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 the Bishop of Quebec and the supreme head of the Catholic Church; it was better to establish bonds which could be broken neither by time nor force, and Quebec might thus become one day the metropolis of the dioceses which should spring from its bosom.”

The opposition to the views of Mgr. de Laval did not come, however, so much from the king as from Mgr. de Harlay, Archbishop of Rouen, who had never consented to the detachment of Canada from his jurisdiction.  Events turned out fortunately for the apostolic vicar, since the Archbishop of Rouen was called to the important see of Paris on the death of the Archbishop of Paris, Hardouin de Perefixe de Beaumont, in the very year in which Mgr. de Laval embarked for France, accompanied by his grand vicar, M. de Lauson-Charny.  The task now became much easier, and Laval had no difficulty in inducing the king to urge the erection of the diocese at Quebec, and to abandon his claims to making the new diocese dependent on the archbishopric of Rouen.