Québec's Beauty in Stillness (Part 3): Faith in the Absence of Religion
It might be strange to think of the absence of religion in a place like Québec: even though the province is now officially secular (and policy takes it to an extreme that has been roundly criticized by the rest of the country), religion is a near-constant presence in its architecture. Since much of the population was historically Roman Catholic, there is no shortage of churches, crosses, and other forms of Christian iconography scattered throughout the landscape.
Instead, when I speak of "faith in the absence of religion", I am referring more to myself. That seems to be the thing about this "Beauty in Stillness" series: three parts, each with its own distinct lens. In the first post about Vieux-Québec, I brought up the questions I had about "great man history"; in the second post about Montréal, I wanted to caution against looking at Indigenous-settler relations through the idyllic lens of the fur trade.
This time, though, while Canada as a country is still in the midst of its reckoning regarding the Indian residential school system, including calling for the Catholic Church to take responsibility for its role in that...I want to do something different. Something far more personal.
See, despite stating in my previous blog post that I am a Christian, it would be more realistic for me to say that I'm one of those people who would, for lack of a better term, describe themselves as "brought up Christian". However, unlike so many others who have wound up leaving the faith altogether - becoming agnostics or atheists - I still believe in the values and doctrines that I grew up with. It is the Church, not the faith, that I have come to reject as an adult: a Church that I saw as hypocritical and worldly, more interested in congregational size than scriptural truth.
Now, I'm not Catholic. I never was. I'm Protestant, somewhere in that vague group of denominations commonly lumped together as "evangelical". Which means that my views toward Catholicism - and Catholic churches - have always been...complicated. In addition to the standard rhetoric about how Catholicism was "idolatrous" and "not really Christianity", I was a history nerd as a child, so I wound up reading about the whole long series of interdenominational wars and conflicts that sprang up in Europe in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation: the Spanish Inquisition, "Bloody Mary", the persecution of the Huguenots....
In short, as a child, I was genuinely afraid of stepping into a Catholic church. Not because of our differences in belief, but because I felt, from the start, that I could only ever enter it as an outsider. Someone with no right to be there. A heretic.
What that childhood self could never have anticipated, though, is that someday, years later, I would feel the same sort of fear and trepidation entering a Protestant church. And that feeling would be magnified so much more. Never mind what I actually believe: in the eyes of an institution that equates church attendance and outward signs of piety with inner belief, I would not be a believer. I would not even be a heretic. I'd be an apostate, and that is ten times worse.
Yet, ironically, it's because of that shift in my attitude towards my own Protestant faith that I am now able, possibly, to view a Catholic church - like the many ones I came across in Québec and Montréal during my trip in October 2014 - through a more neutral lens. I would still be an outsider, but in a more generic sense: knowledgeable enough to recognize what I see, but with no real emotional strings attached.
So with that in mind, I did venture to go inside a few times. As for what I learned about myself in the process, suivez-moi and you'll find out.
(Disclaimer: This specific "Beauty in Stillness" series combines places and experiences from two trips to Montréal and Québec City that I took in October 2014 and August 2015. In other words: everything in this post predates the COVID-19 pandemic, and in no way do I condone traveling in violation of public health guidelines! Also, note that I have previously written about the 2014 trip in particular in an older blog I ran prior to this one, so any overlap is purely because of that and not because of any plagiarism.)
Basilique Notre-Dame de Montréal
Mind you, the church really was as dim as my pictures suggest, but that meant that what few illuminated focal points there were really stood out. The one thing that I do wish in hindsight was that the space could have been lit up just a little bit more, as it appears that many surfaces were actually richly painted and decorated.
Also, classical music nerd that I am, there is one thing that I will always look for whenever going into a church this size: its organ. This one in particular is a Canadian instrument - a Casavant - and although no-one was playing it at the time I was there, I could easily imagine how thrilling it would be to heard what its music ringing out through such a cavernous space.
And that's the thing.
As a child, I would have found a place like this absolutely intimidating: there is a solemn majesty to the Basilique Notre-Dame that, more so than any Protestant church I grew up attending, would have made a younger version of myself really feel like I was stepping into a divine presence. As for now, despite believing that, in many ways, a church building like this is an empty shell - a visual representation of institutionalized religion rather than personal faith - there was something awe-inspiring about this place. As soon as I took that first step into the sanctuary, I felt this instinctive hush come over me: I slowed down my steps, trying to make them as silent as possible; I did not dare to speak as I looked around me; I even felt just the tiniest guilty tug at my conscience that I was there to take photos rather than to worship myself.
All this, in a Catholic church.
Why?
In truth, I do not know. That feeling seems to go against just about everything I've said I thought or believed about the Catholic faith thus far. I suppose, in some ways, I still hold some form of reverence for the concept of sacred space: even though I know and believe, as most Christians do, that God is everywhere, there is something different about entering a place that is dedicated solely to that divine presence.
Before I go on to the next part, I do want to point out that the Basilique Notre-Dame in Montréal also has a secondary chapel. Initially built in the 19th century, as the main sanctuary was, the current architecture is from the 1970s, when this portion was rebuilt after the original was destroyed in a fire.
Basilique Notre-Dame de Québec and the Séminaire de Québec
I can't remember now, almost seven years after the fact, whether I was alone in the Basilique in Montréal. However, what I can say is that here in Québec, as revealed in these photographs, I wasn't. The church was not packed while I was there; however, there were still always people scattered throughout the sanctuary. Whether these were local parishioners, pilgrims or tourists, I do not know. What I do know, though, is that this does reinforce for me the role that a church - either as a building or as an institutional - could serve as the centre for a community's social life.
And for the the Basilique de Notre-Dame in Québec, there is further evidence of that once you step outside.
This gate here, just next to the Basilique Notre-Dame de Québec, marks the way into what was once the Séminaire de Québec: an institution that started off as a place to train students for the priesthood during the French colonization, but that also expanded into a general boys' boarding school after the British conquest. Eventually, it was also from here that the Université Laval (Laval University), North America's first Catholic French-language university was founded in the 19th century: part of the buildings here are still affiliated with Laval today, with the rest of the complex now run as a private Catholic high school.
In all honesty, although I did not go inside in either case, the site of the Séminaire was one of my favourite little quiet spots during both trips (October 2014 and August 2015, the latter of which is where the sunnier photos are from, actually) to Québec City. I liked how it was tucked away behind a gate like this: it was simultaneously a border against trespassers, but also an invitation to peek through the bars and imagine what it must have been like as a centre for learning through the centuries.
However, I never bargained on hindsight, nor the myriad questions concerning religion's role in education that it would bring.
On the one hand, I can't deny the fact that religious institutions, like the Catholic Church at large, were behind many of our world's oldest surviving educational institutions. Even more so once I consider that in a place like Canada, where so much of the infrastructure came from European colonization, it was on account of the Church that higher education - and the promise of enlightenment and upward social mobility it brings - was even possible at all.
Yet, on the other hand, I cannot discount how this came at the price of centuries and millennia of Indigenous knowledge: no less valuable, but cast aside and denigrated solely due to it falling outside of either the Classical Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian contexts of the colonizers. And that's just when Church-based education goes well and no-one tries to abuse the power that divine right supposedly brings.
Sadly, we all know by now what the result is when that is the case.
As I mentioned in my most recent blog post, I don't believe I have the answers in terms of reconciliation with Canada's Indigenous peoples: this is a community that has been denied its voice for far too long, and I, as an outsider, should not claim to speak for them, no matter how well-intentioned that drive might be.
However, where I do have stake in this, personally, is as a Christian. Not a Catholic, no, but then again, it's not only Catholicism that has the innate systemic and institutional flaws that seem to plague all religions: the slippery slope of, as one of my friends put it to me once, "Using man's ways to do God's work."
And that, mes amis, takes me right back to where this blog post started: faith in the absence of religion.
More specifically: a site that, while not religious per se, does give me a lot to think about nonetheless.
Québec's Cross of Sacrifice
I came across this monument, a memorial to Québécois soldiers who had lost their lives in WWI, WWII and the Korean War, on my first day in Québec City during the October 2014 trip. Situated near the Plains of Abraham, just outside of the walls of Vieux-Québec, it caught my eye as a still, quiet and solemn place to stop and reflect.
I passed by it several times during the trip - understandable since we parked the car nearby - and in doing so, I noticed something: a couple of bouquets, left quietly at the base.
Now I am sure that, as a war memorial, the Cross of Sacrifice sees no shortage of offerings left by those seeking to honour loved ones and veterans. However, this time, the flowers were different, if for no other reason than because I, and many other Canadians, knew exactly whom they were left for.
Corporal Nathan Cirillo was standing guard at Canada's National War Memorial in Ottawa on the morning of October 22, 2014 when he was gunned down in what turned out to be the prelude of an attempted terrorist attack on Parliament. The trip that I took to Québec was just a few days after his death - I even saw the funeral procession on my way there - and many Canadians were still reeling from what had happened.
So when I saw these flowers that had been left by mourners, right at the base of a monument engraved with Je me souviens (I remember), I took these photos as my own personal form of remembering.
What does this have to do with faith? I don't know if either Corporal Cirillo or the anonymous person who left the flowers was religious, but honestly, that's not what matters. Instead, I'm struck by the fact that one person died protecting and standing for something bigger than himself, and another person chose to honour that.
Don't misunderstand me: I do not think country is any more worthy a cause than religion. Both have their pitfalls, their corruptions, their blind fanatics who will willingly trample upon others to promote them. However, deep down inside, whether it is true or not, I want to hope that all three of us - the soldier, the mourner, and I - are driven by greater things: by courage in the face of evil, by selfless sacrifice, and by the love for justice and for others that they both require.
And that, mes amis, matters more to me than any religion.
What's Next?
Honestly, I'm not sure yet. All I know is that this has been the final installment of my three-part "Québec's Beauty in Stillness" series. But whether I move on to writing about yet another part of the world, or switch gears to another way to look at "little big things"...well, we'll just have to see where the muse strikes.
But until then, à bientôt!
The above blog post is part of the ongoing series Beauty in Stillness, which looks at quiet locations in some of the world's busiest places. To access a master list for this and other series, click here.
Image Credits
All photographs (c) Kitty Na
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