A Battle With Seemingly Impossible Odds

During the 1940’s and 1950’s, the Canadian province of Quebec became a veritable battleground. Arrests for preaching the good news had been taking place there since 1924. By the winter of 1931, some individual Witnesses were being picked up by the police every day, sometimes twice a day. Legal expenses for the Witnesses in Canada became heavy. Then, early in 1947 the total number of cases involving the Witnesses that were pending in the courts in Quebec Province soared to 1,300; yet, there was only a small band of Jehovah’s Witnesses there.

This was an era when the Roman Catholic Church was a powerful influence with which every politician and every judge in the province had to reckon. The clergy were generally held in high esteem in Quebec, and others were quick to obey the dictates of the local priest. As the book State and Salvation (1989) described the situation: “The cardinal of Quebec had a throne on the floor of the Legislative Assembly immediately beside the one reserved for the lieutenant-governor. One way or another much of Quebec was under direct church control . . . The mission of the church was, in fact, to make Quebec’s political life conform to the Roman Catholic concept in which truth is Catholicism, error is anything non-Catholic, and liberty is the freedom to speak and live the Roman Catholic truth.”

In the Canadian province of Quebec, in the 1930’s and the 1940’s, Witnesses were also being brought to trial on the charge of seditious conspiracy. The clergy themselves—both Catholic and Protestant, but especially Roman Catholic—even went into court as witnesses against them. What had Jehovah’s Witnesses done? The clergy argued that they had endangered national unity by publishing things that could cause disaffection toward the Roman Catholic Church. However, the Witnesses replied that, in reality, they had distributed literature that brought humble people comfort from God’s Word but that this infuriated the clergy because unscriptural teachings and practices were being exposed.

[Picture on page 681]

Maurice Duplessis, premier of Quebec, publicly kneeling before Cardinal Villeneuve in the late 1930’s and putting a ring on his finger as evidence of the close ties between Church and State. In Quebec, persecution of Jehovah’s Witnesses was especially intense