The choice made by your Holiness of the
person of the Sieur de Laval, Bishop of Petraea, to go in the capacity
of apostolic vicar to exercise episcopal functions in Canada has been
attended by many advantages to this growing Church. We have reason to
expect still greater results if it please your Holiness to permit him to
continue there the same functions in the capacity of bishop of the
place, by establishing for this purpose an episcopal see in Quebec; and
we hope that your Holiness will be the more inclined to this since we
have already provided for the maintenance of the bishop and his canons
by consenting to the perpetual union of the abbey of Maubec with the
future bishopric. This is why we beg you to grant to the Bishop of
Petraea the title of Bishop of Quebec upon our nomination and prayer,
with power to exercise in this capacity the episcopal functions in all
Canada."

However, the appointment was not consummated; the Propaganda, indeed,
decided in a rescript of December 15th, 1666, that it was necessary to
make of Quebec a see, whose occupant should be appointed by the king;
the Consistorial Congregation of Rome promulgated a new decree with the
same purpose on October 9th, 1670, and yet Mgr. de Laval still remained
Bishop of Petraea. This was because the eternal question of jurisdiction
as between the civil and religious powers, the question which did so
much harm to Catholicism in France, in England, in Italy, and especially
in Germany, was again being revived. The King of France demanded that
the new diocese should be dependent upon the Metropolitan of Rouen,
while the pontifical government, of which its providential role requires
always a breadth of view, and, so to speak, a foreknowledge of events
impossible to any nation, desired the new diocese to be an immediate
dependency of the Holy See. "We must confess here," says the Abbe
Ferland, "that the sight of the sovereign pontiff reached much farther
into the future than that of the great king. Louis XIV was concerned
with the kingdom of France; Clement X thought of the interests of the
whole Catholic world. The little French colony was growing; separated
from the mother country by the ocean, it might be wrested from France by
England, which was already so powerful in America; what, then, would
become of the Church of Quebec if it had been wont to lean upon that of
Rouen and to depend upon it? It was better to establish at once
immediate relations between