PQ needed to recall history and Quebec’s new saints

When in Rome for the 2013 conclave, one heard frequently enough the quip that Latin America had had its best week in history. On March 5, Hugo Chavez, Venezuela’s thuggish dictator, died, having reduced his petro-rich country to a barter economy suffering from acute toilet paper shortages.

Then eight days later, the first Latin American Pope was elected. Not a bad week at all. One doesn’t like to make light of a man’s death — even a man as wicked as Hugo Chavez, corrupt to the hilt and ferocious in his anti-Catholicism — but joking about the tyrant’s death is one of the few pleasures to be had in Venezuela, coping as they do with material impoverishment and a loss of basic liberties.

On a much lesser scale, one might analogously observe that Quebec has had its best week in a very long time. On April 3, Pope Francis decreed that François de Laval and Marie de l’Incarnation, the 17th-century pioneers of both Church and society in Quebec, are now to be venerated as saints. Then on April 7, Quebeckers threw the governing Partì Québécois out of office in humiliating fashion. Even the premier, Pauline Marois, lost her seat and promptly resigned, bringing the career of the last of the original PQ generation of René Lévesque to an ignominious end.