GLIMPSES of how Canada worked: a writer's memoir.

39. What might have been

THE 1969 DEATH IN OFFICE OF THE CORRUPT and ultra-conservative Union Nationale Premier Maurice Duplessis of Quebec Province unleashed imaginations and energy in all its people. His very liberal Liberal successor, Jean Lesage, set about modernizing everything the Province controlled. Corruption was exposed, many bureaucrats fired. New ministries were established. Existing ones adopted new technologies. Lesage especially wanted education to be updated as fast as possible, and secularized.

With all that going on besides preparations for Expo 67, Quebec was a paradise for journalists. Millions of words about its "Quiet Revolution" are online today.

A small item in the final report of the 22-member Parent* Commission on Education Lesage had appointed recommended that "the whole English Catholic collectivity" create its own university. It urged the four existing English Catholic institutions of higher education -- the Jesuits' Loyola College, the Congregation of Notre Dame's Marianopolis College, the Archdiocese's St. Joseph Teachers College, and Thomas More Institute of continuing education -- to work together as equal partners. 

I wrote in The Challenge  that the Commission's proposal not only signalled "the first official provincial recognition of the Anglo-Catholic minority in Quebec", but offered that minority a mandate to custom-tailor a university for itself in the most modern terms: "...designed today for tomorrow's students, designed in the second half of the 20th Century without any handicapping residue from the first half".

Like WOW! There was loud rejoicing among thinking members of the "Anglo-Catholic minority". Unfortunately, most of Quebec's small English Roman Catholic community didn't think. Like most readers of The Canadian Register, they were comfortable and smug.

Most members of my beloved Church believe that "We know the Truth already. What else is there to do?" Along with my Dad and Bill DeMeza and Cardinal Leger and Monsignor Hanley and Leo MacGillivray and people at Marianopolis, I respond that we must get up off what we sit on and LIVE the Truth as Christ asked us to!!!

The rector of Loyola College knew he could safely spread the idea that "A lot of people in the community would be very disappointed if the name of the new university were not Loyola". He had repeated that in different contexts for several years to a community which didn't notice that he offered no proof.

After the Parent Commission's proposal he avoided meetings called by the other three schools but organized a few "community consultations" to plan the new entity. He even persuaded a dozen laymen to petition the Legislative Assembly of Quebec to establish Loyola University with him as president, a total waste of everyone's time because it was against the Commission's clear instructions regarding correct procedures. The Assembly ignored the petition.

His behaviour was so blatantly self-serving and divorced from reality that even other members of the Society of Jesus opposed him. One who taught philosophy at Loyola and was a good friend of my husband and me, often dropping in for meals, was outspoken in his objections to the plans of his boss. He was suddenly transferred to Winnipeg.

For more than three years the President of Marianopolis, usually with Gloria beside her, met with Quebec's Ministry of Education, the Universite de Montreal (with which Marianopolis was historically affiliated because it was bilingual and Catholic), McGill, St. Joseph Teachers College and Thomas More, with RC community leaders and with the hierarchy of the Archdiocese. The two women's mantra was that what Marianopolis offered was almost unique in North America: Post-secondary Arts and Science degrees "for women only" during the few years of their lives when psychological research showed they develop best without male competition.