One may praise the
steadfastness with which the Church fought for what its bishops
believed to be right, or one may, on the other hand, decry the
arrogance of its pretensions to civil power and its hampering
conservatism; but as the great central fact in the history of New
France, the hegemony of Catholicism cannot be ignored.
When Frenchmen began the work of founding a dominion in the New World,
their own land was convulsed with religious troubles. Not only were
the Huguenots breaking from the trammels of the old religion, but
within the Catholic Church, itself in France there were two great
contending factions. One group strove for the preservation of the
Galilean liberties, the special rights of the French King and the
French bishops in the ecclesiastical government of the land, while
the other claimed for the Pope a supremacy over all earthly rulers in
matters of spiritual concern. It was not a difference on points of
doctrine, for the Galileans did not question the headship of the
Papacy in things of the spirit. What they insisted upon was the
circumscribed nature of the papal power in temporal matters within the
realm of France, particularly with regard to the right of appointment
to ecclesiastical positions with endowed revenues. Bishops, priests,
and religious orders ranged themselves on one side or the other, for
it was a conflict in which there could be no neutrality. As the royal
authorities were heart and soul with the Galileans, it was natural
enough that priests of this group should gain the first religious
foothold in the colony.
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