Pilgrim Mothers and Fathers

Pilgrim figures are prominent in the histories of New England and New France, the antecedents of the United States and Canada. They lived at approximately the same time. The societies they founded were only a few hundred miles apart. Yet there are a number of differences between them.

The Mayflower pilgrims who founded Plymouth, Massachusetts, were a society led largely by men. They had fled persecution in England and were looking to raise their children in a tradition of their own making.

Unlike the Puritans, who remained critics within the Church of England, the Pilgrims were religious separatists who would practice on no terms but their own. And like many persecuted minorities, they themselves persecuted dissenters within their ranks.

The spiritual mentors of New France were a mixed group, but a majority of the most prominent leaders were women. Two decades after the founding of Plymouth, these women came out not to raise families of their own.

They founded schools, hospitals, and receiving facilities for the young women who came out to marry Québec habitants: les filles du roi. In short, they laid built the infrastructure that turned New France from a fur trading outpost into a sustainable society.

They were Catholics of a variety of backgrounds. Some were members of religious orders, others lay workers who founded new serving communities. Some had been married and raised families before embarking on their new vocation.

A few had left the Old World after seeing visions of an island at the meeting of two great rivers in the New World (the Ottawa and Saint Lawrence, site of present day Montreal. Such visions were not suspect in the country birthed by Joan of Arc!

Some were repelled by the decade of Imperial France which would fall to the mob in less than fifty years. Yet they were not paupers of ascetics. Some had considerable wealth they expended on their project.

The New England founders were called “Pilgrims” some time after their arrival when they wrote their history in the light of a reference to pilgrims in Hebrews 11 in the New Testament

The founders of New France did not use this kind of language. Yet many of the women who can be considered Canada's Pilgrim Mothers came with a definite sense of divine vocation.

Later French Canadians infused their heritage with the biblical image John the Baptizer, who saw himself as a voice crying, “Prepare the way of the Lord in the Wilderness…”

Significantly both English and French explorers made major Canadian discoveries on June 24, the Baptizer’s day. Giovanni Cabotto (John Cabot) reached Newfoundland where Saint John's now stands, in 1497. Samuel de Champlain explored the mouth of the Saint John River, at what is now the city of Saint John, New Brunswick on that day in 1604.

After the French Revolution in 1789, many inhabitants of the former New France (now the British colony of Quebec) considered themselves the surviving remnant of Old France not only in North Amerrica but the world. This persisted until Quebec's Quiet Revolution of the 1960’s.

Religious elements of Puritanism have virtually vanished from New England public life. The region’s universities and other institutions are now among the most secular in the US.
Likewise urban Québec and especially Montreal, now leads Canada as a secul society.

But the source from which the word “pilgrims” sprang has become embeded in one of Canada’s symbols. The latest addition to the Canadian coat of arms is a circular “ribbon” which surrounds the shield bears the Latin inscription “They desire a better country…”

That is the motto of the Order of Canada, which was founded in 1967 to replace earlier British titles and honours. The motto comes from a passage in The Letter to Hebrews, Chapter 11: 13-16:.

All these died in faith without receiving the promises, but having seen and greeted them from afar, and acknowledging that they were pilgrims and exiles on the earth.

For people who speak thus make it clear they are seeking a homeland. If the had been thinking of the land they had left, they would have had opportunity to return.

But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God for he has prepared for them a city.

The pilgrim spirit lives on subliminally in the Canadian psyche. Next posting we’ll explore the new religious movements that have sprung up in the New World, and particularly, the United States.