Conrad Black’s conversion story…
…makes for some darn interesting reading. In particular, his reflections on the Church’s role in the province of Quebec’s history are…informative:
When I moved to Quebec in 1966, I was astounded by the omnipresence there of Roman Catholicism. In researching my book about Maurice Duplessis, I steeped myself in the relations of Church and state in traditional Quebec, and interviewed many prominent clergymen. I had had the usual English-Canadian view that the Church had allied itself with reactionary political elements to slow the progress of Quebec and keep it in superstitious retardation.
There certainly had been reactionary, and even racist and quasi-fascist elements in the Quebec clergy, but they never predominated.
My research revealed that only the Church had sustained the French language in Quebec, the demographic survival of French Canadians, and the prevalence of literacy, provision of health care, and even most capital formation for nearly two centuries after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759.
Of course, Quebec had been a priest-ridden society, with a great deal of meddlesome, priggish excess, but with all the secularisation that has occurred in Quebec, relatively few problems of deviant behaviour have been unearthed or even alleged.
In Quebec as in France, those who persist in the practice of the faith are not the oldest, poorest, most desperate, though those are there, but a very random group, including elegant young women, evidently successful men, bright students, unselfconscious, curious, and assured. The spiritual edifice of the Church functions obliviously to market share, and there is a common strain of intelligent and hopeful faith, regardless of fashion, age, or economics. Whether in packed and mighty cathedrals, like St Peter’s or St Patrick’s (New York), a simple wooden building like the Indian church in Sept-Îles, Quebec, in primitive religious structures in Cameroon, at fashionable resorts like Biarritz, St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Portofino, or even Palm Beach (“The Lord is my shepherd, even in Palm Beach,” as a guest homilist proclaimed some years ago), or in the improvised chapel in my prison as I write, there is a discernible, but almost inexpressible denominator that unites communicants. I am still impressed by the purposeful spring in the step of people approaching a Catholic Church as the hour of a service peals.
I remember being shown a video by Dr. Hans Machel, a geology professor and militant evangelist for atheism at the University of Alberta, in which a French-speaking Quebecois librarian attempted to present the image of a province stunted and lagging centuries behind in its literary collection because of the meddlesome Church.
It wasn’t the sort of thing that seemed even remotely plausible, and the above would certainly seem to paint a rather different picture of things.
And in balancing the two competing accounts against each other, Black’s seems the more plausible, in no small part because the Church played a very similar role to what he describes in bringing Europe through what used to be called “the Dark Ages.”
Not that it’s at all surprising to learn that a militant atheist like Dr. Machel is not above using stale polemics and outright falsehoods in presenting atheism to his students (which is relevant to geology how, by the way?) — truth is obviously not on his side. Even so, the brazenness of the lie, in this case, is…surprising.
But I digress.
Do give Black’s story a full read-through, good reader. In truth, I didn’t know the man was Catholic before this point; it’s not what one expects to hear from a media mogul, I guess, especially in Canada. That said, it’s nice to find, and Black tells his tale with an unexpected humility.
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