“Quebec’s Wayside Crosses and the Creation of Contemporary Devotionalism,” in eds. Lucas Van Rompay and David A. Morgan, The Long Shadow of Vatican II: Authority, Faith, and Church since the Second Vatican Council, 102-122. University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Three thousand croix de chemin – wayside crosses – dot the landscape of rural Quebec. Fifteen feet tall and often elaborately carved, these wooden crosses peaked as popular devotions in the 1930s-1950s before being largely abandoned following Vatican II and the accompanying “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec. Since the late-1990s, however, more rural people are rebuilding and restoring them. Using the crosses as a lens, this chapter explores the often ambivalent interactions between public/private and popular/official Catholicism in post-Vatican II Quebec.
Cross restorers describe it as a tradition attacked on two sides: by a modernizing conciliar Church that sought to limit private devotions and by laicité secularists who attempt to legislate a religiously neutral public sphere. The crosses are especially appealing because they offer a material contestation of urban elites’ push for secularization, while also embodying a grassroots Catholicism that consciously promotes lay agency in the face of Vatican control.
At stake are questions about the role of pre-conciliar structures in the built environment of places like rural Quebec and how resurgent devotionalism creates new ways of being Catholic in the twenty-first century.
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Three thousand croix de chemin – wayside crosses – dot the landscape of rural Quebec. Fifteen feet tall and often elaborately carved, these wooden crosses peaked as popular devotions in the 1930s-1950s before being largely abandoned following Vatican II and the accompanying “Quiet Revolution” in Quebec. Since the late-1990s, however, more rural people are rebuilding and restoring them. Using the crosses as a lens, this chapter explores the often ambivalent interactions between public/private and popular/official Catholicism in post-Vatican II Quebec.
Cross restorers describe it as a tradition attacked on two sides: by a modernizing conciliar Church that sought to limit private devotions and by laicité secularists who attempt to legislate a religiously neutral public sphere. The crosses are especially appealing because they offer a material contestation of urban elites’ push for secularization, while also embodying a grassroots Catholicism that consciously promotes lay agency in the face of Vatican control.
At stake are questions about the role of pre-conciliar structures in the built environment of places like rural Quebec and how resurgent devotionalism creates new ways of being Catholic in the twenty-first century.
back