Canadian Journal of Sociology Online July-August 2006
Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie 31 (1) 2006 1
Abstract: The author develops the hypothesis that the rise of cohabitation in Quebec can be explained by the fact that almost all of its French speaking population was Catholic, and that the Church's refusal to change its doctrine on marriage and sexuality, and to allow laity to play a decisional role in the definition of doctrine, provided Quebec Catholics with the motive to abandon the traditional Christian norms in these matters; the local Catholic authorities' withdrawal from the institutions that framed people's lives "from cradle to grave" made it possible to actually abandon these norms. This case study allows the author to argue that the speed with which each society proceeds along this path should be studied by analyzing the political, legal, and institutional contexts within which the changes constituting the second demographic transition occur in each society.
Résumé: L'auteur développe l'hypothèse selon laquelle la montée de la cohabitation au Québec peut s'expliquer par le fait que la plus grande partie de sa population francophone est de tradition catholique et que l'église de la fin des années 1960, en refusant de changer sa doctrine sur la mariage et la sexualité et en refusant également aux laïcs tout pouvoir sur la doctrine morale, a donné, aux catholiques du Québec, de bonnes raisons d'abandonner les normes chrétiennes traditionnelles en cette matière. Le fait que l'église, à la même époque, se soit retirée des institutions qui encadraient la plus grande partie de la vie des Québécois a donné à ceux-ci l'occasion de le faire sans subir de conséquences f’cheuses. L'auteur profite de l'étude de ce cas pour soutenir que l'étude du rythme auquel chaque société progresse sur la voie de la deuxième transition démographique ne peut être faite sans tenir compte des institutions et des lois de chacune.
Comparative studies of European countries show important differences in the prevalence of cohabitation. According to Kiernan's (2000; 2002) analyses of data from the European Commission for 1996, cohabitation was the living arrangement for between 20% and 35% of women, aged 25 to 29 years, in Norway, Sweden, Finland and France, between 10% and 20% in the Netherlands,
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Belgium, Luxembourg and Britain, between 5% and 10% in West Germany, East Germany and Austria, and less than 5% in Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Italy. Strong differences also exist within Canada: in 1996, 24.1% of couples residing in Quebec were cohabiting compared with only 10.0% in the rest of Canada.
From the evolution of cohabitation in Sweden, where it developed as a widespread phenomenon earlier than in other countries, several researchers have hypothesized that some Western societies are going through a transition in the way couples are formed. This transition occurs in several stages, in the first of which cohabitation is limited to a small group of deviant or " avantgarde" people and, in the last, where marriage and cohabitation become indistinguishable (Hoem and Hoem, 1988; Prinz, 1995; Kiernan, 2002). From a broader perspective, this shift from marriage to cohabitation is viewed as part of a more general phenomenon, the second demographic transition (van de Kaa, 1987).
However interesting, such a generalization falls short of explaining why this transition starts earlier or later in different countries or societies, why its pace varies, and why some countries, like Italy, seem immune to it. More specifically, it does not explain why Quebec lagged behind the rest of Canada on this path until roughly the end of the 1960s, and then became a forerunner (Le Bourdais and Marcil-Gratton, 1996).
In their study of the early life transitions of Canadian women, Ravanera, Rajulton and Burch (1998) interpreted Quebec women's atypical behaviour as "a distinctive mixture of Gallic sophistication and modernity with lingering traces of a very conservative brand of Catholicism," which alludes to some form of normative distinctiveness, but hardly qualifies as a real explanation. Wu (2000), in his study of cohabitation in Canada, leaves largely unanalysed the difference between Quebec and the rest of Canada and, although he describes changes over time in the incidence of cohabitation and in the attitudes towards it, he assumes that the micro-level processes leading to the choice of cohabitation, or attitudes towards it, are stable over time. Lapierre- Adamcyk, Le Bourdais and Marcil-Gratton (1999) analyze current attitudes towards marriage and cohabitation among young Ontarian and Quebecois, but do not examine the evolution of such attitudes through time. Bélanger and Turcotte (1999) do examine the change over time in the effects of education and work on the choice of cohabitation or marriage as the form of the first union among Quebec women; they show that, contrary to what is assumed by the economic approach to human behaviour, these effects change over time. However, as their analysis is limited to Quebec, it is not possible to evaluate how the pace of these changes compares with Ontario or the other Canadian provinces. Had they made such comparisons, they may not have been able to explain any observed differences using the economic explanatory framework
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and independent variables they chose. From a completely different perspective, relying heavily on Parsons and Bales' (1955) work on the family, Dagenais (2000) has examined changes in the contemporary family; although he presents his analysis as a general one, and not specific to Quebec, Quebec is the only actual society he refers to; once again, this prevents any comparison with the rest of Canada or any other society.
Our view is that Quebec's relatively rapid progress along this path can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that almost all of its French-speaking population during the 1960s belonged to the Roman Catholic Church, at a time when the local Catholic Church was changing in one important transformation while failing to change in another equally important one. More specifically, we argue that the Church authorities' refusal either to change their doctrine on marriage and sexuality, or to allow the laity to play a decisional role in the definition of doctrine and the orientation of pastoral activities, gave Quebec Roman Catholics a strong motive for abandoning the Christian tradition as the provider of moral guidelines for sex and family matters; at the same time, the withdrawal of local Roman Catholic authorities from the set of institutions that encircled people's lives "from cradle to grave" made it possible for Quebecers to actually abandon it.
First, we review briefly the main theories related to marriage and its transformation, demonstrating that they cannot provide an explanatory framework for differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada. Second, we examine some recent scholarship on the Roman Catholic Church's role in fostering Quebec's so called "Quiet Revolution." Third, we explore the Quebec Church's principal response to the turmoil of the late 1960s — the Commission d'étude sur les laïcs et l'église, led by Quebec sociologist Fernand Dumont — and the recommendations it made which were never implemented. We then examine the source of moral theology in the Roman Catholic Church, and its relation to centralized authority, and compare it with the source of moral theology in the main Protestant churches, relating it to the evolution of the moral doctrine of these churches from the beginning of the last century. Finally, we compare Quebec's evolution with that of French-speaking Catholics from Ontario, whose are closer to other Ontarians in terms of behaviour than they are to Quebecers; we also look briefly at Norway, where the rate of cohabitation is similar to Quebec's.
Theories regarding the increase of age at first marriage, the substitution of cohabitation for marriage, and the declining proportion of people who ever marry fall into two broad groups (Lapierre-Adamcyk and Charvet, 1999). One is derived from the economic approach to human behaviour (Becker, 1993). Although not stressed by Becker, this theory relies heavily on the fact
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that marriage is a contract between a man and a woman that cannot be broken without the State's consent, and according to which the parties involved owe each other support. The family has a single utility function, which is another way of saying that exchanges between members of the family are not market exchanges but more like transactions taking place within a firm. According to the theory, people choose marriage as a form of living together because, if one spouse has an advantage in the labour market and the other in home production, their total production is higher if each specializes in their privileged occupation than if they are both equally involved in both spheres. The reasoning relies on several more or less implicit postulates, including that the contract is not supposed to end, that it cannot be terminated by the sole will of one party, and that, if it does end, the law guarantees alimony will be paid to the homemaker by the breadwinner to insure that the former will not be without resources despite forfeiting the ability to bring in an income.
It follows from Becker's theory, and as he himself suggested, that people would be less interested in marriage as a form of conjugal life if the advantages of specialization were to disappear. As women become more involved in vocational training and graduate studies, and thus as the investment in their human capital increases, their earning potential grows closer to men's and the advantages of specialization disappear. Although Becker does not develop the argument, it is easy to see that if all individuals are obliged to enter the labour force, marriage, as a contract from which one cannot escape easily, becomes a liability rather than a security and is less attractive to women themselves. As long as living with another individual is perceived as providing benefits that living alone does not, people would be willing to live with someone else, but within some other form of arrangement. In other words, although the theory does not discuss cohabitation as such, there is space within it for seeing it as a substitute to marriage that does not encompass its institutionalized and mandatory form of economic cooperation and that therefore becomes preferable when specialization has little or no advantages.
Although Becker only suggested progress in women's education as a possible cause of marriage's declining popularity, other researchers have devised an alternative explanation of this phenomenon based on human capital theory. Oppenheimer (1994) and Oppenheimer, Kaljminand Lim(1997) developed the idea that the disappearance of the benefits of specialization, and thus the demise of marriage, was brought about by changes in young men's economic conditions, and especially their declining economic prospects, rather than by women's rising education levels. AsOppenheimer stresses, since the beginning of the 1970s, young men have had increasing difficulty in finding the type of well paid and stable jobs that enabled their predecessors fulfilling their side of the specialization deal; at the same time, stagnant or decreasing real wages and new patterns of consumption have put pressure on families for both spouses to
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have paid work. As stable and well paid jobs are more and more restricted to college graduates, young men either delay marriage because they are studying, or are simply ineligible for it because they never get the job that would enable them to become reliable breadwinners. Cohabitation is thus either a temporary status for young adults still accumulating human capital, or a "budget" form of marriage for the men who cannot expect to acquire either a well paid stable job or the women they would otherwise be likely to marry. Homogamous late marriage among professionals and constantly postponed marriage among black people are offered as evidence of this hypothesis.
The second group of theories explaining the decline in marriage and the rise of cohabitation interprets these demographic phenomena from a sociological and historical perspective. This approach views the decrease in fertility and nuptiality and the increase in divorce, cohabitation and out-of-wedlock births, as related trends.
From the conventional demographic perspective, declining fertility is commonly seen as part of the demographic transition, a general phenomenon that includes a fall in mortality. According to this macro-sociological view, fertility adjusts itself to the fact that material progress has reduced infant mortality and increased longevity. The more recent spread of divorce, cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock births, as well as the circulation of parents and children across families, brought about by these changes, are seen as part of a "second" demographic transition (van de Kaa, 1987) that transforms the determinants of individual demographic behaviour.
From this sociological and historical perspective, changes in marriage and the family are usually perceived as a consequence or a part of a general process towards individualisation. In a very broad sense, individualisation is a process in which 1) the traditional notion of the individual as simply the indivisible empirical unit of the human species (L. Dumont, 1977: 17), as an interchangeable unit defined by its position within society or as the sum of the various qualities that may describe him (Luhmann, 1990: 26) rather than by its personality (Arendt, 1973), is replaced by the notion of the individual as a moral entity with universal value, each unit of the species being seen as a special incarnation of this moral entity, and in which 2) society — as well as the understanding of it —, previously organized around society itself, the nation or God, is reorganized along this new notion of the individual.
Individualisation has been used to explain changing demographic behaviour at least since the end of the 19th century. A. Dumont (1890; 1898) was the first demographer to clearly link decreasing fertility with the process of individualisation: according to his view, people had fewer children because they put their own interests, and those of their descendants, before the nation's. Based on field research carried out to explore the cause of France's early fertility decline, revealed by the 1881 census, this statement was limited to the con-
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temporary French situation and was mixed with issues of morality; since then, it has nonetheless been the inspiration for much historical work and some sociological theorizing. In a series of studies looking specifically at the evolution of ideas, attitudes and behaviour towards children, and towards death, from the 17th century to the present day P. Ariès developed the idea more generally. Using historical material, he showed that, at around the 17th century, people's behaviour started to indicate that they placed greater value on the quality of individual children rather than on their quantity —infanticide decreased, precautions were taken to avoid infant deaths, and apprenticeship was replaced by formal education. Furthermore these changes began at the start of a century-long downward trend in fertility that can only be explained by the fact that some form of contraception was being used —a behaviour compatible with the idea that more importance was being given to the individual child than to the number of children (Ariès, 1973). A similar research series into attitudes and behaviour surrounding death showed that the long downward trend in mortality, and the increase in longevity, both starting at about the same time, can only be accounted for by a growing interest in self-preservation that preceded progress in medical care. At this time, the social behaviour surrounding death started to move away from a traditional conception of death as an inevitable part of life, to the contemporary notion where people appear to act as though death were the negation of life and should not occur (Ariès, 1975, 1977a, 1977b).
In more recent years, Lesthaeghe and Surkyn (1988) brought the idea proposed by A. Dumont almost a century before back into demographic thought. Roussel (1999) studied the more recent transformations of family structure and dynamics, now viewed as a part of the second demographic transition, in a strictly demographic fashion, but using the general explanatory framework developed by Ariès. From this perspective, the decrease in fertility and nuptiality, and the rise in divorce, cohabitation and in extra-marital sexual relations and births are different elements in marriage's waning position as the institution encompassing sexual relations, child-rearing, mutual assistance and, in the modern Western world at least, intimacy and love. People are no longer constrained by norms, whether internalized or enforced by social pressure, to marry in order to have a sexual partner, a spouse or children; nor are they constrained to marry as part of the normal course of life. Individuals may have many sexual partners at once or in succession; these relationships may or may not lead to cohabitation and children, with births being elective and planned. Raising a child is an experience that an individual may or may not choose to live, not a duty or part of a role that he or she is required to perform.
Both the economic and the "socio-historical" perspectives are broad and general. Each provides a framework to understand contemporary changes affecting sexual behaviour, marriage, and the family in most developed
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countries. However, neither one, by itself, explains the differences in the nature and rhythm of these changes between societies. More especially, both come short of explaining why, in the two most populated provinces of Canada, in relatively similar political and economic circumstances, the evolution of cohabitation over the last two decades, and its current prevalence, are very different. Another kind of explanation may be needed.
That Quebec experienced a "Quiet Revolution" in the wake of Maurice Duplessis's death in 1959 is common knowledge. The most striking feature of this "revolution" is that the local Roman Catholic Church gave up its power over education, health, and social services, until then their undisputed realm, handing them over to the Quebec government; at the same time, a host of other institutions closely related to the Roman Catholic Church — such as the "caisses populaires" (credit unions) and the "Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada," one of the main labour unions —ended their religious affiliation, not only without protest from the Church, but with its active collaboration.
Recent scholarship (Warren and Meunier, 1999; Meunier and Warren, 2002) emphasises the fact that such a peaceful transfer of power from the Roman Catholic Church to the Quebec government was possible because it was the local part of a worldwide Catholic religious movement —"an army of militants," in the words of Pope Pius X —created to foster the implementation of the Rerum Novarum [1] encyclical (1891). This movement was a response to already declining religious attendance, and to the demands of concerned Catholics, who saw the Church's message loosing its relevance in a rapidly industrializing world whose main ideologies — individualist liberalism, fascism, and communism — were all far from the Roman Catholic ideal. As pointed out by Meunier (1999) and Warren and Meunier (1999), the Rerum Novarum encyclical offered Roman Catholics a new ethic of social commitment, but did not break with the Church's Thomistic intellectual tradition, which had been reaffirmed as its official philosophical doctrine by the Vatican Council I in 1870 (Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith); on the contrary, it clearly adopted it, and used it as its foundation. The movement, inspired by personalist philosophers like Emmanuel Mounier (1949) and Jacques Maritain, and embodied in organisations such as "l'Action catholique"
1. Encyclicals and similar documents of the Catholic Church whichhave a quasi legal status within the Church and are easily accessible, for instance on the Vatican web site (www.vatican.va), are referenced to in the text by their title and are not listed in the References section at the end of the article. Other documents of the Catholic Church, such as those prepared for Vatican Council II, are treated as regular material and listed at the beginning of the References section. Back to text
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and "la Jeunesse ouvrière catholique," encouraged laypeople to commit themselves to social discipleship, offering them a role unprecedented in the modern history of the Roman Catholic Church. Catholicism was no longer to be present in the structures of society but in the lives of Catholics, each within his own milieu, and this form of testimony was to be the beginning of a re- Christianisation of society. By the end of the 1950s, this movement had won over most of Quebec's secular and clerical elite, and retained its influence at least until the mid-1960s. Because of the widespread impact of these ideas, Quebec's political and administrative reorganization appears as an essentially Catholic endeavour.
By the middle of the 1960s, the Quebec Roman Catholic Church had new problems to face. Laypeople, who now had an almost priest-like role in implementing the Church's social doctrine, wanted to gain power within its structure. On another front, rank and file lay Catholics were eager to discover the Church's position towards the contraceptive pill, believed by many to be compatible with the Catholic view of conjugal sexuality as, unlike condoms, the diaphragm or coitus interruptus, it did not spill or stop semen. The last encyclical on the topic, Castii Connubii in 1930, had reaffirmed the Church's traditional doctrine on marriage and the family: no divorce, no contraception except continence, no abortion, no tolerance of extramarital sex, and the submission of wives to their husband. It also carried the reminder that God does not require from man what he cannot do, that pretending otherwise entails excommunication, and it required confessors to be explicit about the doctrine and not depart from it. From then on, Roman Catholics were left to grapple with their desire for the Church to relax its moral position on sexuality. As shown in Gauvreau and Gervais (2003), married French Canadian Catholics had been struggling with these problems for a long time, and had developed various strategies to allow them to use some form of contraception without placing themselves outside of the Church. These strategies often involved looking for lenient confessors, and true believers, who needed to resort to them, found them unsatisfactory because, in their view, they undermined the sanctity of the sacrament of confession. The Humanae vitae encyclical, released in 1968, changed only minor points: contraception by continence was extended to methods based on natural cycles, pornography was added to the list of sexual wrongdoing, and, interestingly, no reference was made to the submission of wives to husbands.
In Quebec, the Roman Catholic Church's main attempt to deal with the turmoil of the late 1960s was the Commission d'étude sur les laïcs et l'église. Initiated in 1968, and modelled on government commissions such as the Commission royale d'enquête sur l'enseignement (a.k.a. Commission Parent), this commission received its mandate from the bishops of French Canada. It was asked to look into the concerns of bishops and questions raised by the
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clergy and laity, the changes affecting society and the consequences of Vatican Council II. The commissioners themselves believed that they needed to study the entire situation and future of the local Church (CELE, 1971). The Commission proceeded in a similar fashion to other important commissions of the time. It commissioned reports from prominent experts on various topics, conducted empirical research through qualitative surveys, and met with numerous groups of people. The impression given by the commissioned reports is that, from the outset, the commissioners wished the Roman Catholic Church to democratize itself and move away from the centralization that had become its hallmark. In a document on the notion of authority, one expert argued that the Church's current structure, inherited from political power structures in the late Roman Empire, should be replaced by structures that could accommodate the growth of democratic conscience in politics as well as the wishes of laypeople (Harvey, 1969). Another expert analyzed the briefs received by the commissioners from various groups and individuals, using the terminology of the De Ecclesia dogmatic constitution recently adopted by the Vatican Council II (Proulx, 1970). He concludes that when it comes to the "royal function," that is authority within the Church, laypeople desire the right to elect community leaders, the right to take part in decisionmaking, the right to participate in official position statements, the right of being consulted, the right of public and free expression (presumably to be understood as the right to express publicly dissenting views without religious sanction) and the right to information.
The Commission's main report, published in 1971 and written mostly by its president, sociologist Fernand Dumont, almost completely avoided moral issues and limited itself to the role of laypeople within the structure of the Church. The report is a strange document in that its author states that he has recommendations to make, but that he will not divulge them formally and group them at the end of chapters of the report itself. The recommendations are actually so well hidden in the text that only a very careful and synthetic reading of the whole report makes it possible to fully figure out what they are. Baum (1990) provides such an analysis. In his opinion, the report's author had two goals: first, it favoured the reorganisation of the local Church to encourage the emergence of a Church of Quebec, largely independent of the Canadian Catholic Conference, and, second, to truly democratize the Roman Catholic Church as a whole. The first recommended strategy was that the diocesan pastoral councils, recently introduced in the Church, should include laypeople who were elected rather than appointed by the bishop, and that these councils should be given decisional rather than consultative power. Second, l'Assemblée des évêques du Québec —the Quebec Bishops' Assembly —should be recognised by the Holy See as being the Roman Catholic Church's leading body in Quebec. Third, the Church of Quebec should create interdiocesan structures to
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provide consistency; most important among these was the creation of a decisional pastoral council that wouldinclude elected laypeople. If the third recommendation had been implemented, Quebec Catholics would have controlled their Church through an elected body.
As Baum (1990) pointed out, decisional pastoral councils were only possible if each bishop agreed to renounce the authority imparted upon him by Canon Law, thus making the existence of these councils very fragile by design; furthermore, the minute the pastoral council suggested anything not conforming perfectly with official doctrine, Rome would have required any bishop agreeing to share responsibility in this way to take it back immediately. Furthermore, interdiocesan pastoral councils would have required a change in Canon Law. Last but not least, the whole idea of limiting the decisional power of the ecclesiastical hierarchy ran contrary not only to the Pastor Aeternus dogmatic constitution that gave absolute authority to the Pope, but also to the then more recent De Ecclesia dogmatic constitution that reasserted the same belief. As Baum (1990) puts it, the authors of the report hoped implicitly to democratize the whole RomanCatholic Church. According to Pastor Aeternus, the definitions of the Roman Pontiff, including the notion that his authority in any religious matter should not be submitted to the control of any other part of the Church, "are irreformable of themselves and not from the consent of the Church." It was no wonder the commissioners did not spell out their recommendations, given that the mere fact of contradicting this definition immediately entailed excommunication. Of course, the Commission's report had no practical effect and the Roman Catholic Church, as a whole, remains to this day as undemocratic as it was. Roman Catholic Quebecers thus had to face a second disappointment.
Despite the exhilarating atmosphere of the 1960s, neither of these setbacks should have come as a surprise. The second Vatican Council's decree On the Apostolate of Laypeople (Apostolatu laicorum) had stated that laypeople have a form of apostolate to fulfil, but the dogmatic constitution On the Church (De Ecclesia) had not offered them any power. A complete chapter of the pastoral constitution The Church in Today's World (De Ecclesia in mundo huius temporis: 220ss.) had been devoted to marriage and the family: it repeated the traditional doctrine of the sanctity of marriage and family, promoted chastity within marriage, and condemned eroticism, contraception, and divorce. A few words on the appropriateness of a responsible sexual education for young people, in the declaration On Christian Education (De Educatione christiana), was the only "modern" passage on sexual matters in all of the council documents.
These statements were in line with the organization of the Roman Catholic Church and the nature of its beliefs. As explained by Baum (1990), since the 19th century, the Roman Catholic Church's main tendency had been to resist
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the widespread movement towards democratization of its political structures and to affirm the Church as a monarchy; adopting the dogma of papal infallibility, in 1870, was the acme of this trend. Authority is centralized and, since 1870, the definition of the magisterium on moral theology practically rests in the sole person of the head of the Church (Mahoney, 1987). Theological and moral doctrine is highly intellectualized and theology, as a discipline, is held to be a science in the strictest sense (Ratzinger, 1987). This view goes back to Augustine and Aquinas, who adapted from late stoicism and developed the idea that creation had a natural order from which reason — basically logical reasoning —could derive the natural law, man, as a rational being, having the capacity of "freely accepting and embracing the order of his being and his place in the divine scheme of things" (Mahoney, 1987: 78). Centralised power and the belief in the scientific nature of theology are related: if, as Aquinus believed, reason, guided by faith, is the way to truth, and thus truth is demonstrated by means of logic, truth will be found by the intellectual work of one mind, rather than through the deliberations of many; this is what Pope John Paul II refers to when stating that the Church, following Christ, searches for truth which may not always coincide with the opinion of the majority (Familiaris Consortio). With theology a science and Catholics expected to freely follow natural law, important matters of faith and morality, and not only the organization of the Church, are expressed as rules of law —Canon Law — that binds all Roman Catholics.
The Roman Catholic Church's stance on marriage and sexual behaviour is to be understood within this context. Over the centuries, the Church has adopted a conception of marriage and sexuality that was derived from St. Paul, developed by a few important authorities, Augustine and Jerome in particular, and explicitly expressed by Aquinas in his Summa contra Gentiles (III, 122-126). Although historical research shows that the Catholic doctrine on marriage has a very human history (Brundage, 1975), recent "official" Catholic theological work still presents it as the result of a continuous and progressive "sacralisation" of the notion of marriage from Genesis to the Gospels ( Cottiaux, 1982). The most relevant elements of the Catholic dogma on marriage can be summarized as follows: sexuality exists solely for reproduction; corporeal pleasures may be enjoyed if they accompany something necessary or required, such as eating for the survival of the individual or reproduction for the survival of the species, but must not be sought or experienced for themselves; actions that prevent reproduction, including contraception, masturbation, and homosexuality, are second only to homicide in the hierarchy of sins; marriage is indissoluble and its sole purpose is to have children and raise them as Christians. Another somewhat related point, exposed in the same sections of the Summa, is of some importance for our discussion: women are inferior to men and should submit to them. These elements are parts of a natural law
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believed, at least since Augustine, to be eternal. God-given eternal laws, of course, can no more be repealed than can the law of gravity.
Although all Western Christian churches have inherited the same basic theology and moral doctrine, the Protestant and Catholic Churches differ on two important matters for the topic discussed here.
The first difference is that, although mainstream Protestant churches kept most of the prevailing traditional Christian moral doctrine at least until the beginning of the 20th century, from the start they all differed from Catholicism on one topic: divorce. At least two aspects of this difference are relevant for our discussion. First, divorce is permitted by all Protestant churches and, in most of them, remarriage is also allowed and even encouraged (Phillips, 1988). Second, in the wake of the Reformation, the state seized the Church's jurisdiction on marriage and related topics both as a civil and a religious matter (Kitchin, 2002 [1912]). Thus, in countries where the Reformation prevailed, ecclesiastical courts disappeared, and a divorce granted by a state court, parliament or the sovereign himself dissolved the marriage both as a contract and as a religious bond. In France, where Catholicism remained the established religion until the Revolution, matters evolved in a different way. The Holy See maintained its view that all legal matters pertaining to marriage were its preserve and should be handled solely through Canon Law; French authorities and lawyers, in contrast, developed the doctrine that marriage, as a sacrament, was the preserve of ecclesiastical law, but that all other aspects — marriage, as a convention or contract, and, more generally, marriage for civil purposes — belonged to the authority of King and Parliament (Pothier, 1822). Quebec used French civil law, "la coutume de Paris" (basically the customary law of Île-de-France), until the adoption of the Civil Code of Lower Canada, just before Confederation. The British North America Act of 1867 handled the problem in a very clever way. Allmatters assigned to the King and parliaments by the pre-revolutionary French legal doctrine became the exclusive powers of the parliament of Lower Canada, while all those belonging to the Church came under the exclusive control of the Canadian Parliament. This is as true a Canadian solution as one can imagine: from the Protestant perspective, the State kept the powers it took over at Reformation, whereas, from the Roman Catholic perspective, parliament which has power over civil law has no power over marriage as a sacrament. This arrangement is close to perfect in a world in which, as a rule, spouses stay together until death and, in the rare cases where things go wrong, only Protestants ever address a petition for divorce to the Canadian Parliament whereas Roman Catholics will never request more than a separation from the civil courts, or an annulment from the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical courts. The fact that the French Restoration had occurred by the time this solution was implemented, abolishing divorce in its own Civil Code, made it even easier for the creators of Lower Canada's Civil
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Code. In practice, the difference between Protestants and Catholics was slight: whether obtaining a divorce through a private bill from the Canadian Parliament was more likely than receiving an annulment from a Roman Catholic Church court is a matter of opinion. This being said, Lower Canada's original Civil Code did not include divorce as a possible cause for the dissolution of a marriage, although it was clear that it applied to all marriages contracted in Lower Canada whatever the religious affiliation of the married. Apparently, this situation satisfied the Protestants of Lower Canada. That the Anglican Church recognized divorce but did not authorize remarriage of the divorced blurred the difference between the separation available to Catholics and the divorce available to those who belonged to what, in Quebec, was the emblematic protestant church.
The context changed somewhat when the number of couples requesting separation and divorce increased among Protestants as well as Catholics, and when the Canadian Parliament used its power over divorce to extend the possibility of obtaining divorce from a court of law to the whole Canadian territory, something that until then had been possible in only a few provinces. There was now a vast difference between Protestants and Roman Catholics: at a time where couples of all creeds increasingly wished to go their separate ways, the former were now able to obtain a civil and religious divorce from a court of law — almost a routine procedure compared to presenting a private bill to the federal parliament — whereas the latter had easy access to civil divorce, but one with no religious effect. The new law put Quebec Roman Catholics into an uncomfortable position. If you marry and things don't work out, you can end your marriage from the State's perspective, but not from the Church's. You are aware that the risk of finding yourself in the situation where you or your spouse, or both, wish to end your marriage is high. Afterwards, you will have the right to remarry before a court official, but not in a church: your ex-spouse will be your spouse until death, and your new husband or wife will merely be a concubine, whatever the law of the land may say. Roman Catholics in Ireland or Italy did not have to face such questions, as civil law did not authorize divorce. To some extent, the situation of Quebec Roman Catholics became similar to that of Jews (and Muslims), who must request divorce from both civil authorities and their respective religious authorities... with one important difference —in Judaism (and Islam) divorce [2] is permitted.
2. One reviewer suggested that a discussion of the legal context should include amendments to the Civil Code which erased the distinction between married and unmarried parents in relation to their children. There is definitely a relation between these changes in the Civil Code and the rise of cohabitation. The reviewer seems to argue that the changes in the CivilCode may explain the rise of cohabitation by themselves. I would rather argue that such changes became possible because Quebecers and their legislators moved from the notion that human law should respect [continued]
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The second difference is that protestant churches have moved away from Catholicism's centralist trend and have reinstated the autonomy of national churches that never disappeared in Orthodoxy. Even in the Anglican Church, the closest to Catholicism, national synods may or may not enforce the Church of England canons. Furthermore, in the protestant world, theology and moral theology are areas of debate, and whatever is accepted as right by the relevant collegial authority becomes right. Decentralization and a belief that matters of faith and morality are to be defined by the assembly of believers in its historical circumstances, have given protestant churches the latitude to deal with matters of morality in a wide variety of ways. The important point is that this latitude existed, was used, and is still used, to accommodate a wide range of conceptions of moral behaviour that make it possible to keep divorce, remarriage of the divorced, contraception, women ministers, and even, in some cases, homosexuality and abortion within the realm of religious morality. [3]
As we have seen, no such latitude existed within the Roman Catholic Church in the 1960s. Although we have no direct evidence from interviews or published material, it is not unreasonable to imagine that Quebec Roman Catholics might have been satisfied if their Church had followed, at least with respect to contraception, a path and a timing similar to the one taken by the Anglican Church between 1920 and 1958 (Noonan, 1965). The latter had evolved from a reassertion of the traditional Christian doctrine of marriage
and implement natural law as defined by the Church to the notion that law should be "positive," secularized and enforce individual rights (see for instance Melkevik,1998). Law and behaviour are following parallel paths: changes in the former and the latter are simply two aspects of the same change. Both changes became possible because the people ceased to support the Catholic beliefs in these matters. From a logical perspective, both may be seen as having a common cause; at best, changes in law would be an intermediate variable. Back to text
3. One reviewer asked why I did not include cohabitation in this list. This goes to the core of the matter. Churches may allow contraception, on the basis that the essence of marriage is not procreation. There is a tradition in Christianity that advocates this on the ground that if procreation were the essence of marriage, then Joseph and Mary would not have been truly married. The same may be said of abortion. There has been a long debate over the time of pregnancy at which the soul inhabits the foetus and the current dominant idea in Catholicism is only one of the ideas that were discussed in the Church in its long history. Churches may allow divorce arguing that a few words in Matthew's Gospel allow it, as well as remarriage of the divorcees because it fits within the purpose of marriage according to Saint-Paul. Homosexuality is a tougher one, but some inventive theologians find arguments for it. Churches may vary on the degree of "sinfulness" they see in cohabitation or, more generally, sexual relations between unmarried people. But whatever their doctrine on this respect, and whether they see marriage as a sacrament or not, they inherited their basic idea of marriage from Canon Law and all share the belief that the only God blessed framework to have sexual relations and raise a family is religious marriage. My point is that allowing for contraception, divorce and remarriage of the divorcee makes cohabitation largely irrelevant whereas forbidding all of them make marriage almost completely irrelevant. Back to text
Power of Religion and Power over Religion 15
(R. 66, Lambeth, 1920 [4]) and the sinfulness of contraception (R. 68, Lambeth, 1920) — in way very similar to the Castii Connubii encyclical, still to come —through a somewhat reluctant acceptance of artificial methods of contraception as a means to limit or avoid parenthood (R. 15, Lambeth, 1930), to the truly novel idea "that the responsibility for deciding upon the number and frequency of children has been laid by God upon the consciences of parents" (R. 115, Lambeth, 1958). The Roman Catholic Church did not.
Confronted by a similar problem within his own church, a Protestant would have had several options: taking part in a campaign to have the relevant authority of the church change its decision; leaving the church for another one with a position closer to his own beliefs; creating a new church or congregation with a more liberal approach. The Protestant world has dealt with moral or theological issues in this way since the Reformation. These options did not make much sense for a French Canadian Catholic believer in the 1960s and 1970s. Given the centralized nature of Church authority and the so-called scientific nature of catholic theology, political action within the Church was pointless —the failure of the Commission d'étude sur les lcs et l'église was a rather convincing empirical corroboration of this. From a social perspective, leaving the Roman Catholic Church for, say, the Anglican Church of Canada, was as unlikely an option in Quebec as in Northern Ireland. Furthermore, the Humanae vitae encyclical was issued in 1968, at a time when many other moral issues were emerging (such as "free love" or abortion) on which the Protestant churches' position were not very different from that of the Roman Catholic Church. At this time, problems involving religion were considered private matters, and were increasingly solved through disaffiliation rather than reformation, as in Luther's time, or secularization, as during the French Revolution. Apparently, once a large number of Quebec Roman Catholics reached the conclusion that Catholic morality had become impracticable and unlikely to change, they seized the opportunity to free themselves of it without any practical consequence in everyday life; instead of looking for a different way to handle morality within religion, they simply replaced it, taking guidelines for their actions from a definitely non-religious perspective. Since then, their lives have been directed essentially outside the realm of religious morality.
Protestants, on the other hand, who had the power to define religious morality within some deliberative bodies, were able to keep adapting it to the new realities. From the Protestant perspective, religious morality is open to
4. Resolutions from the Lambeth Conferences of Anglican Bishops are treated as legal material and referenced to by the year and number. They are available for reading on the web site of the Anglican Communion (www.anglicancommunion.org) Back to text
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change and does change. This has two consequences. First, it makes it possible both to remain within the church or retain religious beliefs and to live according to an updated religious ethic, either because his particular Church or congregation has updated its moral doctrine, or is likely to do so, or because an equivalent Protestant Church or congregation will have done so. Second, by keeping religion relevant to such issues, it continues to legitimate control of sexual and reproductive behaviour by churches and, more important, by the community. Within the Protestant world, the act of matrimony is relevant as an orderly moral event although, in the Protestant doctrine, as in the Orthodox doctrine, it is not a sacrament in the sense it is in the Roman Catholic Church.
More important, this was happening at a time when almost all of the institutions structuring the everyday life of French-speaking Roman Catholic Quebecers "from the cradle to the grave" were changing; they had either been handed over to the Quebec government by the religious communities who had owned and managed them for centuries, as in the case of health and education, or had just abandoned their affiliation to the Roman Catholic Church, as in the case of labour unions and credit unions. In less than ten years, the Roman Catholic Church's authority and influence over all of these institutions ended completely, and they became officially non-confessional. As a result, for the first time in Quebec history since the Conquest, not being in line with the Roman Catholic Church ceased to have practical consequences for the entitlement to health, education and a host of other services related to everyday life or important occasions.
In other words, the Catholic Church in Quebec gave up its power over these institutions, its most obvious and effective means of controlling its members, at the same time as the Holy See was tightening its control over the definition of right and wrong, and using it to ensure that the doctrine would not change. With Quebec's Catholic Church, therefore, no longer able to enforce this dogma, this created a situation inviting Quebecers to act as though it was no longer relevant. Given the circumstances, Quebecers chose to accept the invitation, and treated it as irrelevant.
In this discussion of morality and authority over moral matters, we are comparing Catholicism with the mainstream branches of Protestantism present in Canada between roughly the 1950s and the late 1980s — those nowadays known as the United Church of Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Presbyterian Church in Canada, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. We are not referring to the beliefs or dynamics of the denominations of the "conservative" Protestant nebula which, according to Bibby (1987, 2002), mainly comprised groups now known as Baptists — either from the Fellowship of Evangelical Baptist Churches in Canada or from the Baptist
Power of Religion and Power over Religion 17
Convention of Ontario and Quebec —, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Christian Reformed Church in North America, the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, the Mennonite Church Canada, the Free Methodist Church in Canada and the Salvation Army; these denominations are known to have conservative views on moral matters but were not an appreciable part of the Canadian religious landscape in the years we are studying (Stackhouse, 1994).
Obviously, our hypothesis raises questions about the apparent immunity to common-law unions among French-speaking Canadian Catholics living elsewhere in Canada, among American Catholics, or in countries as deeply linked to Catholicism as Quebec has been, such as Spain, Italy and Ireland. It also leads to questions about profoundly Protestant nations, like Sweden or Norway, whose rapid rise in cohabitation actually inspired the idea of a second demographic transition. If cohabitation's swift diffusion in Quebec is the response of French-speaking Catholic Quebecers to the Catholic Church's moral rigidity on family and sex related matters, why did other Catholics not react in the same way, and why would Protestants be so open to cohabitation in certain countries?
Providing a complete answer to such questions would require a lengthy analysis of each. This being said, and making no claims to provide a complete analysis of the question, it is nonetheless possible to examine the case of Canadian French-speaking Catholics living outside Quebec, and especially of those living in Ontario. Obviously the latter belong to the same Church as their Quebec brethren and are subject to the same Canon Law, and there is no reason to imagine that they did not experience the same struggles. In Canada, only the 1991 decennial census makes it possible to estimate the relative prevalence of common-law unions and marriage among groups defined according to religion; the relevant data from the 2001 census is not yet available and estimates of the prevalence of common-law unions in the 1981 census cannot be broken down by religious group. The 1991 census' Public Use Micro File data on individuals shows that, among Catholic French-speaking Quebecers, 21.2% of those who were living with a spouse were cohabiting. The corresponding figure is 10.9% among Catholic French Canadians living outside Quebec, virtually the same proportion as among English-speaking Catholics irrespective of where they live in Canada, with 11.0% of these couples in a common-law union in 1991. Apparently, French-speaking Catholics in the rest of Canada dealt with their struggle in the same way as other Canadian Catholics rather than like the Quebec flock. These are somewhat higher than the corresponding figures for members of mainline and conservative Protestant denominations, at 7.2% and 6.3%, respectively, proportions which are very close.
Ontario's French-speaking Catholics came up against these issues of family structure and religion in very different circumstances from those faced by
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Quebec's French-speaking Catholics. The British North America Act of 1867 gave exclusive control over education to provincial legislatures, and included provisions linking the organisation of primary and secondary schooling to religion. The practical arrangements within each province vary greatly, and have varied greatly over history, but the original idea was to encourage the maintenance of separate Catholic and Protestant schools and school boards in the provinces where these divisions existed before Confederation. In Ontario, until 1996, only public and Roman Catholic school boards existed, both funded by the province. Provincial funding of Roman Catholic school boards, and the French and the English Catholic communities' degree of control over these school boards, were the source of much dispute in Ontario during the 20th century (see J. Zucchi introduction to Stagni, 2002). In 1993, Ontario's public school boards administered 57 French-language elementary schools, 18 French-language secondary schools, 16 mixed-language elementary schools, and 15 mixed-language secondary schools. Roman Catholic school boards, on the other hand, administered 280 French-language elementary schools, 43 French-language secondary schools, two mixed-language elementary schools, and four mixed-language secondary schools. However, all school boards were controlled by English-speaking people. Before 1996, there were no Frenchlanguage school boards administering the French-language schools, whether public or Roman Catholic. Nonetheless, most French-language schools are still part of the Roman Catholic school system. Put bluntly, the only real way for French-speaking Ontarians to keep their children away from mixed schools, known to favour linguistic assimilation, and place them in French-language schools, has long been, and still is, to send them to Catholic schools. Under Ontario law, however, now as before, only children whose parents or guardian are Roman Catholic, and can prove it, are entitled to attend a school under the jurisdiction of a Roman Catholic school board. The child's baptism into the Roman Catholic Church is the most common proof. But, according to Canon 868 §1 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, "For an infant to be baptized licitly [...] there must be a founded hope that the infant will be brought up in the Catholic religion; if such hope is altogether lacking, the baptism is to be delayed according to the prescripts of particular lawafter the parents have been advised about the reason." Of course, any priest would view parents who are not married are unlikely candidates for raising their children in the Catholic religion. The use of illicit contraceptive methods may be concealed, and remain a secret even if confessed; the absence of a Catholic marriage certificate or baptistery, on the other hand, is blatantly obvious when one is required to show it. My argument is not that the articles of the British North America Act, the Code of Canon Law and the Ontario Education Act are jointly responsible for the lower preference for common-law unions among French-speaking Catholics in Ontario than in Quebec. However, I do maintain
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that, for Ontario's French-speaking couples, living in a common-law union limits the possibility of providing French schooling for their offspring, and that the diffusion of cohabitation would involve their entry into a new struggle for control of the schools, this time against the Catholic authorities. I also suggest that people and communities take such issues into account when making choices. In summary, the slow pace of the shift from marriage to cohabitation among French-speaking Catholics in Ontario seems to be related to power invested in the Catholic Church, through Canada's constitution and Ontario's laws, over the institutions on which they depend as a community. Or, to put it another way, the Catholic Church in Ontario, through its control over the institutions of the French-speaking community, has kept the power to enforce its moral dogma.
A brief look at the Norwegian case helps make a methodological point. The prevalence of cohabitation in Norway has recently reached a level close to that of Quebec, with roughly 30% of Norwegian couples living in common-law unions. With similar cohabitation rates, and with both societies being small, Nordic and relatively homogenous, one could think that the same effects may have the same causes. Thus it is worth investigating whether an explanation similar to the one we propose for cohabitation's rapid diffusion as a form of union in Quebec could be relevant for the Norwegian case.
Although the Norwegian constitution grants freedom of religion to the kingdom's inhabitants, it makes the Evangelical Lutheran religion the official state religion, and obliges those professing this faith to bring up their children in it. The King is appointed head of the Church of Norway and has to profess the state religion. The constitution also assigns power to make laws about the Church to the Storting, the parliament, and gives the King control over the appointment of ecclesiastical officials and to insure orthodoxy of those who teach the faith. Not surprisingly, more than 80% of the Norwegian population is baptized in the state religion. Despite this rather strong intertwining of Church and State, the laws on marriage and related matters appear relatively liberal. For instance, the current marriage act allows for easy divorce. If nothing is to be disputed before a court, application for divorce may even be made to, and granted by, the County Governor, an administrative official. Homosexual partners can register their partnership, making their union equivalent to marriage, except for the right to adopt children; for heterosexuals, on the other hand, marriage is the only way of official recognising their union. This said, the "Joint Household Act" entitles people living together, whatever their relationship, to makes claimson common property, even against legal heirs, when they cease to live together whether by death or by choice. Children born out of wedlock are treated as children born within marriage in terms of inheritance from their father, as long as paternity as been recognised. Women have had the right to abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy since
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1975. As for religion, the most recent hot debate in the Church of Norway, dated 1999, was about the respective powers of the bishop and the General Synod, and was initiated when a bishop, a woman bishop, reinstated a lesbian priest who had been demoted by the General Synod on the grounds that she was living in a homosexual partnership.
Where does Norway's case take us? To two conclusions. The first is that, whatever the process that led to a high proportion of Norwegians living in common law unions, it has little to do with the one that led French-speaking Catholic Quebecers to do the same: the differences between the religious and institutional settings are simply far too large. The second is a generalization of the first: if the rise of cohabitation is to be seen as part of the encompassing second demographic transition, there is probably no such thing as a general process that could explain variations in the pace different countries or communities proceed along that path.
One wonders how things would have evolved if the legal problems arising from the coexistence of different religions with different doctrines on marriage and divorce had been managed in Canada the way it had been managed in India, another British colony, where up to this day, these matters are handled through four different family Codes, all acts of the federal parliament: one for Hindus, one for Christians, one for Muslims, and one for Parsis. If Canada had had four family Codes, one for Protestants, one for Roman Catholics, one for Jews and one, say, for Aboriginals, Roman Catholics would not have gained the possibility of getting a divorce from civil courts from an amendment to the Protestant Family Code. With respect to the possibility of divorce, Quebec Roman Catholics would have remained in a situation similar to that of Irish or Italian Roman Catholics.
One may also wonder how things would have evolved if health, social services, higher education and other related matters had remained closely linked to religion as they were before the "Quiet Revolution," and as they still are in many parts of the United States. One could also muse about the fact that, by the middle of the 1960s, Quebecers, unlike any other predominantly Roman Catholic society, had been living within parliamentarian politics uninterruptedly for almost two centuries, and had a long and deep commitment to democracy. Perhaps the Commission d'étude sur les laïcs et l'Église would never had suggested giving decisional powers within the Church to assemblies of elected representatives while leaving the appointment of bishops to the Holy See if its members had not grown up in a democratic political system in which the head of State is a foreign monarch, represented in the federal and provincial capitals by powerless non-elected governors. Perhaps the long standing habit of having a say, through elected representatives, in the writing of laws and codes contributed in some way to Quebecers' collective decision to move away from a tremendously autocratic institution.
Power of Religion and Power over Religion 21
There may be such a thing as a broad general process that leads human societies towards the path of the second demographic transition. The nature of this general process is still to be investigated, and it is not unreasonable to assume that economics may help understand it. This process certainly involves changing attitudes towards the self, towards children and death, and towards the relation between the individual and the group. This said, whatever the pressures this process may put on individuals and societies to change their beliefs, values and norms about procreation and its social forms, neither individuals nor societies will respond to these pressures automatically. Beliefs, values and norms are part of the fabric of societies. They provide the intellectual resources individuals and groups have to give meaning to their life and their action; they provide the guidelines along which long-term decisions are made and everyday life is organized; they are the yardstick by which one is judged by the others. Culture is not immanent, nor is it permanent; it is an evolving intellectual construct related to many things, including, as we discuss in this paper, to struggles for power, prestige and resources. Whether individuals or societies take advantage of the pressures to change their beliefs, values and norms, or resist such pressures will largely depend on circumstances, as we have seen in contrasting the cases of French-speaking Catholics in Quebec and Ontario.
In much of the demographic literature that makes reference to it, culture tends to be conceived as something that can be contrasted easily from one society to the other, each being more or less at one point or another on a single or several continuums. Although attitudes and values may be measured on continuums and contrasted in this way, as they are, for instance, in the World Values Surveys, it is doubtful whether the dynamics of the evolution of beliefs, values and norms within societies can be ascertained by thinking of the culture of different societies as sets of coordinates in a multidimensional space. Such an approach may provide a description and a measurement of the pace at which changes occur across societies, but will never by itself lead to an explanation. To provide an explanation, one cannot escape looking into the institutional setting of each society, and examine the various struggles it encompasses. The role of struggles for power, prestige, and resources in the evolution of elements of culture such as beliefs, values, and norms should come as no surprise. Social scientists seem in need of periodic reminders that, as explained by Elias (1973), the notion of culture as it is now customarily understood in the social sciences, that is with the idea that it is immanent to a people or a group, was invented by the German bourgeois intellectuals of the 18th century. Culture, as a scientific concept, was born as a weapon against the use the German aristocracy made of French intellectual production, manners, and taste to legitimate its political advantages.
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