Sacramental Communities: Atlantic Catholics and Sociopolitical Formations in British Nova Scotia

Between 1758 and 1827, Nova Scotia’s Roman Catholics were politically disenfranchised subjects under a British colonial administration. During the late 1750s, the Catholic Acadians – descendants of the French settlers who first occupied the colony in the early seventeenth century – had been deported by the British. By the close of the Seven Years’ War, all Catholic missionaries were also expelled from Nova Scotia. The Church of England was then installed as the colony’s established religion. Some Acadians lingered in remote parts of coastal Nova Scotia, while others returned after a period of exile. Meanwhile, the Indigenous Mi’kmaq – also an historically Catholic people – were impacted by the increasing numbers of Anglo-Protestant settlers arriving in Nova Scotia from New England. Before 1800 especially, the Mi’kmaq and Acadians sometimes went years without access to Catholic clergy. In this thesis, I analyze the ways Catholic communities in Nova Scotia lived under an Anglican establishment until the political ‘emancipation’ of the province’s Catholics in 1827. \n \nMaritime public memory has long focused on Acadian ancestral piety and the ‘apostolic’ work of colonial missionary priests. During the clerical absences of the late eighteenth century, however, Catholic laypeople in rural Nova Scotia conducted their own sacramental rites. Midwives blessed newborns and laymen led their communities in improvised liturgies. Sacramental rituals socially and spiritually structured parishes located on an Atlantic fringe. These Catholic communities included parishioners of Acadian, Mi’kmaw, and Black Loyalist origins. Parish kinships thus drew the faithful into intimate, familial relations that were sometimes ruptured by defiant behaviour. Parishes also maintained racial and class hierarchies typical of the greater Atlantic as Acadian masters and mistresses oversaw the baptisms and burials of their Black servants. For the Mi’kmaq, demonstrations of Catholic devotion anchored Indigenous land claims amid mounting settler colonization. Treaties and petitions invoked the moral obligations of the colonial administration toward the Mi’kmaq and bound governors, clergymen, and tribal leaders to negotiate state benevolence and relief policies. In the civic domain, Catholic laypeople gave and received charity and leading Acadian men stepped into public offices. Participation in all these aspects of colonial life generated sociopolitical coherence for ethnically diverse Catholic subjects of the revolutionary-era British Empire.

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