By Sandra Dunham & Seanna Watson 
It has been said about the people of France that they are “not religious, and the religion they are not is Catholic.” In Canada, the same description can be applied to the Quebecois of French heritage. As we have seen in recent history, “secularism” in English Canada often has a different connotation versus its Francophone equivalent: “laicité.” The history of French Canada includes severe and abusive domination by the Catholic church, which has only recently been recognized, and to this day only partially addressed.
CFIC is committed to the principle of separation of church and state, or more formally, religion and government. In Canada today, there are still many examples of the small yet significant breaches in what we would like to see as a wall separating the two. Yet in Canada’s not too distant history, the ties between unethical governments and immoral religious institutions have led to grievous violations of human rights.
Though most Canadians are aware of the role that churches played in colonizing Indigenous people, perhaps only a handful of our readers will still recall a dark period in Quebec, when a powerful alliance between Maurice Duplessis and the Catholic Church led to horrific abuses of “the children of sin.” Remembering is important in our efforts to ensure that these abuses never happen again.
The so-called “children of sin” were born to single mothers during Duplessis’ tenure as premier. At the time, limited social services were available to residents of Quebec, and most of the available social institutions were run by the Roman Catholic Church. Although the proportion of children born to unwed mothers in Quebec was lower than in the rest of the country, the rate of institutionalization was higher than anywhere else in Canada. Mothers were forced to sign over their newborn children within three days of giving birth, in spite of this practice being against the laws of the time. “Women reported that church officials shouted at them in the delivery room while they were still drugged that social services would sue them if they didn’t give the child up.”
In Quebec, these children were sent to orphanages run by the Catholic Church, which received a stipend to “care” for the children. Children at orphanages were not required to attend school, and supervision was limited. Each nun in the orphanage was required to supervise at least 10 children under the age of two. The lack of education and stimulation meant that these children were delayed in their development.
The situation was made even worse when Duplessis and the church increased revenues by converting orphanages to “mental institutions.” This allowed Quebec to increase the amount of money transferred from the federal government to Quebec to fund public institutions. The orphanages were subsidized at a rate of $1.25 per day, but as mental hospitals, they received $2.75 per day — more than double the revenue. In all, more than 5,000 Quebec orphans were improperly classified as “mentally retarded” and committed to the 16 psychiatric hospitals in Quebec, all run by the Catholic Church. Despite the added funding, as new mentally ill and developmentally delayed individuals were placed with the orphans in the new “hospitals,” the children were forced to provide care for these patients and all pretexts of education came to a halt.
The litany of abuses suffered by the “children of Duplessis” included being confined to a straight jacket for days at a time, sexual and physical abuse, neglect, emotional cruelty, being drugged, and even being lobotomized.
Along with the Government of Quebec and the Catholic Church, a third group is implicated in this horror: the Quebec College of Physicians. Doctors signed documents certifying that the orphans were “mentally deficient.” Dr. Piche, the physician who was responsible at Mont Providence, and who in 1993 was still practicing medicine at the age of 75, described the forms as “bureaucracy and paperwork” and did not even remember signing documents that destroyed the lives of so many. When asked by a survivor, “Why did you sign this?” Dr. Piche responded “because the nuns asked me to.”
In 2006, the government of Quebec issued an apology and compensation for the affected individuals, with the condition that the orphans agreed to drop legal action against the church. The orphans accepted the offer but acknowledged its insufficiency indicating that they accepted it because they were reaching the end of their lives. To this day the church has not apologized. Archbishop Lepine, in 2013, declared that “the church itself is not responsible for terrible acts the Duplessis orphans suffered.”
The book The Home for Unwanted Girls, by Joanna Goodman, is a work of fiction set in the reality of Quebec in the 1950s. It explores this dark story from the perspective of a young, unwed mother and a child, growing up in a Catholic orphanage turned mental hospital.
Do you have any memories of the “La Grande Noirceur,” our great darkness? You are welcome to share your story. We forget history at the risk of repeating it.