Editor’s Note: Church, State, and Education The history of Canada’s formation and endurance as a nation-state is a unique and engaging blend of national, religious, linguistic, and cultural differences, distinctions, struggles, and sometimes less than enthusiastic tolerance. This is perhaps more evident in the sphere of compulsory education than any other. Ontario, for example, hosts four public school boards – anglophone, anglophone Catholic, francophone, and francophone Catholic – as well as a number of independent secular, Catholic, Jewish, and other private schools.
The Church advocates freedom of parental choice in education, a choice that must be realizable in practice. Full state funding makes this difficult – indeed, without active and widespread parent and voter participation, practically impossible. An overlay of educational disagreement to an ever-simmering civic dispute concerning current and historical relationships between Church and State can produce complex and interesting disputes on topics of fundamental importance to individuals, families, and society.
One of the least-heard and possibly least-respected voices in the Canadian educational debate is that of publicly-supported francophone Catholic education. Julie Douglas, a native francophone Catholic Ontarian and product of Ontario public francophone Catholic education, sheds interesting light on the history of her people and their culture.
It’s worth reading, thinking, and perhaps talking about. We encourage thoughtful responses, including those representing alternative points of view.
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A Franco-Ontarian’s reflection on staying when it’s easier to leave
I recently attended a one‑day conference that was life‑giving in ways I didn’t expect. Mostly because for once, I didn’t have to switch registers or translate myself. I didn’t have to think, “Okay, here I’m talking to a secular audience so I need to adapt my speech.” These were people who instinctively understood where I was coming from.
During one of the panels, the conversation turned to publicly funded Catholic education, and the moderator said something like:
“The moment Catholic schools became publicly funded is the moment they stopped being Catholic.”
Ma’am.
My entire francophone, History‑Major‑who-specialized-in-francophones‑hors‑Québec being said: absolutely not.
Not only has this not been my experience, but this view lacks historical and cultural context. And this is where I will, in fact, put my BA in History to good use.
Before I do that, though, I need to ask you a serious question:
Have you ever heard of the Battle of the Hatpins?
If so, congratulations. You are either a history nerd or francophone‑adjacent, as my dear husband is.
I studied at the University of Ottawa, only a few blocks away from where sisters Béatrice and Diane Desloges, surrounded by an army of francophone mothers, defended French‑language education against Règlement 17, the Ontario regulation that prohibited French as a language of instruction.
At this point, the anglophone reader usually says:
“Okay, but that’s a language rights issue,” especially since our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ under Bishop Fallon united with Protestants in opposing French‑language education. Bishop Fallon believed a unified, English‑speaking Catholic population would strengthen the Church in Ontario. Many Protestants believed English‑only schooling would strengthen the province. For once, Catholics and Protestants found themselves on the same side.
But that doesn’t paint the whole picture.
Because for francophones, language wasn’t just language. It was the vessel that carried the faith, the memory, the stories, the devotions, the hymns, the worldview. It was the medium through which the sisters taught catechism, the way families prayed, the way the liturgical year was lived at home. You couldn’t simply “switch languages” without switching cultures, and for a small, scattered minority, switching cultures meant disappearing.
This is why the old saying mattered so much:
La foi, gardienne de la langue; la langue, gardienne de la foi.
Faith guards the language; the language guards the faith.
For my ancestors, the school wasn’t just a place where children learned grammar. It was the front line of Catholic survival. The parish, the home, and the school formed a single ecosystem. If one part fell, the others weakened.
So when Règlement 17 tried to eliminate French from the classroom, francophones didn’t hear “curriculum reform.” They heard an existential threat: to their faith, their culture, their continuity as a people.
And that is why the Desloges sisters stood their ground, why the moms showed up with hairpins, and why this history still shapes how francophones understand Catholic education today.
(And that’s the stock I come from, just sayin’!)
If I am being completely honest, this is something that I have known in my bones (and rolled my eyes at) every time we were told to speak French instead of English at recess. It’s only now that I am raising my own little bilingualaphones in an exogamous marriage united by faith that I have fully metabolized the importance, and instinct, of wanting to keep the culture alive.
My education at École Assomption (later École Assomption-St. Joseph, when the elementary and middle schools blended together due to declining enrollment) was the battleground where faith survived. My sacramental preparation was led by the school, and again, by moms who wanted their kids to follow in the faith. Our priests were involved but did not want to rock the boat. They were haunted by the spectre of the Quiet Revolution, which impacted formation through the parish.
While we weren’t in Québec, we still felt the aftershocks. Given how many Catholics were rejecting the church, our clergy – already stretched thin; our priest had 5 parishes scattered across Northeastern Ontario – became very quiet in terms of fully preaching what the Church actually is and what we believe. They were present, but cautious and conflict-averse. The school then became where the faith was transmitted, however imperfectly.
Which is why when someone says that Catholic schools “stopped being Catholic” the moment they became publicly funded, my entire being reacts and says: you are speaking from your history. Not mine.
My school was where Catholicism survived when the parish grew timid and the culture shifted.
This is the part of the story that English Catholics often don’t see, and it’s the part that explains why Franco‑Ontarians stay, even when the formation feels thin, when the institutions feel fragile, when the culture feels like it’s slipping through our fingers.
We stay because we remember what it cost to keep these places alive, and this is the same passion that mobilizes us when the government threatens to shut down our hospitals, or as recently as 2018, to resist against what we called Black Thursday when the Ford government implemented a series of policies effectively diminishing the franco-ontarian institutions. It’s simply the continuity from the Desloges sisters in their classroom protected by moms and their hatpins telling the authorities absolutely not to an unjust law. Our battle cry was “we are, and will be” – nous sommes, nous serons.
I know many people like to make jokes about French people and surrendering, but at least here in Canada, we seem to be from hardier stock. Walking away has never been our story.
This is also why we stay put when formation gets thin in our Catholic schools, because by removing ourselves from the system, we become invisible. Registration in the French-Catholic school boards is not simply an individual choice, but a signal to the government and those studying numbers that this is a service that we want, actively use, and will fight for: it’s a census of the heart, of history, of continuity. It’s the same logic behind my family requesting the French-language motto licence plates for our vehicles. It’s a tangible sign that we are here, alive, and thriving.
Don’t get me wrong, none of this means accepting mediocrity. I am absolutely that mom that asks why the school watered down Minuit chrétiens during the Christmas concert (by changing the “pour effacer la tache originelle” line – without original sin, why do we need a redeemer?), that questions when they take six months to swap out the picture of Pope Francis for Pope Leo, and why they put out Easter decor in the middle of Lent. I also question why the school board puts the land acknowledgement and the anti-racism statement before the prayer during meetings, because even without saying anything, the order in which these elements are presented sends a signal. Our desire for reconciliation and racial justice should flow out of our catholicity and not the other way around.
My anglophone husband is a teacher in the separate board, and we both come from long lines of educators. Public education is a matter of vocation on both sides of our family. I’ve seen the contradictions and ironies where public school sometimes felt more reverent than the Catholic one. I’m not naïve about its flaws or romanticizing the past.
My older kids literally attend the school named for the protagonist of the Battle of the Hatpins story, my son’s school improv team is named Les XVII after the regulation that tried to silence us. My youngest still attends the school named after the Pioneers that came before us, pioneers like my ancestors who carved parishes out of northern rocks – weaving rosaries around the outside – before building any other infrastructure so that we could still call ourselves Catholic today.
Our schools were explicitly Catholic long before they became institutionalized, and the only way they will remain so is if we also remain and help shape the direction and formation we want our future generations to benefit from. Thin formation is still formation, and thick roots can grow in unlikely soil.
Nous sommes, nous serons.
