CCHA, Historical Studies,
70 (2004), 94-110
“In the Eyes of the Children this was a Miracle”:
Sanctity in Nineteenth-Century Quebec
Timothy Pearson
The vast
majority of scholarly literature on saints and Saints’ Lives1has been produced by
medievalists, despite the fact that the cult of the saints more than endured
beyond the Counter-Reformation. Indeed, the writing of hagiography experienced
a tremendous revival in the seventeenth century resulting largely from the
re-affirmation of the cult of the saints by the Council of Trent (1545-63), the
reform of hagiographic writing by Pope Urban VIII (1623-45), and the new-found
missionary zeal of the expanding church. In recent years there has been a
renewal of scholarly interest in the hagiography of seventeenth-century France
and Spanish Colonial America.2 For the most part, however, Canadian hagiography has not
garnered a great deal of attention amongst historians. Apart from Guy
Laflèche’s work on the Canadian Martyrs and recent work by Allan Greer on
Kateri Tekakwitha, Canadian historians have mostly bypassed what is a large
body of source literature on Canadian saints and holy persons.3 In this paper, I wish to begin
to deal with this lacuna by discussing, through three examples, the
qualities of this genre of literature in nineteenth-century Canada, and some
possible approaches historians might take in order to make it more accessible.
Perhaps the
most pressing reason why Canadian hagiography has been neglected is the nature
of the sources themselves. The fact that sacred biographies draw on
preconditioned beliefs, make appeals to the supernatural, and are structured
around literary conventions, tends to present problems for the practitioner of
cultural and social history. The basic characteristics of these texts are tied
to a specific genre of literature and a theological premise that is foreign to
many modern secular historians. A manipulation of the reality of the past in
favour of ideological principles seems to be at work in these texts. The site
of text-reader interaction is one of conflict between competing expectations;
those of the historian-reader, and those of the culture that recognized and
validated the saintly performance.
The Belgian
sociologist Pierre Delooz observed in a 1983 article that saints are made by
and for others.4
Following on this, scholars of the Middle Ages have largely adopted the view
that saints can provide insight into the society and culture in which they
functioned, and the community which in turn regarded them as saints. Nancy
Caciola, in a review article on recent approaches to sanctity and society,
points out that “[s]anctity is historically determined, culturally constructed
and socially enacted.”5
Focus, therefore, falls on the saint herself, but also embraces “her culture
and community.”6
The historian
as a reader of Saints’ Lives approaches these works from a point of view
significantly different from that of the author of the life and the faith
community that believed (and believes) in the saint. The reading of any work of
literature involves a process of appropriation where the reader internalizes
the text, makes it his/her own, and in doing so engages in an act of meaning
creation.7 This is an act of interpretation
and alteration, especially when the socio-cultural context of the text’s
creation is not taken into consideration. For example, the removal of the
supernatural elements from hagiography in the interest of empiricism neglects
the significance of the miraculous to the faith of the community that recognized
the saint. The work as a whole is emblematic of a coherent system of belief and
socio-cultural expectations that the historian can investigate when the text is
read on its own terms. The work itself, I wish to argue, is a vestige of the
past – a surviving imprint that can mediate to the present an understanding of
the faith community and the conceptions of reality that produced it.8
For the
purposes of this paper, I am interested in the rich body of hagiographic
literature that resulted from the phenomenal revival and reformation of
Catholicism in nineteenth-century French Canada. Commonly known as
Ultramontanism, this movement, which was manifest in Catholicism around the
world, was characterized by a rejection of liberalism and democratic
revolution, and sought to squarely align the local church with Roman ritual and
theology. The Syllabus of Errors, proclaimed by Pope Puis IX in 1864,
demanded that Catholics resist the secularization that liberalism and democracy
implied, and ally themselves more closely with a conservative and traditional
church.
One of the most
pronounced aspects of Ultramontanism in Quebec was the rise of new religious
orders dedicated to teaching and providing social services.9 By Roberto Perin’s reckoning,
fifty-seven new female orders alone were either imported from France or begun
from scratch in Quebec between 1837 and 1914.10 In the short term, these
institutions revolutionized the furnishing of social services. In the long
term, and in terms of my interests here, many of the foundresses and founders
of these orders came to be viewed as saints. Within this group, I will focus in
this paper on Mother Mary Ann, Foundress of the Sisters of Saint Ann, and
Rosalie Jetté, Foundress of the Sisters of Miséricorde.11 In addition, I will examine the
Life of Louis-Zephyrin Moreau, Bishop of Saint Hyacinthe, as an example of the
male typology of sainthood. The profusion of vitas associated with these
and other individuals has left behind for historians a fascinating, but
confusing and often vexing body of literature.12
Supporters of
Ultramontanism in Quebec, such as Bishop Ignace Bourget (1799-1885) of Montreal
and Bishop Louis-François Laflèche (1818-1898) of Trois-Rivières, sought to
construct a Roman Catholic world view based on Roman theology and ritual.
Bourget was a staunch defender of the rights of the church and the doctrine of
papal infallibility proclaimed by the First Vatican Council (1869-70). He
regarded the church as a hierarchy, divorced completely from democratic ideals
and under the total authority of the pope. This Catholic world view informed
the way these new religious orders thought about themselves and their role in
Catholic society. Moreover, it informed the way they conceptualized their
founders as saints and holy people in the context of post-tridentine,
counter-reformation notions of the holy.
As the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued, religion, through ritual and symbol,
formulates conceptions of a general order of existence clothing these conceptions with an aura of
factuality.13 I would argue that hagiography
functions in much the same way. Text and language function symbolically to
enunciate collectively created concepts of sanctity and, by making the
truth-claim that the subject is a saint, give a sense of factuality, not only
to the metaphysical conceptualization of sainthood, but also to the temporal
actions of the subject as laid out in the text. The author functions both as a
representative of community standards and understandings of the holy and as a
teacher and interpreter of the saintly performance.14
Hagiography
mediates between the supernatural and temporal, creating a coherent system of
belief.15 This dual nature of hagiography,
however, has often led historians to categorize their content into divisions
of the believable and not,16
with the result that one approach taken by historians
has been to mine these sources for information considered to be historical or
rational. Rudolph Bell, for example, used the Life of Catherine of Siena to
argue that heroic fasts were really eating disorders,17 while he, along with Donald
Weinstein, used a sampling of Lives to compile a quantitative picture of the
ideal late medieval saint, and what features such a model could be expected to
demonstrate.18
When Saints’
Lives are mined in such ways the integrity of the text as a whole is broken
down, turned into numbers or otherwise picked apart in an attempt to remove the
authentic from the legendary. The process whereby the historian appropriates a
cultural vestige of the past becomes destructive, an exercise of seizure and
control, where little effort is made to understand the vita on its own
terms and in its own context. The results of such studies, have in many cases
been enlightening in terms of the typologies of saints, but have generally
resulted in the destruction of the cultural artefact itself and errors of
specific cultural understanding. Bell, for example, has been accused of
committing an anachronism by mapping a modern disease, anorexia, onto a past
cultural context that would never have recognized it as such.19 Consider the following example
from The Life of Mother Mary Ann, foundress of the teaching order, the
Sisters of Saint Ann, who died in 1890. The Vita was published in 1950.20
At St. Jacques (mother house of the Sisters at the time)
a pupil, while playing, had the misfortune of running her tongue down the spout
of a small teapot. The suction was such that she could not withdraw it.
Alarmed by her screams and not knowing what to do, the sisters were going to
call the doctor. Mother Mary Ann came upon the scene, guided thereto, she said,
by her guardian angel. Very ingeniously she slipped a straw down the spout between
the tongue and the side of the teapot. She breathed through it, and the little
one’s tongue was released. “In the eyes of the children this was a miracle,”
commented the narrator, “and she who performed it a saint. This was the general
opinion held by the pupils of St. Jacques of our Foundress.”21
This short, and somewhat
frivolous, passage can tell us a great deal about how the belief community
regarded Mother Mary Ann’s sanctity and also about how hagiography was written
in the early twentieth century, when it is placed within the larger context of
the Vita as a whole, and the cultural circumstances of its production.
By cultural circumstances, I mean the entire process that led to the
conceptualization of Mother Mary Ann as a person worthy of veneration. This involved
fitting Mother Mary Ann into the larger conventions of sanctity, the process of
gathering local evidence and witnesses to her life, the writing of the life
itself within the conventions of the genre and, of course, Mother Mary Ann's
own performance within a proscribed system of cultural belief.
In this passage, we have an
example of an incident that may well have happened, the memory of which has
been conceptualized as a miracle by at least one of the witnesses. The fact
that the author included this story in the Life, perhaps also indicates that he
believed that Mother Mary Ann was capable of miracles, even if he did not
necessarily regard this particular event as such. Here, a miracle has been
constructed out of a real event, based on the cultural perception of that event
by the community and its re-inscription by the author of the Life.22 This story is found in the
second to last chapter of the book amongst a collection of testimonials made by
witnesses as to the qualities embodied by Mother Mary Ann, and as such reads as
a testimony to her sanctity.
Eugène Nadeau, the author of
the Vita, wished to impart the idea that Mother Mary Ann was a saint
without explicitly saying so, as Canon Law reserved to the pope alone the right
to officially make saints.23
Unofficially however, a saint was created by a belief community, and Nadeau
wished to stress in his narrative that there was such a community centred on
Mother Mary Ann. The existence of a spontaneous community was considered a
necessity by the church, especially when it was emphasized by the belief that
the candidate had performed miracles. Efforts of the Council of Trent to
rationalize the cult of the saints meant that miracles performed by
Counter-Reformation saints were presented as after-death intercessions.24 The fact that Mother Mary Ann is
very much alive in this instance requires that she deny that she had performed
a miracle, and that Nadeau himself not make any grandiose claims. Nevertheless,
the presence of the supernatural in this passage defines and expresses the
community’s conceptualization of Mother Mary Ann as someone who worked
simultaneously on two planes.
Mother Mary Ann, however,
posed a problem for those advocating her cause because, although she had
founded a religious order, she had been deposed from her position as superior
general. A personality conflict and power struggle with the order’s chaplain
resulted in the chaplain requesting that Bishop Bourget depose her in the
interests of maintaining harmony within the fledgling community. Such a
demotion at the hands of the bishop was not auspicious for her cause, and so
her community sought to construct her sanctity, not only as the foundress of a
successful religious order, but also in terms of her great humility and
obedience in the face of adversity. Indeed, her deposition from power stands as
the central crisis point in her Vita where, in the conventions of the
genre, the subject turns to the saintly life and embarks on a career of heroic
virtue.25 The biography was framed to fit
the expectations of the genre which were familiar to the belief community who
regarded Mother Mary Ann as embodying the qualities of sainthood.
Mother Mary Ann participated
in the expectations held of her as a holy person and a woman by her community
by accepting her deposition to live as a humble sister within the community
that she had founded. She never regained her position as superior, and indeed
was sent from the mother house to live out her days as Sister Mary Ann at a
remote sister house at St. Genevieve de Pierrefonds. To show that Mother Mary
Ann, as a candidate for sainthood, fit the conventions of the genre and the
community’s expectations of sanctity, Nadeau explicitly and repeatedly related
her career to the larger cult of the saints and conventions of the genre which,
in theological terms, extend to the life of Christ in the form of an
imitatio christi.26
For example, Nadeau writes, “The lives of saints are full of these challenges
which baffle limited human wisdom. The founders of religious orders seem
inevitably destined for great trials.”27 Mother Mary Ann’s life is constructed according to the
universal plot of the triumphant victim that stretches back to the martyrs of
old.
Within the simple story
related above, the community’s conceptualization of Mother Mary Ann as an
exceptional person favoured by God, and of sanctity itself as a force in the
world, are laid out. By denying that she had anything to do with rescuing the
poor student, Mother Mary Ann participates in this conceptualization by
behaving as a Counter-Reformation saint ought. It was her guardian angel that
guided her in her action. This claim gives credit for the “miracle” to God
working through her, while it deflects credit for a creative solution to a
sticky situation away from herself in the interest of humility. Such behaviour
was evidently recognized as saintly by those who shared a similar world view.
For the faith community, even the deposed and humiliated is a saint precisely
because she accepts her fate with heroic obedience and fortitude, and so
behaves in a way that would be recognized as saintly by others.28
The conventional qualities of
the hagiographic genre, which have the purpose of presenting each saint as
being a member of a heavenly community, can pose problems for historians as
the saint must be subsumed in some degree to the typology. She is not her own
woman, but rather a vehicle for the power of God in the world, and the subject
of community veneration. The intended result is not to diminish the
personality of the saint, indeed each individual is extraordinary within a
particular context, but rather to situate the saint within the eternal as well
as the temporal. Hagiography has the dual aspect of being both historical and
metaphysical, which informs the dual nature of the saint as someone who lives
both in the world and beyond it.29
The pattern, of course, is not
static since, although the saint must appear to fit the mould of sanctity, he
or she must also appeal to the public meant to be served. Social change is
constant and so the saint must also adapt, as culture itself adapts, while
maintaining a recognizable connection to the larger cult of the saints.
Moreover, societies, cultures, and communities differ and so the saint must be
relevant to his or her own cultural circumstances and audience in order to be
successful. Each life requires a balancing of the particular with the
transcendent within the discourse of the Saint’s Life. It is for this reason
that Eugène Nadeau must be so explicit in showing that Mother Mary Ann fits
the metaphysical model as a member of the communio sanctorum, while
also demonstrating her temporal efficacy as a possessor of heroic virtue in
her own time and locality.
Each Life that was constructed as
a hagiography presented its own peculiarities and difficulties, and had to be
relevant to the faith community represented. Mother Mary Ann’s obedience and
humility in trying circumstances established a clear causal connection between
virtue and act – the heroic faith necessary for a performance recognized as
holy, and the foundation of a religious order. This connection firmly rooted
the physical act within transcendent faith. In the case of Louis-Zéphyrin
Moreau, the fourth Bishop of St. Hyacinthe (1824-1901), however, the very
temporality of his life and the success he enjoyed in the world threatened his
claim to sainthood, despite the fact they he was acclaimed for his great charity.30 Community expectations of
sanctity, represented through the biography, dictate that Moreau must be more
than a successful cleric to make a claim to sanctity.
Displaying a keen intelligence
at an early age, Moreau enjoyed a great deal of worldly success during his
life. He became a teacher of dogmatic and moral theology at Collège Nicolet at
the age of twenty, a priest and secretary to the bishops of St. Hyacinthe, and
eventually became bishop himself – a position he held from 1876 until his death
in 1901. The Jesuit priest Frédéric Langevin, writing Moreau’s hagiography in
1937, followed the typology of the bishop and confessor exemplified by figures
such as Saint Martin, Bishop of Tours (d. 397), and Saint Charles Borromeo, the
Counter-Reformation bishop of Milan (d. 1584).31 The crisis point – an illness
that Moreau suffered in 1845 which forced him to take a break from his teaching
and his career – stands at the point where heroic virtue replaces worldly
success as the central theme of the biography. “...[T]he academic year
1845-1846 passed with no improvement in health, with victories in humility and
patience and with little advancement in theological science.”32
Moreau’s illness is a triumph
in patience and fortitude – a setback, humbly endured, to his secular career.
Following his illness, Moreau wished to resume his studies for the priesthood,
but was rejected by the Quebec seminary because of his low academic performance
during his time of illness. “This refusal bit cruelly at the soul of Zéphyrin
Moreau, but his stubborn will would not crumble under an avalanche that leaves
it still living.”33 He turned instead to Bishop
Bourget of Montreal, and was accepted into the Séminaire de Montréal. His
secular career in the priesthood is thereafter presented in terms of his great
charity and commitment to upholding the truths of the church, rather than as a
successful rise through the church hierarchy.
Moreau is presented as a
staunch upholder of a strict orthodoxy characterized by an adherence to
ultramontane values. More importantly for his claim to sanctity, however, is
his charity work for which he is said to have garnered the moniker, Bishop of
the Sacred Heart (l’Évêque de la Sacré Coeur). He is presented as the
defender of doctrine (Le Gardien de la Doctrine), and the good shepherd
(Le bon pasteur), both spiritually pious and temporally hard working.
“Monseigneur Moreau did not place a watertight partition between work and
piety.”34
Despite,
or indeed because of his temporal accomplishments, however, sceptics remained
within his faith community. His audience went so far as to demand miracles of
him whom they suspected capable of performing them. “And the life of Mgr.
Moreau? It was a life of prayer, a life of faithfulness to daily duty; a life
without splendour perhaps, but also a life without stain; a life beautiful in
the eyes of his contemporaries, priests and laity, who called their good pastor
Bishop of the Sacred Heart, and asked of him miracles as would be asked
of saints.”35
A
“life without stain” was not enough to guarantee Moreau a place in the communio
sanctorum, in the eyes of the communio fidelium. Miracles were demanded
by the sceptics and Mgr. Moreau did not disappoint. To solidify the claim to
sanctity it had to be shown that Moreau worked not only in the world, despite
his virtue, but also beyond it, in the supernatural. To be a saint, and to be
called a saint, the community expected “true” miracles.
The people who, without
conflating them, had linked holiness with miraculous power, asked saint Mgr.
Moreau for true miracles – the mildly sceptical to see if the bishop was
indeed the saint he was said to be, and the more convinced to confirm their
devotion while awaiting a sign from heaven.36
In
the final chapter of the Vita, one in which testaments to Moreau’s
sanctity are outlined, evidence of the miraculous is finally offered. The
author attests that these are not necessary to prove Moreau’s sanctity, but
nevertheless obliges his critics by revealing that the bishop had in fact been
performing (or at least had been the conduit for) miracles for some time.
These
miracles violated the unspoken rules of post-tridentine hagiography that
placed the miraculous as after-death intercessions, but nevertheless met the
expectations of the community indicating a particular expectation of sanctity
at the local level. Unlike the case of
Mother Mary Ann where an event with a perfectly plausible and rational
explanation is construed as a miracle by some children, we are now confronted
with wonderful cures attested to by reliable witnesses, including a doctor.
Moreau cures a crippled child, Léonie Adam, who suffered from a bone
deformation, attributing the miracle to the intervention of Saint Anne.37
“…He knelt down on his knee and said to the young patient: Walk. The child
walked.” [...[I]l se mit à genoux et dit à la petite malade: Marche. L'enfant
marcha.]38 This is only the first of
several cures attributed to his intercession, both while he lived and after his
death.
The
cultural expectations of early twentieth-century Catholic Quebec demanded that
miracles be performed to solidify the claim to sainthood made by Moreau and to
overcome the potential dangers of a too familiar association with the secular
world. It is not enough for Moreau to be l'Evêque du Sacré Coeur,
Le Gardien de la Doctrine and Le Bon Pasteur, he must also
perform miracles to legitimate his claim to sanctity in the estimation of his
faith community. The presence of the miraculous in the hagiography is
contingent upon community demands and the expectations of the genre, and
suffice to show that Moreau worked both in the temporal and the transcendent.
In so doing the audience becomes more than mere passive observers, but rather
they take an active role in shaping the life of the holy man to reflect a
received tradition – “a tradition whose locus is in the community.”39
This
is not to say, however, that the author functions only as a mere conduit for
community knowledge and normative conceptualizations of the holy. Rather, the
nature of hagiography as a work meant to edify, means that the author is also
an interpreter and a teacher. Langevin’s job is to draw out and interpret what
the community does not entirely understand – what is mysteriously hidden in
the public record of Moreau’s life.40
The author’s role is not just to confirm what is already known, but to increase
the understanding of the community. Virtues and the miraculous, the particular
and the transcendent, must be shown to come together in the person of Mgr.
Moreau.
The
life of Rosalie Cadron-Jetté (1794-1864), la Mère de la Nativité, foundress of
the Sister of Miséricorde, written by Pierre-Auguste Fournet in 1898, on the
other hand, is almost completely devoid of the miraculous.41
With her we turn from the typology of the male, worldly actor, back to the
female foundress, passive in her obedience and humility, and characterized by a
bending of the will to the will of God. Rosalie Jetté is constructed as the
heroic almsgiver, dedicating her life to the assistance of others with little
or no thought for herself.
Rosalie
was born in Lavaltrie, Quebec and married Joseph Jetté with whom she had eleven
children, seven of whom survived. The family eventually moved to Montreal where
Rosalie became the metaphorical mother superior of her own household, that
included not only her husband and children, but also an increasing number of
indigent persons who called on her for aid as her reputation for charity spread
throughout the city. After the death of her husband in 1832, Rosalie Jetté
continued her charitable work but increasingly focused on aiding unwed mothers,
the fallen women of Victorian Montreal. She was approached by Bishop Bourget in
1845 to set up a shelter and hospice for these women which eventually became
the Congregation of the Sisters of Miséricorde.
The
Life of Rosalie Jetté, like that of Mother Mary Ann, posed problems for her
biographer and especially for her community. Unlike with Mother Mary Ann,
however, these challenges were not easily reducible to the standard heroic
qualities of the saintly life found in the hagiographic tradition, but rather
threatened the very reputation of Rosalie Jetté as a pious widow in the
community. Rosalie Jetté’s chosen profession – her charity work itself –
threatened community standards and mores and challenged the very boundaries of
acceptable social behaviour. As Marta Danylewycz has shown, the work of the
Sisters of Miséricorde with “fallen women” long remained an obstacle to community
acceptance due to popular prejudices against unwed, pregnant women that branded
the sisters as “accomplices in sin.”42
Nevertheless, in the Vita, the socially repugnant nature of the work of
the Sisters of Miséricorde, and Rosalie Jetté’s chosen profession, serves only
to enhance her heroic virtue and sacrifice.
There is a certain class
of person for whom society has no word of pity: we mean those young girls who,
through ignorance, seduction, or a moment’s blindness, have fallen into the
abyss where honour and virtue perish ... What is to become of them? Where will
they go? What asylum, what retreat will throw an impenetrable veil over their
sin? ... Blessed forever be the friendly hand stretched out to the young girl
during these moments of agony, to save her from utter shame and rehabilitate
her soul before God and his Angels.43
Initially
the community of Montreal rejected the work of the Sisters of Miséricorde, the
order struggled financially and socially to legitimate itself, and experienced
great difficulty recruiting new members who preferred to join the more
respectable teaching orders such as the Congregation of Notre-Dame.44
Passers-by were known to ridicule the sisters when they recognized their habit.
The public seemed to have
a settled antipathy in regard to the new work. At the sight of one of the
sisters, passers-by turned their heads aside, others insolently laughed, while
some more daring than the rest laid hands upon the burden, which those pious
women tried to conceal (new-born children being taken to baptism) and overwhelmed
them with abusive language.45
To
remove the stain of a life time spent working with the most rejected of social
outcasts – those deemed worthy of neither pity nor charity – her biographer
attempted to rhetorically separate Rosalie Jetté from her work in the world.
The character of Rosalie Cadron-Jetté all but disappears from the story at the
point where, in response to the prodding of Bishop Bourget, the hospice for
fallen women is established.46 “From
the day that she gave up the direction of her work in order to sanctify
herself, far from human eyes, she almost disappears from this history.”47
Marta Danylewycz suggests that Rosalie Jetté never wished to found an order
and so declined the offer to be the first mother superior, thus taking a back
seat in day-to-day operations of the Sisters of Miséricorde.48
Fournier attributes this refusal to her humility which allows him to
disassociate his subject from an institution and vocation that remained impoverished
both in financial terms and in the social estimentation of the community, while
remaining within the expected rhetorical constructions of the hagiographic
genre. The worthiness and unfortunate necessity of such an institution could
only reflect favourably on its founder and argue for her sanctity, but the associated
social stigma requires that the two – worldly and saintly – be kept at arms
length from one another.
At
the point of the foundation of the hospice for fallen women the hagiography
changes genres and becomes a history of the Sisters of Miséricorde, which
outlines the process whereby the institutional church slowly took over control
of the order. Rosalie Jetté’s position as the sanctified nun and pious widow
is not compatible with the work of the order and so her biographer must
separate her from it as far as possible. Her days as an actor are largely over
and she lives in “blessed obscurity” as decisions fall increasingly to male
institutional figures such as Bishop Bourget and the community’s chaplain,
Venant Pilon.49
Community
expectations demanded the separation of the holy from the profane and, at the
same time, insisted on male institutional control over the dangerous field of
fallen women and pious nuns.50 There
was a necessity to impose male institutional order so that the congregation
could take its proper place in society without casting contempt upon the nuns
and upon the church. This was a necessary response on the part of the church to
a dangerous social situation, and only once the nuns had been given a
formalized and controlled position in society does the new order begin to
stabilize and flourish.
Many priests still
entertained doubts about the hospital. In the first place, they said, it was a
new community, – a capital grievance in the eyes of some, – and then, to say
nothing of its object, which seemed to be of uncertain utility, – how could it
possibly get out of the poverty in which it had been struggling...51
Coadjutor
Bishop Prince decided to give the nuns a habit and Bishop Bourget determined
that they should take simple vows and be given a rule. Through such measures
the male, hierarchical, and institutional church took control of, and attempted
to legitimize, a vocation that was looked down upon by the community, after
which, the public “to some extent, conquered its aversion and began to see the
great utility of such an institution.”52
At the moment of their taking of vows, the chaplain Pilon recites the anthem prudentes
virgines, which serves to define the sexual limits of the nuns amongst
their fallen charges.53
The
institutionalization of the sisters granted legitimacy both to Rosalie Jetté’s
work and to her performance as a saint. Her biographer is able to present her
as the patient and passive follower of the will of God and the demands of her
bishop.54 “No one was better
convinced than herself that she was unable to found or direct a community. She
realized fully her own weakness and incapacity. But was she not doing the will
of God? And who can fight against the Most High?”55 She does not question God’s plan for her,
but follows obediently despite the social ramifications and boundary
transgressions. Community standards demanded first that Rosalie Jetté be
subsumed to patriarchal authority, and second that her association with the
unwed mothers for whom she cared, and which made her sacrifice so much the
greater, be reduced as much as possible.
The
result is a Vita that emphasizes the great humility, charity, and
obedience of this would-be saint, but limits her association with the order she
founded so that she might be distanced from an unpopular institution and the
threat of moral stain. Her claim to sanctity is constructed, like Mother Mary
Ann’s, almost entirely in terms of heroic virtue in the face of great
adversity. As the Church takes control over the Sisters of Miséricorde, she
re-occupies a recognizably female role in society – one that is bounded by the
dictates of patriarchy and so conforms to community expectations, allowing her
life to be constructed as saintly within the genre-expectations of female
hagiographic literature.56
Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that of the three candidates for
sanctity discussed here, Rosalie Jetté advanced the least on the road to
institutional and formal canonization.
When
viewed in the contexts of authorial intention, historical circumstance, and the
conventions of the genre as a whole, Rosalie Jette’s biography illustrates for
the historian the central importance of local community standards in assessing
a candidate’s virtues within the confines of social expectations and the
genre-conventions of the Lives of the Saints. In much the same way, Mother Mary
Ann’s alleged miracle becomes a story that can illuminate a particular conceptualization
of sanctity held by a religious culture that regarded the temporal and
supernatural as part and parcel of the same belief system. To her belief
community, Mother Mary Ann lived in the temporal realm, but kept one foot
firmly planted in the transcendent. The narrative reinforces this belief and
makes the truth-claim that Mother Mary Ann is, indeed, a saint. Moreau’s
biography shows how community expectations demanded that a saint have power
beyond the temporal realm and how these demands became a part of the authorship
of the life. The historian reading such sources can come to an understanding of
the world view of the communities that produced these works when they are read
with a sensitivity to both the temporal and supernatural aspects of religious
understanding, and with a healthy respect for cultural difference.
Consequently,
as I indicated near the beginning, I would like to argue that sacred biography
should be viewed not as a source document per se, which implies
something to be used to achieve or support an end outside itself, but rather as
a vestige of the past that helps historians come to terms with the dynamics of
sanctity in context. According to literary theorist Paul Ricoeur, who was
concerned with how the past is read in the present, the vestige is the
re-inscription of lived time into the present.57
In this sense, the vestige is not so much documentary or archival evidence as
it is material culture, and as such it has a synthetic quality as something from
the past but in the present. It is something present standing for
something past to which the historian brings knowledge and training in order to
learn about the culture that created it.
History,
argues Ricoeur, is the knowledge of vestiges, because the past can never be
replayed exactly as it was.58 Rather,
history is the knowledge and appropriation in the present of what has been left
behind by the past. As a vestige, a sacred biography provides the present with
an impression of a past community and the culturally informed understanding of
the world that it held. Canadian hagiography offers a tremendous opportunity to
learn about the cultures that created these works, about the reactions of the
audience to the saintly performance, and also about the saint herself and how
she and her biographer strove to meet cultural expectations.
1 Capitals are used for Saints’
Lives here and throughout this paper to draw a distinction between such lives
as a genre of literature and the actual lived lives of saints.
2 See for
example, Eric Suire, La Sainteté Française de la Rèforme catholique
(XVIe-XVIIIe siècles) (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bourdeaux,
2001), and Ronald J. Morgan, Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of
Gender (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2002).
3 Guy
Laflèche, Les Saints Martyrs Canadien (Laval: Singulier, 1988). Allan
Greer’s published work on Kateri Tekakwitha (d. 1680), the Lilly of the
Mohawks, includes “Colonial Saints: Gender, Race
and Hagiography in New France,” William and Mary Quarterly. Vol. I.VII,
No. 2, 2000, “Savage/Saint: the Lives of Kateri Tekakwitha,” in Habitant
et Marchand: Vingt ans après. eds. Sylvie Dépatie, Catharine Desbarats et
al. (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), and
“Iroquois Virgin: The Story of Catherine Tekakwitha in New France and New
Spain,” Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas.
ed. Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff (New York: London: Routledge, 2003).
4 Pierre
Delooz, “Towards a Sociological Study of Canonized Sainthood in the Catholic
Church,” Saints and Their Cults. ed. Stephen Wilson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983): 189-216.
5 Nancy Caciola, “Through a Glass, Darkly:
Recent Work on Sanctity and Society. A Review Article,” Comparative Study of
Society and History 58 no. 2 (1996): 302.
6 Ibid., 302.
7 For a discussion of appropriation as a
part of the act of reading see Paul Ricoeur, “Appropriation,” Hermeneutics
and the Human Sciences. ed. and trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), 191. Edward Said argues for an aggressive
form of appropriation that involves the colonizer taking control of and
manipulating the culture of the colonized. See Edward Said, Orientalism
(New York: Random House, 1979).
8 For a discussion of the text as vestige of
the past see chapter 8, “The Interweaving of History and Fiction,” in Paul
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985).
9 For a good discussion of the various
religious orders introduced in Quebec at this time see Nive Voisine (dir.) Histoire
du Catholicisme Québécois: Réveil et consolidation 1840-1898. Vol. II. (Québec: Boréal, 1991).
10 Roberto
Perin, “French Speaking Canada from 1840,” A Concise History of Christianity
in Canada. ed. Terrence Murphy and Roberto Perin (Toronto & Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996): 212.
11 Blessed Mother Mary Ann (1809-1890),
beatified in 2001; Venerable Mère de la
Nativité, Rosalie Cadron-Jetté (1794-1864). There are many others who could be
included in this group such as Blessed Mother Léoni Paradis (1840-1912), beatified
in 1984.
12 Blessed Louis-Zephyrin Moreau (1824-1901),
beatified in 1987. It should be noted that my primary interest in this paper is
with the Lives themselves as textual artefacts from the past. Consequently, the
fact that the majority of individuals about whom Lives were composed were never
officially canonized, is of little importance in examining community
conceptualizations of holiness and the conventions of hagiographic writing.
13 Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Culture
System,” Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion. ed. by
Michael Banton (London: Tavistoke, 1968), 4.
14 Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and
Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), 19.
15
Caciola, “Through a Glass Darkly,” 304.
16 This was the general approach of the
Bollandists, editors of the Lives of the Saints, from the mid-seventeenth
century to the present. See Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints.
trans. Donald Attwater (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962). See also H.
Delehaye, L’oeuvre des Bollandistes: A travers trois siècles, 1615-1915
(Bruxelles: Société des Bollandistes, 1959).
17 Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985).
18 Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, Saints
& Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000-1700 (Chicago :
University of Chicago Press, 1982). See also Andre Vauchez, Sainthood in the
Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Michael
Goodich, Vita Perfecta: The Ideal of Sainthood in the Thirteenth
Century (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1982).
19 Heffernan, Sacred Biography, 277n.
20 Nadeau, Eugène, O.M.I. The Life of
Mother Mary Ann (1809-1890), Foundress of the Sisters of Saint Ann. trans.
Sister Mary Camilla, S.S.A. (Lachine: Saint Ann Edition, 1965).
21
Ibid., 246.
22 Delooz, “Towards a Sociological Study of
Canonized Sainthood,” 211.
23 For a detailed description of the Vatican’s
saint-making process see Kenneth L. Woodward, Making Saints: How the
Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why (New
York: Simon and Shuster, 1990).
24 The Council of Trent defended the Catholic
tradition of the veneration of saints, but moved to regulate popular piety. The
faithful were not to erect new images, accept new accounts of miracles or
recognize the legitimacy of new relics without episcopal approval. See Morgan, Spanish
American Saints, 29.
25 The biographical pattern of the western
saint was set out by Sulpicius Severus in his Life of saint Martin of Tours
(d. 397). The central crisis point in Martin’s life is not martyrdom, but
rather his conversion to the heroic Christian life which characterized his
later deeds and achievements. C. Stancliffe, St. Martin and His Biographer
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1983), 92.
26 Heffernan, Sacred Biography, 29.
27 Nadeau, The Life of Mother Mary Ann,
115.
28 Delooz, “Towards a Sociological Approach to
Canonized Sanctity,” 208.
29 Heffernan, Sacred Biography, 38-39.
30 Moreau was beatified in 1987. His feast day
is May 24.
31 St. Martin was the first monk in the west
to become an ordained bishop and was represented by his biographer, Sulpicius
Severus, as an exemplary individual able to live simultaneously both in the
world and in the metaphorical desert. Charles Borromeo was instrumental in
implementing the program of the Council of Trent and therefore the counter
reformation itself. Saint Martin therefore, provides the example of the model
bishop-saint, while Charles Borromeo is the model counter-reformation saint.
32 [...[L]'année scolaire 1845-1846 passait
sans amélioration de la santé, avec des victoires d'humilité et de patience,
avec des gains assez maigres en science théologique.] F. Langevin, S.J. Monseigneur
Louis-Zéphyrin Moreau, Quatrième évêque de Sainte-Hyacinthe, 1824-1901
(Québec: L’Action Catholique, 1937), 27.
33 [Ce refus mordit cruellement l'âme de
Zéphyrin Moreau, mais son vouloir têtu ne croulera pas sous une avalanche qui
le laisse encore vivant.] Ibid., 28.
34 [MGR Moreau ne plaçait pas de cloison
étanche entre le travail et la piété.] Ibid., 125.
35 [Et la
vie de Mgr Moreau? Vie de prière, vie de fidélité au devoir quotidien; vie sans
éclat, peut-être, mais vie sans tache, vie belle aux yeux des contemporains,
prêtres et laics, qui appellent leur bon pasteur: l’évêque
du Sacré Coeur, et lui demandent des miracles, comme l'on en demande
aux saints.] Ibid., 149. Langevin’s italics.
36 [Le
peuple qui, sans confondre, avait cependant uni sainteté et puissance
miraculeuse, demandait au saint Mgr Moreau de vrais miracles, - les
quelque peu sceptique, pour voir enfin si l'évêque etait aussi saint qu'on se
plaisait à la répéter; les plus lancés pour confirmer leur dévotion, en
attendant un signe dans le ciel.] Ibid., 247. Langevin’s italics. Note that
Langevin is careful here not to call Moreau a saint directly but to put that
appellation into the mouths of others unnamed. As with Mother Mary Ann, the
claim to sanctity is effectively made without jeopardizing the nihil obstat of the bishop (pp. 11-14). Just in case there was a
chance for confusion, the author included a disclaimer at the beginning.
“Conformément, aux règles edictèes par le pape Urbain VIII, l’auteur déclare
que, s’il a employé quelquefois le mot ‘saint’ en parlent du serviteur de Dieu,
ou de quelque autre, il ne prétend en rien devancer le jugement de la Sainte
Église.” This is a fairly standard device at the beginning of post-tridentine
lives.
37 Ibid.,
248.
38 Ibid.,
249.
39
Heffernan, Sacred Biography, 19-21. Heffernan argues that, because
hagiography is meant primarily to teach, virtuosic writing and literary
aesthetics are of secondary concern. Therefore, authorship is representative of
a larger community voice that is collective. Sanctity is what made the saint an
historical figure and consequently the fictional saint can not be separated
from the historical personage.
40 Ibid.,
21.
41
Rosalie Cadron-Jetté has not yet been beatified, and is generally categorized as a Servant of God. Her life was
composed by Pierre-August Fournier in 1898.
42 Marta
Danylewycz, Taking the Veil: An Alternative to Marriage, Motherhood and
Spinsterhood in Quebec, 1840-1920 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987),
77.
43 Pierre
August Fournier, Mère de la Nativité et les origines des soeurs de
Miséricorde (Montréal: Institut des Sourds-Muet, 1898), 32-3. There is a
direct English translation of this work, Mother de la Nativité and the
Origins of the Community of the Sisters of Miséricorde, 1848-1898
(Montreal: Institution for Deaf Mutes, 1898). The quotations I have used here
are drawn mostly from this translation.
44
Danylewicz, Taking the Veil, 82
45
Fournier, Mother de la Nativité, 74.
46 The
first house belonging to the order was named after St. Pelagia, a legendary
actress from Antioch with a reputation for licentious living, who became a
Christian and, dressed as a man, a monk in the desert. The symbolism of this
name is significant given the work of the new hospice and the necessity to
separate the virgin nuns from the sins of their fallen charges. “Plein
d’espérance pour l’avenir, le pieux évêque décora cette masure du titre
d’Hospice Sainte-Pelagie, en l’honneur de la sainte pénitente de ce nom.”
Fournier, Mére de la Nativité, 43.
47
Fournier, Mother de la Nativité, 141.
48 Ibid.,
80.
49 Ibid.,
132.
50 See Elizabeth
Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and the Church in the Seventeenth Century
(Montreal; Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990). Rapley argues that
the institution of a rule upon female religious collectives was a central means
of exerting institutional control over female religious groups that were often
viewed as suspicious by male authorities. These orders, left uncloistered,
threatened to cross gender boundaries into male sphere’s of teaching and
proselytizing and, therefore, threatened the traditionalism that the Council of
Trent and Counter-Reformation wished to reinforce. Although Rapley's book deals
mostly with the seventeenth century, the cloistering of female congregations as
a central reform of the Council of Trent was inherited by the Ultramontane
church of the nineteenth century.
51
Fournier, Mother de la Nativité, 87-88.
52 Ibid.,
111.
53 Ibid.,
96.
54 Ibid.,
32. “Nothing less than that charity which knows no bounds was needed to
undertake the work which was henceforth to consume her whole life.”
55 Ibid.,
48.
56
Danylewicz, Taking the Veil, 53. Throughout the nineteenth century,
existing male and female divisions and inequalities were reinforced. Men and
women occupied separate spaces in the religious and political arenas and were
thought to internalize different value systems.
57 Paul
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985), 184.
58 Ibid.,
120.