What was called the “silent revolution” in Quebec in the 1960s has morphed year after year into the “silent heresy” or “silent apostasy” across Canada.
The website Catholic Riposte commemorates this slow and unstoppable decline in northern Ontario on April 27, 2021: “On July 16, 2017, Radio-Canada listed approximately fifteen churches that have been closed and sold since 2004, while Timmins’s There are five churches in the diocese.In 2010 the Diocese of Salt-Saint-Marie closed five more and sold the three English-speaking churches in Salt-Saint-Marie itself.
In the same year, the French-speaking Churches of Resurrection and Sacred Heart in Sturgeon Falls (demolished in 2015) and North Bay ceased operations, while the Diocese of Hearst sold the Church and Rectory of St. Rita (Val-Rita). . In 2011 the same diocese closed the Church of St. Stanislaus in Harty.
Finally, the Church of St. Mathieu de Vahanapite, bilingual French-English, ceased operations in 2016. In addition, the Uville Orphanage in Sudbury was closed and destroyed in 2005.
These shutdowns have since continued and intensified across Canada with the coronavirus crisis and severe restrictions in regions – in Quebec, for example, the number of worshipers allowed to attend Mass was capped at fifty for months. Was, since then 6 April has also been done. has been reduced to 25.
In Quebec, church attendance, which had previously dropped from 3 to 4% per year, fell to 10% in the year before COVID-19 and the fifth year in the year of the pandemic. Many believers attended mass via the Internet, but did not return to churches. This fact made the financial situation of the parishes more difficult, which largely forced themselves to separate from their churches.
Quebec’s motto currently seems to contradict Catholic amnesia. Historian Thomas Chapais said in 1895: “There are only three words in this motto: ‘I remember’, but these three words, in their simplicity, deserve the most eloquent speech. Yes, we remember.”
We remember the past and its lessons, the past and its disasters, the past and its glory. Let the province of Belle realize that without this memory it has no future, for it is impossible to know where we are going if we do not know where we are from!
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