Guide to Documents Relating to French and British North America in ...

French colleagues, and often made their decisions according to the same range of options. It remains
to be seen why all this happened.
5. AN AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
During the Ancien Regime, change had been so slow that it did not affect the lives of individual
citizens. Generation after generation had been trained to believe that, while small alterations could make
their lives a little better or a little worse, they would substantially follow in their parents' footsteps.
The second half of the eighteenth century shook this general belief in a static and unchangeable world,
in Europe as well as in America. The Seven Years' War turned North America from a largely French
continent to an English-speaking one. While Canada lost its religious uniformity and most of its
political and military leaders, the British colonies lost their hostile neighbours, and the opportunity arose
to rally against the English "tyrants." Contrary to all expectations, the American Revolution became
a reality for the governments of Western Europe. The French Revolution and what followed it were
even more terrifying to the European establishment, since its social character and the violence it
originated touched all facets of Western society as it was then known. Kings were beheaded, nobles
fled the country, peasants became popular leaders, popes were arrested and exiled. Individual citizens
began to realize, in Europe as well as in America, that change was indeed possible within the short
span of their own lives, and that the future could be significantly different from the past, for better or,
indeed, for worse.
The Holy See had entered a period of great difficulties. Its supernational status waned. The gap
between the missionary church, zealously striving to survive in a perilous land, and the routiniere
church, operating within a well-established tradition of relations with the civil authorities in such
countries as Italy and France, was widening, with a crisis of vocations as one of its results. 71 The
heroic age of missions was long past, and they were now experiencing a period of tragic collapse.
Rome's inability to cope with the political pressures exercised by other European governments led to
the implementation of the papal brief Dominus ac Redemptor (1773), which suppressed the Society of
Jesus with its 22,589 members, withdrawing some 3,000 Jesuits from their mission fields. n When the
French Revolution threatened the very existence of the Catholic Church in France, and significantly
disrupted the missionary network Propaganda had been organizing via Paris for decades, the Holy See
was simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of events that no government in Europe had been able to
anticipate.
Oddly enough, in the years immediately following the eruption of the French "turbamenti,"73
Propaganda officials began to look at their mission fields in Protestant North America as the only real
alternative to the European catastrophe. The young churches of Canada, Newfoundland and the United
States were to provide a refuge for priests and religious institutions fleeing Europe. As already noted,
in 1785, the nuncio in France, Dugnani, was advised to contact the network of all agents that
Propaganda had organized in Paris. Four years later, in 1789, times had changed. On account of the
frightening news coming from Paris, Dugnani wrote, "Le meilleur parti est celui d'aller en Amerique."
In 1790, someone from the offices of Propaganda (its prefect, Cardinal Leonardo Antonelli, or its prosecretary,
Giulio de Carpineo) wrote to the nuncio that he was "immerso nella piu profonda amarezza"
for the loss "di queste due grandi istituzioni di S. Sulpizio e del Seminario delle Missioni Straniere,"
since for their loss "vanno a perdersi tanti vicari apostolici, tante missioni feconde, tante anime
guadagnate alIa Fede di Gesu Cristo con spese immense e con incessanti sudori." [See Appendix A for
translation.] According to the writer, though, the idea of leaving France for the American missions was
a dangerous one, since that was "un campo pieno di spine e di triboli, [...] e ogni emulazione del
par[t]ito de protestanti, che e prontissimo in quegli stati, potrebbe distruggere e devastare tutte Ie fatighe
degli agricoltori evangelici di quella vigna." [See Appendix A for translation.] The suggestion was made
that the majority of the members of the two religious institutions be sent to North and South America,
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