collection edited by Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press 1996). apf ns v.462 r.154. Jay P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s Irish and German Catholics, 1815–1865 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press 1975). See Walker’s Catholic Education, and John Moir, Church and State in Canada West: Three Studies in the Relation of Denominationalism and Nationalism, 1841–1857 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1959), ch. 6. See Sissons, Bilingual Schools, 69ff. For a discussion of the Orange Order’s influence on the question see Barber, “Ontario Bilingual Schools Issue.” On the Order’s general influence on Ontario politics in an earlier period see H. Senior, “Orangeism in Ontario Politics, 1872–1896,” in Oliver Mowat’s Ontario, edited by Donald Swainson (Toronto: Macmillan 1972), 136–53. Perin, Rome in Canada, 227. apf ns v.333 r.154. I am indebted to Matteo Sanfilippo’s astute insights in his paper, “Le projet Pie ix et les archives du Saint-Siège,” delivered with Giovanni Pizzorusso at the conference Recasting Canadian History in the Wider World, Sestri Levante, 5 May 2001. Moir, Church and State, chs. 4 and 5. G.A. Darroch and M.D. Ornstein, “Ethnicity and Class, Transitions over a Decade: Ontario 1861–1871,” in Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers (1984), 114–37. See also Donald H. Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press 1984), ch. 1; Mark McGowan, The Waning of the Green: Catholics, the Irish and Identity in Toronto 1887–1922 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1999), 33. McGowan argues persuasively in his book that the Irish in Toronto by 1920 had fully entered the Toronto polity as part of the culture and not

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36

37

38

39 40 41

as a group apart. Irish newspapers and associations declined with the “waning of the Green”; Duhamel to Scott, 8 Sept. 1907, asv dac 39.11. Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, ch. 4 and Conclusion. On Jubilee riots, see Martin Galvin, “The Jubilee Riots in Toronto, 1875,” Canadian Catholic Historical Association, Report 26 (1959), 93–107. Clarke’s analysis of the event is interesting; see 208–11 of Piety and Nationalism. On the Shiners’ Wars, see Michael Cross, “The Dark Druidical Groves: The Lumber Community and the Commercial Frontier in British North America, to 1854” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Toronto,1968). On the establishment of St Patrick’s Parish see Rosalyn Trigger, “The Role of the Parish in Fostering Irish-Catholic Identity in Nineteenth-Century Montreal” (ma Thesis, McGill University 1997), and Kevin James, “The Saint Patrick’s Society of Montreal: Ethno-Religious Realignment in a Nineteenth-Century National Society (ma Thesis, McGill University 1997). On the Acadian struggles for an Acadian bishop see Léon Thériault, “L’Acadianisation de l’Église catholique en Acadie, 1763–1953,” in Les Acadiens des Maritimes: études thématiques, edited by Jean Daigle (Moncton: Chaire d’Études Acadiennes 1980), 293–369, and Martin Spiegelman, “Race et religion: les Acadiens et la hiérarchie catholique irlandaise du Nouveau Brunswick,” in Société de l’Église catholique, Sessions d’études (1981), 37–56. On Irish-Scottish ethnic conflict among the clergy see the petition by eight priests of Irish origin to J.C. McDonald, Bishop of Charlottetown, 1 November 1907, and Fr. John Murphy to Cardinal Gotti, 26 May 1907, apf ns v.462 r.154. Mary Vipond, for example, shows how “rationalizing” the expansion of Christianity in the West was a significant factor behind the formation of the United Church of Canada. See “Canadian National Consciousness and the Formation of the United Church of Canada,” Committee on Archives of the United Church of Canada, Bulletin 24 (1975), 5–27. Pastoral letter to priests, 14 April 1905, asv dac 72.1c. 9 February 1905 asv dac 66.3. David Gillies, pp, writing to Sbarretti from St Andrew’s parish, a trilingual community of French-, English-, and German-speaking Canadians, in Via Wapella, Saskatchewan, 13 December 1907, asv dac 81.5b: “It is difficult to find English or Irish priests, speaking French or German who would be willing to labor on the missions in this diocese. I have been here for the last twenty-three years, and I failed in my endeavors to get a

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42 43

44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52

Priest, speaking English and Gaelic, to come and help me in this parish.” Foley to Sbarretti, 20 July 1909, asv dac 39.32. Raymond Huel, “The Irish-French Conflict in Catholic Episcopal Nominations: The Western Sees and the Struggle for Domination within the Church,” Canadian Catholic Historical Association, Study Sessions (1975), 51–70; Matteo Sanfilippo, “Essor urbain et création de nouveaux diocèses dans l’Ouest: la correspondence des délégués apostoliques 1902–1918”; Choquette, “English-French Relations in the Catholic Community,” in Creed and Culture, edited by Murphy and Stortz, 14–17. On the French Catholic presence in the West see Robert Painchaud, Un rêve français dans le peuplement de la Prairie (St Boniface: Éditions des Plaines 1986); McGowan, Waning of the Green, 237ff. Perin, Rome in Canada: 157. See ch. 5 of that volume for his revisionist view of Langevin. Sbarretti to Gotti, 3 February 1908, asv dac 71. Sbarretti to Merry del Val, 11 May 1909, asv dac 73.1g. Giovanni Pizzorusso, “Un diplomate du Vatican en Amérique: Donato Sbarretti à Washington, la Havane et Ottawa (1893–1910),” Annali accademici canadesi 9 (1993), 5–33; Tremblay, “Mgr. Pellegrino Stagni,” 16ff. Stagni had lived in England for many years, at first to complete his studies following Rome’s suppression of religious orders in 1873. J.T. Foley to Alfred A. Sinnott (Secretary to the Apostolic Delegate), 29 June 1909, asv dac 39.32. Drummond to Sbarretti, memo, 22 July 1903, asv dac 75.2. Cherrier to Sbarretti, 16 January 1905, asv dac 75.10. Barrett to Sbarretti, 20 January 1905, asv dac 75.10. For an excellent discussion of this see Gaffield, Language, Schooling and Cultural Conflict, ch. 6. The Census of Canada showed an increase of the French-origin population in Ontario from 158,671 in 1891 to 248,275 in 1921 (a 56.5 per cent increase). The total population of Ontario rose from 2,182,947 in 1891 to 2,993,662 in 1921 (a 37.1 per cent increase). The Catholic population rose from 390,304 to 576,178 in the same period (32.3 per cent). While the population of French origin rose from about 5.3 per cent to about 8.5 per cent of the total Ontario population between 1891 and 1921, the percentage of the Catholic population of French origin in the province rose from about 30 per cent to about 45 per cent in the same period. If we factor in the new immigration of European Catholics in this time period, it is clear that the percentage of Catholics of Irish origin in the province overall was decreasing. Nowhere

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55 56 57

58 59

60

61

was this more evident than in Ottawa, where the Catholic population of French origin rose from about two-thirds of the diocese in 1891 to over three-quarters by 1921. Merchant’s Report noted that there were 223 separate and 122 public French-language or bilingual French-English schools in Ontario in 1912 with 25,805 students. See F.W. Merchant, Report on the Condition of English-French Schools in the Province of Ontario. McNeil to Stagni, 11 October 1915, asv dac 128.1/1. Cardinal Bégin to Cardinal Gotti of Propaganda Fide in 1907, apf ns v.462 r.154. “French-Canadians, thanks to their marvellous fertility [would continue to] spill over into the neighbouring provinces and notably Ontario, this fortress of Protestantism ... on the contrary [the Irish], no doubt for good reasons, do not practice the divine precept, ‘grow and multiply and fill the earth.’” Macdonell to Stagni, 9 November 1912, asv dac 2.1. Stagni to Macdonell, 27 March 1913, asv dac 2.2. Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, The Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec (Toronto: Gage Publishing 1983), ch. 13; Walker, Catholic Education, 2:287–9; J.I. Little, “French Canada and the Western Schools Question,” Acadiensis 5 (1976), 149–54. Colman J. Barry, The Catholic Church and German Americans (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company 1953), 10–11. Philip Gleason, The Conservative Reformers: German-American Catholics and the Social Order (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press), chs. 1 and 2. The Lucerne Memorial was presented to Pope Leo xiii by Cahensly in 1891. It was drawn up the previous December at a meeting of Catholic emigration societies affiliated with the German St Raphaels-Verein (founded by Cahensly). The memorial called for national parishes, the teaching of the children’s native language in parochial schools tied to the national parish, and, most significantly, bishops for the various immigrant nationalities in host countries. The classic study on the nineteenth-century German-American Catholics and on Cahenslyism is Barry’s The Catholic Church and German Americans. See also his two articles, “Cahenslyism: The First Stage, 1883–1891,” Catholic Historical Review 31 (1946), 389–413, and “Cahenslyism: The Second Chapter, 1891–1910,” Catholic Historical Review 23 (1946), 302–40. Robert Anthony Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press 1985), 60–64. Closely tied to this was the question of whether national

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123 Notes to pages xxxvii–xxxix

62 63 64

65 66

67

68

parishes and traditional popular piety from the ethnic group’s homeland assimilated immigrants to American culture or carved out an ethnoCatholic identity. See, for example, Silvano Tomasi, Piety and Power: The Role of Italian Parishes in the New York Metropolitan Area (Staten Island: Center for Migration Studies 1975), and Anthony J. Kuzniewski, Faith and Fatherland: The Polish Church War in Wisconsin 1896–1918 (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press 1980). Unlike the older school of John Tracy Ellis, Will Herberg, and Sidney Ahlstrom, who emphasized the assimilating role of the churches, Victor Greene contends that the debate among intellectuals and leaders over the place of Catholicism in Polish America led Polish Americans to develop an ethnoreligious identity. See For God and Country: The Rise of Polish and Lithuanian Self-Consciousness in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1975). Barry, The Catholic Church and German Americans, 293 and Choquette, Language and Religion, 71. Barry, The Catholic Church and German Americans, 135–6. Barry, The Catholic Church and German Americans, 260. Tardivel’s book, La situation religieuse aux États-Unis, was published in Montreal in 1900. See also Pierre Savard, Jules-Paul Tardivel, la France et les États-Unis 1851–1905 (Quebec: Les Presses de L’Université Laval 1967), 320ff. Barry, The Catholic Church and German Americans, 258. Fallon to Stagni, 5 June 1910. Diocese of London Archives, Archbishop Fallon Papers, Drawer 2, Correspondence with Apostolic Delegates 1910. It is noteworthy that Cardinal Bégin, like Cahensly, called for national bishops (that is, bishops for nationalities) in Canada, saying that it had worked for the Byzantine Rite Ruthenians (Ukrainians). Cardinal De Lai confidentially warned Archbishop Stagni that Cardinal Bégin had written the Pope on the matter. De Lai to Stagni, 20 August 1917, asv dac 128.3, Affari generali, Scuole bilingue dell’Ontario 1917. Perin, Rome in Canada, ch. 6. asv has numerous files regarding the question of immigrants in the Archdiocese of St Boniface. See also Mark McGowan, “Toronto’s English-Speaking Catholics, Immigration, and the Making of a Canadian Catholic Identity, 1900–30,” in Creed and Culture, edited by Murphy and Stortz, 204–45. Thomas A. Tweed, Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (New York: Oxford University Press 1997), 84. The literature on diaspora studies is extensive. Among the more interesting studies are Matthew Frye Jacobson, Special Sorrows: The Diasporic

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124 Notes to pages xxxix–l

69

70 71

72 73 74

75

76

77 78 79

Imagination of Irish, Polish and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1995); William Saffran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1 (1991), 83–99; and James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9 (1994), 302–38. The term was used in the title of a collection on the Quebec and Acadian migrations in North America. The Quebec and Acadian Diasporas in North America, edited by Savard and Breton. Clarke, Piety and Nationalism, ch 10. Ramsay Cook, Provincial Autonomy, Minority Rights and the Compact Theory, 1867–1921, vol. 4 of Studies of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (Ottawa: Information Canada 1969). Flannery O’Connor, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” Collected Works (New York: Library of America 1988), 861. Tremblay, “Mgr. Pellegrino Stagni,” 16–24. Indeed, Donato Sbarretti, Stagni’s predecessor, wrote in 1912 to Cardinal De Lai at the latter’s request. He was critical of Fallon for his imprudence but he also felt that Fallon was unfortunate (with the leaking of the memo). Sbarretti was well aware that Rome was very upset with Fallon’s polemical attitude regarding bilingual schools. See Sbarretti to De Lai, 30 July 1912, and Sbarretti to Sinnott, 31 October 1910, asv dac 21.1/1. On exogamy of men of Irish Catholic origin see Madeline A. Richard, Ethnic Groups and Marital Choices: Ethnic History and Marital Assimilation in Canada, 1871 and 1971 (Vancouver: ubc Press 1991), 114–25. Richard’s tables show us that Irish Catholic religious exogamy in Canada increased from about 3 per cent in 1871 to about 16 per cent in 1971. Stagni was probably correct that there was no need to overreact to the new tendency towards mixed marriages. There had been a current in the Catholic Church that had advocated Catholic agricultural settlements in North America at the turn of the century. See, for example, Painchaud, Un rêve français, ch. 5, or Pietro Pisani, Il Canadà presente e futuro in relazione all’emigrazione italiana (Rome: Tip. Dell’Unione coop. Editrice 1909). Charlebois was pastor of Ste-Famille Parish in Ottawa and a leading figure in the acfeo. Tremblay, “Mgr. Pellegrino Stagni,” 313–17. Tremblay, “Mgr. Pellegrino Stagni,” 335–46; Walker, Catholic Education, ch. 11. On resolution of the crisis see Peter Oliver, “The Resolution of the Ontario Bilingual Schools Crisis, 1919–1929,” Journal of Canadian Studies 7:1 (1972), 22–45. For a local study, see John D. Jackson,

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125 Notes to pages 10–15 Community and Conflict: A Study of French-English Relations in Ontario, rev. ed. (Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press 1988).

b i li ngual sch o o ls i n o n ta r i o 1 9 1 5 , ed i to r’s no tes 1 The Roman Catholic Separate School Act, 26 Vic. ch. 5, assented to 5 May 1863, also known as the Scott Act. 2 He was perhaps referring to the situations in France, Spain, and Portugal where Catholic schools had suffered setbacks in the previous twenty years. For a general overview of church-state relations around the world at the time, see Hubert Jedin and John Dolan, eds., The Church in the Industrial Age (New York: Crossroad 1981), vol. 9 of the series History of the Church. 3 See John Moir, Church and State in Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1959). 4 Roman Catholic Separate School Act, 26 Vic. ch. 5, 5 May 1863, sec. 26. 5 Stagni uses the curious term “nationalistic” instead of “ethnic.” I assume he wanted to avoid the term “national” because that would refer to a national (or Canadian) school system, yet the term “ethnic,” as we understand it, was not used at the time. By racial schools, again, he is referring to ethnic schools. In fact, although there was no legal provision for ethnic or linguistic schools, Ontario’s Protestant and Coloured Separate School Act (22 Vic. ch. 65) provided for “coloured” schools for Blacks. 6 The regulation was adopted in the Ontario Legislature on 4 April 1890, regulation 12(2), even if French- and German-language classes had been allowed since 1851. 7 Congrès d’éducation des canadiens-français d’Ontario, Rapport officiel des séances tenues à Ottawa, du 18 au 20 janvier 1910 (Ottawa: Association Canadienne-Française d’Education 1910), 147. 8 “Normal” schools referred to schools from which students graduated with a teaching certificate. 9 Congrès d’éducation des canadiens-français d’Ontario, Rapport officiel, 151–2. 10 Stagni is referring to a letter from Charron and others that was delivered by Bishop Latulipe to Cardinal De Lai in the late summer of 1915. De Lai refers to the letter as being “abbastanza calma,” quite calm or mild. De Lai to Stagni, 13 September 1915, asv dac 123.4. 11 Mgr N.Z. Lorrain, Bishop of Pembroke, and Mgr Elie-Anicet Latulipe, Vicar-Apostolic of Temiscaming. Ottawa was (and is) what in canon (Catholic Church) law is referred to as an ecclesiastical province

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12 13

14 15

16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23

24

25 26 27

whose centre is an archepiscopal see. A number of dioceses or other jurisdictions are within that province, in this case (in 1915), the Apostolic Vicariate of Temiscaming and the Diocese of Pembroke. Hanna was the provincial secretary. Quoted in Fallon to Stagni, Statement of the Right Reverend Michael F. Fallon, Bishop of London, Ont., Canada on the Bilingual School Question 29 March 1911. Dr J.O. Reaume, minister of public works. I was unable to locate the source of this quotation, but its substance was related in a letter from Fallon to Stagni, dated 26 May 1913, asv dac 20.20/2. The motion was made by George Howard Ferguson and passed unanimously on 22 March 1911. Latulipe to Stagni, 19 November 1913, asv dac 123.1. Both Stagni and his predecessor, Donato Sbarretti, were readier to tolerate mixed marriages than most Canadian bishops. For a discussion of tensions between the Toronto archbishop, Desmond O’Connor, and the Apostolic Delegate on this matter see Mark McGowan, The Waning of the Green: Catholics, the Irish and Identity in Toronto, 1887–1922 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1999), 104–17. The gathering was held at the Monument National to help the so-called “blessés d’Ontario.” M.J. Whelan was pastor of St Patrick’s Church in Ottawa and this letter appeared in the Ottawa Evening Journal on 13 February 1915. For a brief background on Whelan, see Robert Choquette, Language and Religion A History of English-French Conflict in Ontario (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 1975), 186. La Verité, 31 July 1915, p.11. Stagni to Latulipe, 22 November 1913, asv dac 123.1. The ad limina visit is made by bishops from an ecclesiastical province or number of provinces in a country or region to Rome, usually every five years. During the visit they report and are interrogated on the state of their dioceses. The two Oblates, Charles Charlebois and Albert Lortie, were close collaborators of Le Droit. Charlebois in particular was the main inspiration of the paper from its founding in 1913 until the late 1920s. The Privy Council announced its decision on 2 November 1916 and did indeed uphold Regulation 17. “There shall be new things even worse than what came before.” Father Charlebois continued to be involved with Le Droit for over anoth-

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127 Notes to pages 98–104 er decade. Stagni informed Cardinal De Lai in April 1916 that Lortie had been distanced from Ottawa and that nothing was being heard from him. Stagni to De Lai, 7 April 1916, asv dac 124.1.

th e sepa r ate s c h o o l s q u e st i o n i n o ttawa , ed i to r ’s n o t e s 1 The Privy Council announced its decision on 2 November 1916 and upheld the old board. 2 “Even where the civil laws allow contributions to be made to either Catholic or neutral schools, those Catholics who disdain the Catholic schools and do not hesitate to support public schools are in grave sin and show themselves to be unworthy of the sacraments.” This is a canon on elementary schools from the Acts and Decretals of the First Plenary Council of Quebec (1907).

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128 Notes to pages 00–00

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Index

Ad limina visit 44, 102 Affari vos 85 Archdiocese of Ottawa xvii, xxxiii, xxxv, xlvi, 80 Archdiocese of Toronto xvii, 32, 43 Archdiocese of Kingston 43 Archivum Secretum Vaticanum xvi Association canadiennefrançaise d’éducation d’Ontario (acfeo) xviii, xlii–xliii, xlvii, 8, 26, 28, 29, 50–2, 54, 74, 77, 78 Barrett, J.K. xxxii Bégin, Louis Nazaire (Cardinal Archbishop of Quebec) xiii, xxii, xxiii, xxxiv, xlvi, 35, 36, 38, 66, 69, 109 Belcourt, Napoléon A. 7, 23, 24, 30, 36, 51, 61 Benedict xv, Pope xiii, xiv, xv, xxiv, xlix, 109, 114 bishops, their role in the

bilingual schools question: Ontario 33–4; Quebec 35–8 Boer War xx Bourassa, Henri xviii, xl, 38 Bourget, Ignace (Bishop of Montreal) xxvii Bourne, Francis (Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster) xviii, xxv, 38 British North America Act 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 22, 63, 64, 9 Brown, George xx Bruchési, Paul (Bishop of Montreal) 34, 35, 36, 66, 69, 100 Cahensly, Peter Paul xxxvi–xxxviii Cahenslyism xxxv–xxxviii Catholic Record xxviii Catholic Register 50 Charlebois, Rev. Charles xlvii, 52, 57 Charron, A.T. 15 Cherrier, Rev. Alphonse A. xxxii

Choquette, Robert xvii Christian Brothers xvii Clarke, Brian xx, xxi, xxvi Clear Grits xx clergy, public involvement in the Ontario bilingual schools question 39, 40, 52, 55 Commisso divinitus xlix Congrès de l’association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario (acfeo) xviii, xlii–xliii, 12–15, 17, 43 Conscription (1917) xx Conservative party xvii, xxiv Council of Public Instruction xvi Crysler, Ont. xxxiv Darroch, Gordon A. xxvi De Lai, Giovanni (Cardinal Secretary of the Consistorial Congregation) xv, xxiv, xlviii Department of Education, Ontario xvi, xviii, xxiv, 10, 12, 27, 39, 42

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130 Index Devoir, Le 39 diaspora studies xxxix Diocese of Alexandria xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxv, 80 Diocese of London xxxv, 80 Diocese of Sault Ste Marie xvii, xxxiv, 49, 80 Doherty, C.J. xxvi Dolan, Jay P. xxiii Droit, Le xlvii, 26, 29, 36, 37, 47, 48, 50, 51, 52–5, 56, 76, 77, 93, 99 Drummond Lewis, sj xxxii Duhamel, Joseph Thomas (Archbishop of Ottawa) xxvi, 12, 37

lary Bishop, Montreal) 34 German Catholics in the United States xxxvi–xxxviii German immigrants and bilingual schools xvi, xvii, 12 Gleason, Philip xxxvi Gotti, Girolamo (Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda Fide) xxiii Gratton, J.D. xvii

Evening Journal (Ottawa) 30

immigrants or their descendants: German, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Galician, or Belgian xxiv, xxv, 24, 82 International Eucharistic Congress, Montreal (1910) xviii, xxxviii, 16, 49 Irish Catholics xix–xxiii, xxv

Fallon, Michael (Bishop of London) xviii, xix, xliii, xliv, xlix, 15–16, 17 Fallowfield, Ont. xxviii Fitzpatrick, Sir Charles xxvi Foley, Rev. J.T. xxviii–xxix, xxxi–xxxii Franco-americains xxxv French bilingual schools xiii, xvi, xvii, xix, xxiv, 12 French-Canadian Educational Association of Ontario: see Association canadienne-française d’éducation d’Ontario French-Canadian migration xxxiii French-Irish conflict in Roman Catholic Church in Canada: in the West xxvii–xxviii, xxix–xxxiii; in Ontario xxviii–xxix, xxxiii–xxxv Gauthier, Charles-Hugh (Archbishop of Ottawa) 16, 43, 100–2, 103 Gauthier, Georges (auxi-

Hanna, W.J. xviii, xliii–xliv, 16 Home Rule xxii Huel, Raymond xxix

Jesuit Estates’ Act controversy xix Jubilee riots xxvi Kulturkampf xxxi Labrecque, MichelThomas (Bishop of Chicoutimi) 35 Landry, Hon. Philippe xlvii, 51, 54, 78, 83 Langevin, Adélard (Archbishop of St Boniface) xxviii, xxix–xxxi, xxxvii, xxxviii, 16, 36 language and faith xxxv–xxxviii, 31–2 languages in Canada, legal status of 6–7; in schools 8–9, 11–12, 62–3 Latulipe, Elie-Anicet

(Vicar-Apostolic of Temiscaming) xix, xlvi, 12, 30, 34, 40, 41, 45, 46, 47, 48, 71, 76 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid xxx Leo xiii, Pope xxiv, xxxvii, 85 Litteris apostolicis xlix Lorrain, N.Z. (Bishop of Pembroke) 12, 43 Lortie, Rev. Albert xlvii, 52, 57 Lucerne Memorial xxxvi, xxxvii Lynch, John Joseph (Archbishop of Toronto) xxii Macdonnell, William (Bishop of Alexandria) xxxiv, xxxv, 72 Maisonville, M.H. xviii, 16 Manitoba schools question xix McNeil, Neil (Archishop of Toronto) xxxiii, 34, 41 Merchant, F.W. xviii, 17–18 Mercier, Honoré xxxvii Merry del Val, Rafael (Cardinal Secretary of the Holy Office) xxiv, 102 Meredith, William xvii mixed marriages xlv–xlvi, 32–3 Mowat, Oliver xvi Naval Acts xx Ne temere decree 49 New Brunswick schools question xxi Northwest Review xxxii Northwest schools question xx, xxi O’Connor, Flannery xli O’Connor, Richard (Bishop of Peterborough) xxvii–xxxviii

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131 Index Orange Order xxiv, 52 Ornstein, Michael D. xxvi Ottawa schools question xxxiii, xlviii–xlvix Ottawa Separate School Board xvii; financial problems 94–8; special board nominated by government (1915) 99 Perin, Roberto xxi, xxx Pius x, Pope 76, 102 Privy Council xvii, 23 Propaganda Fide xv, xxii, xxiii Quebec Act (1774) 22 Reaume, Dr Charles xviii Regulation 17 xiii, xix, xxiv, xliii, xliv, xlvi, xlix, l, 18–20; resistance to 20–31, 36, 39, 47, 53, 55, 71, 93, 97, 98 religious schools 9–11 Riel, Louis xix Ross, George W. xvi Roy, Mgr Emile 34

Sacred Consistorial Congregation xv, xlviii, xlix St Raphael Society xxxviii Sanfilippo, Matteo xxix Sbarretti, Donato (Archbishop, Apostolic Delegate to Canada, 1903–10) xxv, xxx, xxxi school inspectors xliv, 21–2, 27, 29 Scollard, D.J. (Bishop of Sault Ste Marie) 53, 75 Scott, D’Arcy xxvi Separate School Act (Scott Act) (1863) 37, 98 Secret Vatican Archives: see Archivum Secretum Vaticanum Shehyn, Joseph xxxvii Silver, Arthur xxi Stagni, Pellegrino (Archbishop, Apostolic Delegate to Canada, 1910–18) xv, xxv, xxxi, xli–l; role in the matter 40–7; recommendations

regarding the Ontario bilingual schools question 55–8, 72, 74; recommendations regarding the schools question in Ottawa 103–5 Tardivel, Jules xxxvii Treaty of Paris (1763) 22, 61, 64 Tremblay, Donald xlviii, 49 Tweed, Thomas A. xxxix ultramontanism xx University of Ottawa question xvii–xviii Uniate Catholics xxxviii Urbanianum College xlii Verité, La xxxvii Whelan, Rev. M.J. xlvi, 37 Whitney, Sir James xlvi, 15, 75

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132 Index