CHAPTER 7
1657-1668.  

THE DISPUTED BISHOPRIC.

CANADA, gasping under the Iroquois tomahawk, might, one would suppose, have thought her cup of tribulation full, and, sated with inevitable woe, have sought consolation from the wrath without in a holy calm within.  Not so, however; for while the heathen raged at the door, discord rioted at the hearthstone.  Her domestic quarrels were wonderful in number, diversity, and bitterness.  There was the standing quarrel of Montreal and Quebec, the quarrels of priests with one another, of priests with the governor, and of the governor with the intendant, besides ceaseless wranglings of rival traders and rival peculators.

Some of these disputes were local and of no special significance; while others are very interesting, because, on a remote and obscure theatre, they represent, sometimes in striking forms, the contending passions and principles of a most important epoch of history.  To begin with one which even to this day has left a root of bitterness behind it.

The association of pious enthusiasts who had founded Montreal1 was reduced in 1657 to a remnant of five or six persons, whose ebbing zeal and overtaxed purses were no longer equal to the devout but arduous enterprise.  They begged the priests of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice to take it off their hands.  The priests consented; and, though the conveyance of the island of Montreal to these its new proprietors did not take effect till some years later, four of the Sulpitian fathers  Queylus, Souart, Galine"e, and Allet  came out to the colony and took it in charge.  Thus far Canada had had no bishop, and the Sulpitians now aspired to give it one from their own brotherhood.  Many years before, when the Re'collets had a foothold in the colony, they too, or at least some of them, had cherished the hope of giving Canada a bishop of their own.  As for the Jesuits, who for nearly thirty years had of themselves constituted the Canadian church, they had been content thus far to dispense with a bishop; for having no rivals in the field, they had felt no need of episcopal support.

The Sulpitians put forward Queylus as their candidate for the new bishopric.  The assembly of French clergy approved, and Cardinal Mazarin .himself seemed to sanction, the nomination.  The Jesuits saw that their time of action was come.  It was they who had borne the heat and burden of the day, the toils, privations, and martyrdoms, while as yet the Sulpitians had done nothing and endured nothing.  If any body of ecclesiastics was to have the nomination of a bishop, it clearly belonged to them, the Jesuits.  Their might, too, matched their right.  They were strong at court; Mazarin withdrew his assent, and the Jesuits were invited to name a bishop to their liking.

Meanwhile the Sulpitians, despairing of the bishopric, had sought their solace elsewhere.  Ships bound for Canada had usually sailed from ports within the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Rouen, and the departing missionaries had received their ecclesiastical powers from him, till he had learned to regard Canada as an outlying section of his diocese.  Not unwilling to assert his claims, he now made Queylus his vicar-general for all Canada, thus clothing him with episcopal powers, and placing him over the heads of the Jesuits.  Queylus, in effect though not in name a bishop, left his companion Souart in the spiritual charge of Montreal, came down to Quebec, announced his new dignity, and assumed the curacy of the parish.  The Jesuits received him at first with their usual urbanity, an exercise of self-control rendered more easy by their knowledge that one more potent than Queylus would soon arrive to supplant him.

The vicar of the Archbishop of Rouen was a man of many virtues, devoted to good works, as he understood them; rich, for the Sulpitians were under no vow of poverty; generous in almsgiving, busy, indefatigable, overflowing with zeal, vivacious in temperament and excitable in temper, impatient of opposition, and, as it seems, incapable, like his destined rival, of seeing any way of doing good but his own.  Though the Jesuits were outwardly cour-teous, their partisans would not listen to the new curb's sermons, or listened only to find fault; and germs of discord grew vigorously in the parish of Quebec.  Prudence was not among the virtues of Queylus.  He launched two sermons against the Jesuits, in which he likened himself to Christ and them to the Pharisees.  "Who," he supposed them to say, " is this Jesus, so 'beloved of the people, who comes to cast discredit on us, who for thirty or forty years have governed church and state here, with none to dispute us?" He denounced such of his hearers as came to pick flaws in his discourse, and told them it would be better for their souls if they lay in bed at home, sick of a "good quartan fever." His ire was greatly kindled by a letter of the Jesuit Pijart, which fell into his hands through a female adherent, the pious Madame d'Ailleboust, and in which that father declared that he, Queylus, was waging war on him and his brethren more savagely than the Iroquois.  "He was as crazy at sight of a Jesuit," writes an adverse biographer, "as a mad dog at sight of water." He cooled, however, on being shown certain papers which proved that his position was neither so strong nor so secure as he had supposed; and the governor, Argenson, at length persuaded him to retire to Montreal.

The queen-mother, Anne of Austria, always inclined to the Jesuits, had invited Father Le Jeune, who was then in France, to make choice of a bishop for Canada.  It was not an easy task.  No Jesuit was eligible, for the sage policy of Loyola had excluded members of the order from the bishopric.  The signs of the times portended trouble for the Canadian church, and there was need of a bishop who would assert her claims and fight her battles.  Such a man could not be made an instrument of the Jesuits; therefore there was double need that he should be one with them in sympathy and purpose.

They made a sagacious choice.  Le Jeune presented to the queen-mother the name of Franfois Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, Abb6 de Montigny.

Laval, for by this name he was thenceforth known, belonged to one of the proudest families of Europe, and, churchman as he was, there is much in his career to remind us that in his veins ran the blood of the stern Constable of France, Anne de Mont-rnorency.  Nevertheless, his thoughts from childhood had turned towards the Church, or, as his biographers will have it, all his aspirations were heavenward.  He received the tonsure at the age of nine.  The Jesuit Bagot confirmed and moulded his youthful predilections; and at a later period he was one of a band of young zealots formed under the auspices of Bernieres de Louvigni, royal treasurer at Caen, who, though a layman, was reputed almost a saint.  It was Bernieres who had borne the chief part in the pious fraud of the pretended marriage through which Madame de la Peltrie escaped from her father's roof to become foundress of the Ursulines of Quebec.  He had since renounced the world, and dwelt at Caen in a house attached to an Ursuline convent, and known as the "Hermitage." Here he lived like a monk, in the midst of a community of young priests and devotees, who looked to him as their spiritual director, and whom he trained in the maxims and practices of the most extravagant, or, as his admirers say, the most sublime ultramontane piety.

The conflict between the Jesuits and the Jansenists was then at its height.  The Jansenist doctrines of election and salvation by grace, which sapped the power of the priesthood and impugned the authority of the Pope himself in his capacity of holder of the keys of heaven, were to the Jesuits an abomination; while the rigid morals of the Jansenists stood in stern contrast to the pliancy of Jesuit casuistry.  Bernieres and his disciples were zealous, not to say fanatical, partisans of the Jesuits.  There is a long account of the " Hermitage" and its inmates from the pen of the famous Jansenist Nicole,  an opponent, it is true, but one whose qualities of mind and character give weight to his testimony.

"In this famous Hermitage," says Nicole, "the late Sieur de Bernieres brought up a number of young men, to whom he taught a sort of sublime and transcendental devotion called passive prayer, because in it the mind does not act at all, but merely receives the divine operation; and this devotion, is the source of all those visions and revelations in which the Hermitage is so prolific." In short, he and his disciples were mystics of the most exalted type.  Nicole pursues: " After having thus subtilized their minds, and almost sublimed them into vapor, he rendered them capable of detecting Jansenists under any disguise, insomuch that some of his followers said that they knew them by the scent, as dogs know their game; but the aforesaid Sieur de Bernieres denied that they had so subtile a sense of smell, and said that the mark by which he detected Jansenists was their disapproval of his teachings or their opposition to the Jesuits."

The zealous band at the Hermitage was aided in its efforts to extirpate error by a sort of external association in the city of Caen, consisting of mer-chants, priests, officers, petty nobles, and others, all inspired and guided by Bernieres.  They met every week at the Hermitage, or at the houses of one another.  Similar associations existed in other cities of France, besides a fraternity in the Rue Saint Dominique at Paris, which was formed by the Jesuit Bagot, and seems to have been the parent, in a cer-tain sense, of the others.  They all acted together when any important object was in view.

Bernie’res and his disciples felt that God had chosen them not only to watch over doctrine and discipline in convents and in families, but also to supply the prevalent deficiency of zeal in bishops and other dignitaries of the Church.  They kept, too, a constant eye on the humbler clergy, and whenever a new preacher appeared in Caen, two of their number were deputed to hear his sermon and report upon it.  If he chanced to let fall a word concerning the grace of God, they denounced him for Jansenistic heresy.  Such commotion was once raised in Caen by charges of sedition and Jansenism, brought by the Hermitage against priests and laymen hitherto without attaint, that the Bishop of Bayeux thought it necessary to interpose; but even he was forced to pause, daunted by the insinuations of Bernieres that he was in secret sympathy with the obnoxious doctrines.

Thus the Hermitage and its affiliated societies constituted themselves a sort of inquisition in the interest of the Jesuits; "for what," asks Nicole, "might not be expected from persons of weak minds and atrabilious dispositions, dried up by constant fasts, vigils, and other austerities, besides meditations of three or four hours a day, and told continually that the Church is in imminent danger of ruin through the machinations of the Jansenists, who are represented to them as persons who wish to break up the foundations of the Christian faith and subvert the mystery of the Incarnation; who believe neither in transubstantiation, the invocation of saints, nor indulgences; who wish to abolish the sacrifice of the Mass and the sacrament of Penitence, oppose the worship of the Holy Virgin, deny free-will and sub-stitute predestination in its place, and, in fine, con-spire to overthrow the authority of the Supreme Pontiff?"

Among other anecdotes, Nicole tells the following: One of the young zealots of the Hermitage took it into his head that all Caen was full of Jansenists, and that the cure's of the place were in league with them.  He inoculated four others with this notion, and they resolved to warn the people of their danger.  They accordingly made the tour of the streets, with out hats or collars, and with coats unbuttoned, though it was a cold winter day, stopping every moment to proclaim in a loud voice that all the cure's, excepting two, whom they named, were abettors of the Jansenists.  A mob was soon following at their heels, and there was great excitement.  The magistrates chanced to be in session, and hearing of the disturbance, they sent constables to arrest the authors of it.  Being brought to the bar of justice and questioned by the judge, they answered that they were doing the work of God, and were ready to die in the cause; that Caen was full of Jansenists, and that the cure's had declared in their favor, inasmuch as they denied any knowledge of their existence.  Four of the five were locked up for a few days, tried, and sentenced to a fine of a hundred livres, with a promise of further punishment should they again disturb the peace.

The fifth, being pronounced out of his wits by the physicians, was sent home to his mother, at a village near Argentan, where two or three of his fellow zealots presently joined him.  Among them, they persuaded his mother, who had hitherto been devoted to household cares, to exchange them for a life of mystical devotion.  "These three or four persons," says Nicole, "attracted others as imbecile as themselves." Among these recruits were a number of women, and several priests.  After various acts of fanaticism, "two or three days before last Pentecost," proceeds the narrator, "they all set out, men and women, for Argentan.  The priests had drawn the skirts of their cassocks over their heads, and tied them about their necks with twisted straw.  Some of the women had their heads bare, and their hair streaming loose over their shoulders.  They picked up filth on the road, and rubbed their faces with it; and the most zealous ate it, saying that it was necessary to mortify the taste.  Some held stones in their hands, which they knocked together to draw the attention of the passers-by.  They had a leader, whom they were bound to obey; and when this leader saw any mud-hole particularly deep and dirty, he commanded some of the party to roll themselves in it, which they did forthwith.

"After this fashion, they entered the town of Argentan, and marched, two by two, through all the streets, crying with a loud voice that the Faith was perishing, and that whoever wished to save it must quit the country and go with them to Canada, whither they were soon to repair.  It is said that they still hold this purpose, and that their leaders declare it revealed to them that they will find a vessel ready at the first port to which Providence directs them.  The reason why they choose Canada for an asylum is, that Monsieur de Montigny (Laval), Bishop of Petrsea, who lived at the Hermitage a long time, where he was instructed in mystical theology by Monsieur de Bernieres, exercises episcopal functions there; and that the Jesuits, who are their oracles, reign in that country."

This adventure, like the other, ended in a collision with the police.  "The priests," adds Nicole, "were arrested, and are now waiting trial; and the rest were treated as mad, and sent back with shame and confusion to the places whence they had come."

Though these pranks took place after Laval had left the Hermitage, they serve to characterize the school in which he was formed; or, more justly speaking, to show its most extravagant side.  That others did not share the views of the celebrated Jansenist, may be gathered from the following pas-sage of the funeral oration pronounced over the body of Laval half a century later: 

"The humble abbe’ was next transported into the terrestrial paradise of Monsieur de Bernieres.  It is thus that I call, as it is fitting to call it, that famous Hermitage of Caen, where the seraphic author of the ' Christian Interior' (Bernieres) transformed into angels all those who had the happiness to be the companions of his solitude and of his spiritual exercises.  It was there that, during four years, the fervent abb6 drank the living and abounding waters of grace which have since flowed so benignly over this land of Canada.  In this celestial abode his ordinary occupations were prayer, mortification, instruction of the poor, and spiritual readings or conferences; his recreations were to labor in the hospitals, wait upon the sick and poor, make their beds, dress their wounds, and aid them in their most repulsive needs."

In truth, Laval's zeal was boundless, and the exploits of self-humiliation recorded of him were unspeakably revolting.  Bernieres himself regarded him as a light by which to guide his own steps in ways of holiness.  He made journeys on foot about the country, disguised, penniless, begging from door to door, and courting scorn and opprobrium, "in order," says his biographer, "that he might suffer for the love of God." Yet, though living at this time in a state of habitual religious exaltation, he was by nature no mere dreamer; and in whatever heights his spirit might wander, his feet were always planted on the solid earth.  His flaming zeal had for its servants a hard, practical nature, perfectly fitted for the battle of life, a narrow intellect, a stiff and persistent will, and, as his enemies thought, the love of domination native to his blood.

Two great parties divided the Catholics of France,  the Gallican or national party, and the ultramontane or papal party.  The first, resting on the Scriptural injunction to give tribute to Csesar, held that to the King, the Lord's anointed, belonged the temporal, and to the Church the spiritual power.  It held also that the laws and customs of the Church of France could not be broken at the bidding of the Pope.1 The ultramontane party, on the other hand, maintained that the Pope, Christ's vicegerent on earth, was supreme over earthly rulers, and should of right hold jurisdiction over the clergy of all Christendom, with powers of appointment and removal.  Hence they claimed for him the right of nominating bishops in France.  This had anciently been exercised by assemblies of the French clergy, but in the reign of Francis I.  the King and the Pope had combined to wrest it from them by the Concordat of Bologna.  Under this compact, which was still in force, the Pope appointed French bishops on the nomination of the King,  a plan which displeased the Gallicans, and did not satisfy the ultramontanes.

The Jesuits, then as now, were the most forcible exponents of ultramontane principles.  The Church to rule the world; the Pope to rule the Church; the Jesuits to rule the Pope, —such was and is the simple programme of the Order of Jesus; and to it they have held fast, except on a few rare occasions of misunderstanding with the Vicegerent of Christ.1 In the question of papal supremacy, as in most things else, Laval was of one mind with them.

Those versed in such histories will not be surprised to learn that when he received the royal nomination, humility would not permit him to accept it; nor that, being urged, he at length bowed in resignation, still protesting his unworthiness.  Nevertheless, the royal nomination did not take effect.  The ultramontanes outflanked both the King and the Galileans, and by adroit strategy made the new prelate completely a creature of the papacy.  Instead of appointing him Bishop of Quebec, in accordance with the royal initiative, the Pope made him his vicar apostolic for Canada,  thus evading the King's nomination, and affirming that Canada, a country of infidel savages, was excluded from the concordat, and under his (the Pope's) jurisdiction pure and simple.  The Galileans were enraged.  The Archbishop of Rouen vainly opposed, and the parliaments of Rouen and of Paris vainly protested.  The papal party prevailed.  The King, or rather Mazarin, gave his consent, subject to certain conditions, the chief of which was an oath of allegiance; and Laval, grand vicar apostolic, decorated with the title of Bishop of Petrsea, sailed for his wilderness diocese in the spring of 1659.  He was but thirty-six years of age, but even when a boy he could scarcely have seemed young.

Queylus, for a time, seemed to accept the situation, and tacitly admit the claim of Laval as Ms ecclesias tical superior; but, stimulated by a letter from the Archbishop of Rouen, he soon threw himself into an attitude of opposition,2 in which the popularity which his generosity to the poor had won for him gave him an advantage very annoying to his adversary.  The quarrel, it will be seen, was three-sided,  Gallican against ultramontane, Sulpitian against Jesuit, Montreal against Quebec.  To Montreal the recalcitrant abbe", after a brief visit to Quebec, had again retired; but even here, girt with his Sulpitian brethren and compassed with partisans, the arm of the vicar apostolic was long enough to reach him.

By temperament and' conviction Laval hated a divided authority, and the very shadow of a schism was an abomination in his sight.  The young King, who, though abundantly jealous of his royal power, was forced to conciliate the papal party, had sent instructions to Argenson, the governor, to support Laval, and prevent divisions in the Canadian Church.  These instructions served as the pretext of a procedure sufficiently summary.  A squad of soldiers, commanded, it is said, by the governor himself, went up to Montreal, brought the indignant Queylus to Quebec, and shipped him thence for France.  By these means, writes Father Lalemant, order reigned for a season in the Church.

It was but for a season.  Queylus was not a man to bide his defeat in tranquillity, nor were his brother Sulpitians disposed to silent acquiescence.  Laval, on his part, was not a man of half measures.  He bad an agent in France, and partisans strong at court.  Fearing, to borrow the words of a Catholic writer, that the return of Queylus to Canada would prove "injurious to the glory of God," he bestirred himself to prevent it.  The young King, then at Aix, on his famous journey to the frontiers of Spain to marry the Infanta, was induced to write to Queylus, ordering him to remain in France.3 Queylus, however, repaired to Rome; but even against this movement provision had been made: accusations of Jansenism had gone before him, and he met a cold welcome.  Nevertheless, as he had powerful friends near the Pope, he succeeded in removing these adverse impressions, and even in obtaining certain bulls relating to the establishment of the parish of Montreal, and favorable to the Sulpitians.  Provided with these, he set at nought the King's letter, embarked under an assumed name, and sailed to Quebec, where he made his appearance on the third of August, 1661,1 to the extreme wrath of Laval
.
A ferment ensued.  Laval's partisans charged the Sulpitians with Jansenism and opposition to the will of the Pope.  A preacher more zealous than the rest denounced them as priests of Antichrist; and as to the bulls in their favor, it was affirmed that Queylus had obtained them by fraud from the Holy Father.  Laval at once issued a mandate forbidding him to proceed to Montreal till ships should arrive with instructions from the King.2 At the same time he demanded of the governor that he should interpose the civil power to prevent Queylus from leaving Quebec.  As Argenson, who wished to act as peace-maker between the belligerent fathers, did not at once take the sharp measures required of him, Laval renewed his demand on the next day,  calling on him, in the name of God and the King, to compel Queylus to yield the obedience due to him, the vicar apostolic.  At the same time he sent another to the offending abbe’, threatening to suspend him from priestly functions if he persisted in his rebellion.  

The incorrigible Queylus, who seems to have lived for some months in a simmer of continual indignation, set at nought the vicar apostolic as he had set at nought the King, took a boat that very night, and set out for Montreal under cover of darkness.  Great was the ire of Laval when he heard the news in the morning.  He despatched a letter after him, declaring him suspended ipso facto, if he did not instantly return and make his submission.  This letter, like the rest, failed of the desired effect; but the governor, who had received a second mandate from the King to support Laval and prevent a schism, now reluctantly interposed the secular arm, and Queylus was again compelled to return to France.  

His expulsion was a Sulpitian defeat.  Laval, always zealous for unity and centralization, had some time before taken steps to repress what he regarded as a tendency to independence at Montreal.  In the preceding year he had written to the Pope: "There are some secular priests (Sulpitians) at Montreal, whom the Abbe’ de Queylus brought out with him in 1657, and I have named for the functions of cure" the one among them whom I thought the least disobedient." The bulls which Queylus had obtained from Rome related to this very curacy, and greatly disturbed the mind of the vicar apostolic.  He accordingly wrote again to the Pope: "I pray your Holiness to let me know your will concerning the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Rouen.  M.  l'Abb6 de Queylus, who has come out this year as vicar of this archbishop, has tried to deceive us by surreptitious letters, and has obeyed neither our prayers nor our repeated commands to desist.  But he has received orders from the King to return immediately to France, to render an account of his disobedience ; and he has been compelled by the governor to conform to the will of his Majesty.  What I now fear is that on his return to France, by using every kind of means, employing new artifices, and falsely representing our affairs, he may obtain from the Court of Rome powers which may disturb the peace of our Church; for the priests whom he brought with him from France, and who live at Montreal, are animated with the same spirit of disobedience and division; and I fear, with good reason, that all belonging to the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, who may come hereafter to join them, will be of the same disposition.  If what is said is true, that by means of fraudulent letters the right of patronage of the pretended parish of Montreal has been granted to the superior of this seminary, and the right of appointment to the Archbishop of Rouen, then is altar reared against altar in our Church of Canada; for the clergy of Montreal will always stand in opposition to me, the vicar apostolic, and to my successors." 

These dismal forebodings were never realized.  The Holy See annulled the obnoxious bulls; the Archbishop of Rouen renounced his claims, and Queylus found his position untenable.  Seven years later, when Laval was on a visit to France, a reconciliation was brought about between them.  The former vicar of the Archbishop of Rouen made his submission to the vicar of the Pope, and returned to Canada as a missionary.  Laval's triumph was complete, to the joy of the Jesuits,  silent, if not idle, spectators of the tedious and complex quarrel.