Dominican Order

The Dominican Order marks the first major institutional path in Régis D’Anjou’s life: he was a Dominican priest, regarded by his family as a figure of exceptional promise, before leaving religious life in the late 1940s after taking a political stand that put him at odds with church authorities. His departure redirected him from an expected ecclesiastical career into journalism and public life.

Régis D’Anjou as a Dominican

When Régis is introduced in the family circle, he is already a Dominican and a person of striking standing. He wears the order’s white habit with a black hood, its visible sign in the scene, and has come from Toronto, where he is continuing his studies with the French philosopher Étienne Gilson. His aunt Marthe, herself a nun, has told him of a precious stone once kept by Élie D’Anjou; Régis’s place in the family gives him unusual access to its history and lends weight to his interest in the secret.

The family sees him as destined for a high ecclesiastical future, almost a pope. That expectation is not merely a private compliment: Régis is already trusted and influential among his relatives, and his learning and religious standing make him a natural recipient of family confidences. The order therefore shapes both his public identity as a young cleric and the authority he carries within the D’Anjou family.

Political commitment and departure

By the late 1940s, Régis is a close adviser to Archbishop Charbonneau of Montreal. He and the archbishop take the side of the miners on strike at Asbestos, a commitment that brings Régis into contact with Pierre Elliott Trudeau and draws him into a conflict with religious authorities. Rather than face their sanctions, or risk being sent far away as Charbonneau had been to British Columbia, Régis chooses to leave religious life.

The account presents this as a consequential break between clerical vocation and political conscience. The Dominican Order is not described through its general rules or institutional structure; its significance here lies in the authority whose discipline Régis fears and the religious career he relinquishes. His departure is a personal decision made under institutional pressure, not a gradual fading of his earlier standing: the future that his family had imagined for him gives way to a difficult search for another intellectual vocation.

After the order

Régis initially hopes to build an academic career, but finds the doors closed in the tightly uniform intellectual climate of Quebec at the time. Journalism becomes the remaining avenue for intellectual work. Despite hearing loss that began after an acute ear infection, he goes on to build a distinguished career and becomes one of the most assiduous contributors to Cité Libre, the journal founded by Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the early 1950s as a centre of resistance to Maurice Duplessis’s repressive paternalist regime.

His essays on Quebec society establish him as a leading intellectual of his generation, though a later revolutionary and neo-nationalist generation repudiates him. By the end of the 1960s he is writing for the prime minister in Ottawa, and he eventually ends his career as a senator. These later roles do not restore the ecclesiastical future he abandoned; they show how the departure from religious life redirected his learning and public influence into journalism, political thought, and government service.