Religion

Roman Catholic missionaries played a large role in Breton immigration to western Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A number of these colonizing priests founded parishes, including Father Paul Le Floch, OMI. Attracted by his charisma, settlers followed Father Le Floch and built the first houses at Sainte-Anne-des-Chênes, Manitoba, around 1860. His fellow Oblate Father Léandre Vachon visited France in 1903 and gave several public lectures in Brittany about the Canadian prairies. The next year, three hundred Bretons from the departments of Finistère and Côtes-du-Nord left for North America under Father Le Floch’s guidance. They were steered to Saskatchewan where they founded the parish of Saint-Brieux.

The colonizing activity of these missionaries had clear ripple effects, as more Bretons followed the flow. In 1913 Joseph Ulliac left Gourin in the department of Morbihan with his wife, Marie-Louise Cospérec, and ten other members of his family. Together they founded Gourin City, Alberta, a village in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains that got its official start when a post office was opened there in 1923. Some twenty Breton families joined the original settlers over the years, and today there are some 192 descendants of the Ulliac clan alone.

Women’s religious orders supported the work of the missionaries. In Brittany, several nuns of the Filles de Jésus, an order founded at Locminé in Morbihan, were dismissed by the government “for teaching the catechism in Breton to children who knew only that language.” In 1902 more than eighty schools run by the Filles de Jésus were closed by government order. Five or six nuns decided to set out for present-day Alberta in western Canada. There, the order was to be active for decades in hospital and educational work.

In the early twentieth century, the strong anticlerical movement sweeping France also led many Breton diocesan priests and missionaries to flee the country. Dozens of them chose to take refuge in Canada, where the Catholic and royalist sentiment that characterized Brittany, which had survived the French Revolution and remained strong throughout the nineteenth century, found an echo in similar attachments in French-Canadian society. Most of these Jesuits, Eudists, and Oblates decided to devote their efforts to teaching, evangelization, and colonization in eastern Canada. Thus, the Eudist Father Joseph-Marie Dréan became pastor of a parish in Nova Scotia and then taught in Caraquet, New Brunswick, before becoming curé of Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pointe-au-Père, Quebec, in 1903.

The Filles de Jésus, who had first gone to western Canada, quickly made a name for themselves, and requests for new teachers came to their mother house in Brittany from all parts of French Canada. Seven Filles de Jésus went to Chatham, New Brunswick, in 1903. Nine others left for Arichat, Nova Scotia, and Bathurst, New Brunswick, on 1 February 1904 while another twenty-one founded a novitiate in Trois-Rivières. Still others joined their compatriot Father Dréan in his parish of Sainte-Anne-de-la-Pointe-au-Père, where he put them in charge of the chapel, while others founded schools in the Lower St Lawrence and Matapedia regions of Quebec.