From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/French/Richard Jones
Until the 1960s, French immigrants to Canada found themselves in a religious environment very different from what they had known in the homeland. Many French immigrants before World War I, both clerical and lay, came to Canada, particularly Quebec, because they wanted to live in a society in which the Roman Catholic Church played an important and accepted role. Historian Guy Laperrière has calculated that at least one-seventh of the clergy in Quebec at that time were French immigrants. The effect was probably even more dramatic on female clergy; whereas departures of brothers from their communities were relatively common, they were rare in women’s communities. Moreover, the arrival of numerous congregations from France put a virtual halt to the establishment of new foundations in Quebec. Nor was the influence of the French clergy limited to Quebec, as many clergy carried their activity to Acadia, to Ontario and, particularly, to the Canadian west.
Beyond numerical effects, the coming of such large numbers of French clergy had a powerful ideological impact. Many of the new congregations were involved in education. So many female clergy entered the Quebec school system that the proportion of lay teachers in primary schools declined markedly. Undoubtedly, though, the major impact of the arrival of the French clergy was to reinforce considerably the conservatism that the Quebec Church would show over the following decades.
Quebec rapidly evolved toward a secular society in the years following the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960s. The majority of recent French immigrants, who had been used to a general separation between church and state in France and who, even if they considered themselves to be Roman Catholics, did not attend mass on a regular basis, probably welcomed this change.
