CHAPTER 12
1662-1680.  

LAVAL AND THE SEMINARY.

THAT memorable journey of Laval to court, which caused the dissolution of the Company of New France, the establishment of the Supreme Council, the recall of Avaugour, and the appointment of Me’zy, had yet other objects and other results.  Laval, vicar apostolic and titular Bishop of Petraea, wished to become in title, as in fact, Bishop of Quebec.  Thus he would gain an increase of dignity and authority, necessary, as he thought, in his conflicts with the civil power; "for," he wrote to the cardinals of the Propaganda, "I have learned from long experience how little security my character of vicar apostolic gives me against those charged with political affairs: I mean the officers of the Crown, perpetual rivals and contemners of the authority of the Church." 

This reason was for the Pope and the cardinals.  It may well be believed that he held a different language to the King.  To him he urged that the bishopric was needed to enforce order, suppress sin, and crush heresy.  Both Louis XIV.  and the Queen Mother favored his wishes; but difficulties arose, and interminable disputes ensued on the question whether the proposed bishopric should depend immediately on the Pope or on the Archbishop of Rouen.  It was a revival of the old quarrel of Gallican and ultramontane.  Laval, weary of hope deferred, at length declared that he would leave the colony if he could not be its bishop in title; and in 1674, after eleven years of delay, the King yielded to the Pope's demands, and the vicar apostolic became first Bishop of Quebec.

If Laval had to wait for his mitre, he found no delay and no difficulty in attaining another object no less dear to him.  He wished to provide priests for Canada, drawn from the Canadian population, fed with sound and wholesome doctrine, reared under his eye, and moulded by his hand.  To this end he proposed to establish a seminary at Quebec.  The plan found favor with the pious King, and a decree signed by his hand sanctioned and confirmed it.  The new seminary was to be a corporation of priests under a superior chosen by the bishop; and, besides its functions of instruction, it was vested with distinct and extraordinary powers.  Laval, an organizer and a disciplinarian by nature and training, would fain subject the priests of his diocese to a control as complete as that of monks in a convent.  In France, the cure* or parish priest was, with rare exceptions, a fixture in his parish, whence he could be removed only for grave reasons, and through prescribed forms of procedure.  Hence he was to a certain degree independent of the bishop.  Laval, on the contrary, demanded that the Canadian cure should be removable at his will, and thus placed in the position of a missionary, to come and go at the order of his superior.  In fact, the Canadian parishes were for a long time so widely scattered, so feeble in population, and so miserably poor, that, besides the disciplinary advantages of this plan, its adoption was at first almost a matter of necessity.  It added greatly to the power of the Church; and, as the colony increased, the King and the minister conceived an increasing distrust of it.  Instructions for the "fixation " of the cure's were repeatedly sent to the colony, and the bishop, while professing to obey, repeatedly evaded them.  Various fluctuations and changes took place; but Laval had built on strong foundations, and at this day the system of removable cure's prevails in most of the Canadian parishes.

Thus he formed his clergy into a family with himself at its head.  His seminary, the mother who had reared them, was further charged to maintain them, nurse them in sickness, and support them in old age.  Under her maternal roof the tired priest found repose among his brethren; and thither every year he repaired from the charge of his flock in the wilderness, to freshen his devotion and animate his zeal by a season of meditation and prayer.

The difficult task remained to provide the necessary funds.  Laval imposed a tithe of one-thirteenth on all products of the soil, or, as afterwards settled, on grains alone.  This tithe was paid to the seminary, and by the seminary to the priests.  The people, unused to such a burden, clamored and resisted; and Me’zy, in his disputes with the bishop, had taken advantage of their discontent.  It became necessary to reduce the tithe to a twenty-sixth, which, as there was little or no money among the inhabitants, was paid in kind.  Nevertheless, the scattered and impoverished settlers grudged even this contribution to the support of a priest whom many of them rarely saw; and the collection of it became a matter of the greatest difficulty and uncertainty.  How the King came to the rescue, we shall hereafter see.

Besides the great seminary where young men were trained for the priesthood, there was the lesser seminary where boys were educated in the hope that they would one day take orders.  This school began in 1668, with eight French and six Indian pupils, in the old house of Madame Couillard; but so far as the Indians were concerned it was a failure.  Sooner or later they all ran wild in the woods, carrying with them as fruits of their studies a sufficiency of prayers, offices, and chants learned by rote, along with a feeble smattering of Latin and rhetoric, which they soon dropped by the way.  There was also a sort of farm school attached to the seminary, for the training of a humbler class of pupils.  It was established at the parish of Saint Joachim, below Quebec, where the children of artisans and peasants were taught farming and various mechanical arts, and thoroughly grounded in the doctrine and discipline of the Church.  The Great and Lesser Seminary still subsist, and form one of the most important Roman Catholic institutions on this continent.  To them has recently been added the Laval University, resting on the same foundation, and supported by the same funds.

Whence were these funds derived? Laval, in order to imitate the poverty of the apostles, had divested himself of his property before he came to Canada; otherwise there is little doubt that in the fulness of his zeal he would have devoted it to his favorite object.  But if he had no property he had influence, and his family had both influence and wealth.  He acquired vast grants of land in the best parts of Canada.  Some of these he sold or exchanged; others he retained till the year 1680, when he gave them, with nearly all else that he then possessed, to his seminary at Quebec.  The lands with which he thus endowed it included the seigniories of the Petite Nation, the Island of Jesus, and Beaupre".  The last is of great extent, and at the present day of immense value.  Beginning a few miles below Quebec, it borders the Saint Lawrence for a distance of sixteen leagues, and is six leagues in depth, measured from the river.  From these sources the seminary still draws an abundant revenue, though its seigniorial rights were commuted on the recent extinction of the feudal tenure in Canada.

Well did Laval deserve that his name should live in that of the university which a century and a half after his death owed its existence to his bounty.  This father of the Canadian Church, who has left so deep an impress on one of the communities which form the vast population of North America, belonged to a type of character to which an even justice is rarely done.  With the exception of the Canadian Garneau, a liberal Catholic, those who have treated of him have seen him through a medium intensely Romanist, coloring, hiding, and exaggerating by turns both his actions and the traits of his character.  Tried by the Romanist standard, his merits were great; though the extraordinary influence which he exercised in the affairs of the colony were, as already observed, by no means due to his spiritual graces alone.  To a saint sprung from the haute noblesse, Earth and Heaven were alike propitious.  When the vicar-general Colombie’re pronounced his funeral eulogy in the sounding periods of Bossuet, he did not fail to exhibit him on the ancestral pedestal where his virtues would shine with redoubled lustre.  " The exploits of the heroes of the House of Montmorency," exclaims the reverend orator, "form one of the fairest chapters in the annals of Old France; the heroic acts of charity, humility, and faith achieved by a Montmorency form one of the fairest in the annals of New France.  The combats, victories, and conquests of the Montmorency in Europe would fill whole volumes; and so, too, would the triumphs won by a Montmorency in America over sin, passion, and the Devil." Then ' he crowns the high born prelate with a halo of fourfold saintship: "It was with good reason that Providence permitted him to be called Francis, for the virtues of all the saints of that name were combined in him,  the zeal of Saint Francis Xavier, the charity of Saint Francis of Sales, the poverty of Saint Francis of Assisi, the self mortification of Saint Francis Borgia; but poverty was the mistress of his heart, and he loved her with incontrollable transports."

The stories which Colombie’re proceeds to tell of
Laval's asceticism are confirmed by other evidence, and are, no doubt, true.  Nor is there any reasonable doubt that, had the bishop stood in the place of Bre’beuf or Charles Lalemant, he would have suffered torture and death like them.  But it was his lot to strive, not against infidel savages, but against countrymen and Catholics, who had no disposition to burn him, and would rather have done him reverence than wrong.

To comprehend his actions and motives, it is necessary to know his ideas in regard to the relations of Church and State.  They were those of the extreme ultramontanes, which a recent Jesuit preacher has expressed with tolerable distinctness.  In a sermon uttered in the Church of Notre Dame, at Montreal, on the first of November, 1872, he thus announced them: " The supremacy and infallibility of the Pope; the independence and liberty of the Church; the subordination and submission of the State to the Church; in case of conflict between them, the Church to decide, the State to submit: for whoever follows and defends these principles, life and a blessing; for whoever rejects and combats them, death and a curse."

These were the  principles which Laval  and the Jesuits strove to make good.  Christ was to rule in Canada through his deputy the bishop, and God's law was to triumph over the laws of man.  As in the halcyon days of Champlain and Montmagny, the governor was to be the right hand of the Church, to wield the earthly sword at her bidding; and the council was to be the agent of her high behests.

France was drifting toward the triumph of the parti devot, the sinister reign of petticoat and cassock, the era of Maintenon and Tellier, and the fatal atrocities of the dragonnades.  Yet the advancing tide of priestly domination did not flow smoothly.  The unparalleled prestige which surrounded the throne of the young King, joined to his quarrels with the Pope and divisions in the Church itself, disturbed, though they could not check, its progress.  In Canada it was otherwise.  The colony had been ruled by priests from the beginning, and it only remained to continue in her future the law of her past.  She was the fold of Christ; the wolf of civil government was among the flock, and Laval and the Jesuits, watchful shepherds, were doing their best to chain and muzzle him.

According to Argenson, Laval had said, " A bishop can do what he likes; " and his action answered reasonably well to his words.  He thought himself above human law.  In vindicating the assumed rights of the Church, he invaded the rights of others, and used means from which a healthy conscience would have shrunk.  All his thoughts and sympathies had run from childhood in ecclesiastical channels, and he cared for nothing outside the Church.  Prayer, meditation, and asceticism had leavened and moulded him.  During four years he had been steeped in the mysticism of the Hermitage, which had for its aim the annihilation of self, and through self annihilation the absorption into God.  He had passed from a life of visions to a life of action.  Earnest to fanaticism, he saw but one great object,  the glory of God on earth.  He was penetrated by the poisonous casuistry of the Jesuits, based on the assumption that all means are permitted when the end is the service of God; and as Laval, in his own opinion, was always doing the service of God, while his opponents were always doing that of the Devil, he enjoyed, in the use of means, a latitude of which we have seen him avail himself.  
SECTION THIRD.
THE COLONY AND THE KING.