Hand of God

"This is the first comprehensive biography of Claude Ryan based upon his published writings and personal papers. Set against a background of intense religious and cultural change and tensions over the meanings of nationalism and federalism in both Quebec and Canada, this book traces the emergence of Ryan's vocation as a public intellectual, in which a merging of Catholic religious fervour and new currents of social analysis enabled him to escape his roots in the poverty-stricken neighbourhoods of Depression-era Montreal. This book reveals the ways in which this enabled Ryan to speak to a postwar generation of committed young Quebecers, thus assuring his surprising ascension to the position of one of the most influential voices in Canadian liberalism and federalism in the 1960s. In rich detail, this biography presents the development of Ryan's ideas on religion, politics, and society, which marked him as both as a major figure seeking the transformation of Roman Catholicism in the 1950s and 1960s, and a key Canadian exponent of a current of liberalism at odds with that espoused by Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Through analysis of Ryan's personal and intellectual dealings with both Trudeau and René Lévesque, this book will contribute to a significant rethinking of the relationship between liberalism, nationalism, and federalism. It contains compelling new material on the breakdown of social and cultural consensus in Quebec in the late 1960s, and provides a strikingly new interpretation of the motives of the key players in the October Crisis of 1970"--