Quebec youth are largely detached from traditional religious institutions today and live in a socio-religious context that has been deeply transformed by the 1960s Quiet Revolution’s rapid social, political and cultural modernization. As a result, the French-Canadian majority is not so much the Catholic Church’s orphans as the inheritors of the Cultural Revolution incarnated by baby boomers who have transmitted a spiritualized and non-institutional type of religiosity and participation to the ambient hyper-mediatized consumer society. Thus Quebec’s long-time specificity regarding religion has eroded while aligning with other West-European societies. The characteristics of contemporary youth religion are cast as forming a system, thus challenging the widespread diagnoses of fragmentation, transience or blurriness. This supports the argument that a methodology less concerned with the destiny of congregational religious institutions than with the lives, experiences, and actual beliefs of youth is required for the sociology of religion today.

The International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec (2008) provides a number of indicators on the status of religious experience among young people and their relationship with the Catholic tradition. While the event may seem disconnected from the dominant culture, it would not be possible without its contribution. Which characteristics of youth culture and the IEC have strong enough affinities for this event not only to be possible, but also to be considered a success ? What type of Catholicism is it ? Two hypotheses are proposed to explain this “product” of secularization: a manifestation of marketed “pure religion” or manifestation of a “religion of the market.”

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract