place, by establishing for this purpose an episcopal see in Quebec; and
we hope that your Holiness will be the more inclined to this since we
have already provided for the maintenance of the bishop and his canons
by consenting to the perpetual union of the abbey of Maubec with the
future bishopric. This is why we beg you to grant to the Bishop of
Petræa the title of Bishop of Quebec upon our nomination and prayer,
with power to exercise in this capacity the episcopal functions in all
Canada."

However, the appointment was not consummated; the Propaganda, indeed,
decided in a rescript of December 15th, 1666, that it was necessary to
make of Quebec a see, whose occupant should be appointed by the king;
the Consistorial Congregation of Rome promulgated a new decree with the
same purpose on October 9th, 1670, and yet Mgr. de Laval still remained
Bishop of Petræa. This was because the eternal question of jurisdiction
as between the civil and religious powers, the question which did so
much harm to Catholicism in France, in England, in Italy, and especially
in Germany, was again being revived. The King of France demanded that
the new diocese should be dependent upon the Metropolitan of Rouen,
while the pontifical government, of which its providential rôle requires
always a breadth of view, and, so to speak, a foreknowledge of events
impossible to any nation, desired the new diocese to be an immediate
dependency of the Holy See. "We must confess here," says the Abbé
Ferland, "that the sight of the sovereign pontiff reached much farther
into the future than that of the great king. Louis XIV was concerned
with the kingdom of France; Clement X thought of the interests of the
whole Catholic world. The little French colony was growing; separated
from the mother country by the ocean, it might be wrested from France by
England, which was already so powerful in America; what, then, would
become of the Church of Quebec if it had been wont to lean upon that of