The Body or the Soul?

How a Quebec community fashioned a resilient balance between freedom and faith out of their culture and their Catholicism.

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In the two centuries before the Quiet Revolution, the people of Quebec exercised a higher degree of independence from the Catholic Church than is often presumed. Investigating rural Quebec from the mid-eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth, Frank Abbott argues convincingly that the obligations and priorities of the Church did not unswervingly rule the lives of its parishioners. The Body or the Soul? is a history of religious and cultural life in the parish of St-Joseph-de-Beauce. Drawing from their pastors' detailed annual reports to the archbishops of Quebec, St-Joseph's parish registers, contemporary accounts, government censuses, and the largely unexplored oral testimony on rural life and culture found in the Archives de folklore et ethnologie at Universite Laval, Abbott assesses the nature and degree of influence and control that the church exerted over the everyday lives of a rural Quebec community.
He examines the telling details found in church building projects, the relationships between clergy and parishioners, attendance at Sunday mass and catechism classes, reception of communion, the persistence of what the Church termed "superstition," traditional customs of sociability, and the degree of control that the Church exerted over the community's social and sexual behaviour. Rich with primary sources, The Body or the Soul? reveals the tensions between Catholicism's place in people's lives and the independent spirit of a vigorous popular culture.