One of Canada's most easterly Atlantic provinces, Nova Scotia, was historically one of the primary crucibles of missionary Catholicism in North America. While there have been many excellent studies of the province that span several academic disciplines, the importance of Catholicism in Nova Scotia's history has often been overshadowed by local studies of Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, and the many iterations of Baptist churches there. With the publication of these two books, the pioneering efforts of the Catholic Church in Eastern Canada are bound to garner the attention of serious scholars.
Matteo Binasco's French Missionaries in Acadia/Nova Scotia, 1654–1755: On a Risky Edge is a much-needed, comprehensive, English-language overview of French missionary endeavour in a region considered “marginal” to imperial interests, when compared to other French overseas territories. This meticulously researched book argues quite convincingly that the French missionary effort in the region shifted in the late seventeenth century from evangelization of Indigenous peoples to missionaries servicing the interests of empire. In their effort to thwart British interlopers and invaders, Franciscan, Jesuit, and Spiritan missionaries became lynchpins in imperial military policy by securing Indigenous alliances (primarily Mi'kmaq and Abenaki peoples) for France during the Anglo-French wars. Binasco confirms, which has already been recorded by notable historians of New France, that the Jesuits were experts at evangelization among Indigenous peoples, and the Recollets were not adept in the Indigenous missions due to prioritizing actions to transform the Mi'kmaq into “civilized Frenchmen” before initiating them into the rites and doctrines of the church.
The book also offers a detailed account of the heated interplay between the Recollets, the Diocese of Quebec, and other religious congregations for control over missions and parishes to the Acadian population of the region. The European colonist/settlers became the primary focus of the Catholic Church in the eighteenth century. Binasco expertly examines the complicated and risky relations of a church attempting to continue operations and service to the Acadian and Indigenous populations, between the British conquest (1714) and the British expulsion of the Acadians (1755). Also helpful in the book is an extensive appendix containing a list of all serving clergy in the region. Although there is one map at the end of the book, the detail offered by Binasco's text deserves a much more detailed map of the region, and one that is far clearer in terms of its presentation.
Peter Ludlow's Disciples of Antigonish picks up the historical narrative of the region about a century after Binasco's exploration of missionary Catholicism ends. While on the surface, Ludlow's volume appears to be a history of the Diocese of Antigonish, which comprises Cape Breton Island and three counties on mainland Nova Scotia, it breaks the bounds of what might be considered the institutional narratives that characterize many diocesan histories in North America. While the author does gather the narrative strands around the careers of three of its bishops, John Cameron, James Morrison, and John R. MacDonald, the book focuses on the everyday engagement of clergy and laity, church and local economy, and the social and political challenges faced by Catholics and non-Catholics alike in eastern Nova Scotia. What results is a profound examination of “lived Catholicism,” intersecting the warp and woof of the ordinary lives of Nova Scotians in the region. As such, it is an integrated model of history that explores the elite of the church, the clergy, women religious, steel workers, miners, and fisherman, and also the racial and ethnic challenges and interplay within a multicultural church consisting of: Mi'kmaq peoples, Acadian Francophones, Irish, Newfoundlanders, Italians, Poles, Dutch, and of course Highland Scots. What is clear from Ludlow's meticulous research is that the Scots-Gaelic appearance of the Diocese betrays a rich and vibrant multicultural fabric, which becomes evident in Catholic devotional life, language, education, and social action.
Looking at diocesan life in a wholistic way, as Ludlow does, helps one understand why this region became one of the most vibrant in the world when addressing the problems of the capitalist cultures that fueled the industrial and financial revolutions and led to its crash in the 1930s. The engagement of clergy and lay laborers in Cape Breton gave rise to both the co-operative movement in Canada, which quickly spread beyond national boundaries, and to the belief that effective adult education could make people “masters of their own destiny.” Ludlow makes clear how bishops, priests, women religious, and laypersons built a progressive social movement, through St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, and navigated between capitalism and socialism. As Ludlow indicates early in the book, in Antigonish, Catholics came to understand that the parish was the basic “cell of social life” (7). Without resorting to a tiresome “bricks and mortar” approach to the diocese, Ludlow presents parishes as catalysts in transforming the spiritual and secular cultures of which they are an integral part. By the mid-twentieth century, the social activism and cooperative movement of Antigonish and its parishes became the diocese's most influential export.
Like Binasco's work, Ludlow's is the product of exhaustive research in the primary and secondary sources. Each chapter is supported by hundreds of endnotes, which is a testimony to the historical master detective at work here. Despite its length, the text is neither cumbersome nor ponderous, but is the product of a knowledgeable, creative, and skilled writer at the top of his game.
Church historiography will benefit from these excellent studies of a region to which contemporary historiography has given scant attention. Given that the diocese of Antigonish was, for some time, one of the greatest exporters of clergy and religious to the rest of Canada, and the Antigonish Movement had global influence, it is important that historians of religion, at least in Canada, should observe Augustine's invocation: “tolle et lege.”
