The association of women and girls known as the Congregation of the Holy Family, which was formed under Jesuit auspices, and which met every Thursday with closed doors in the cathedral, is said to have been very useful to the fathers in their social investigations. ** The members are affirmed to have been under a vow to tell each other every good or evil deed they knew of every person of their acquaintance; so that this pious gossip became a copious source of information to those in a position to draw upon it. In Talon’s time the Congregation of the Holy Family caused such commotion in Quebec that he asked the council to appoint a commission to inquire into its proceedings. He was touching dangerous ground. The affair was presently hushed, and the application cancelled on the register of the council. *** The Jesuits had long exercised solely the function of confessors in the colony, and a number of * La Salle, Mémoire, 1678. ** See Discovery of the Great West, 105. *** Représentation faite au conseil au sujet de certaines assemblées de femmes ou filles sous le nom de la Sainte Famille, 1667. (Registre du Conseil Souverain.) The paper is cancelled by lines drawn over it; and the following minute, duly attested, is appended to it: “Rayé du consentement de M. Talon” curious anecdotes are on record showing the reluctance with which they admitted the secular priests, and above all the Recollets, to share in it. The Recollets, of whom a considerable number had arrived from time to time, were on excellent terms with the civil powers, and were popular with the colonists; but with the bishop and the Jesuits they were not in favor, and one or two sharp collisions took place. The bishop was naturally annoyed when, while he was trying to persuade the king that a curé needed at least six hundred francs a year, these mendicant friars came forward with an offer to serve the parishes for nothing; nor was he, it is likely, better pleased when, having asked the hospital nuns eight hundred francs annually for two masses a day in their chapel, the Recollets underbid him, and offered to say the masses for three hundred. * They, on their part, complain bitterly of the bishop, who, they say, would gladly have ordered them out of the colony, but being unable to do this, tried to shut them up in their convent, and prevent them from officiating as priests among the people. “We have as little liberty,” says the Recollet writer, “as if we were in a country of heretics.” He adds that the inhabitants ask earnestly for the ministrations of the friars, but that the bishop replies with invectives and calumnies against the order, and that * “Mon dit sieur l’evesque leur fait payer (aux hospitalières) 800L. par an pour deux messes qu’il leur fait dire par ses Séminaristes que lei Récollets leurs voisins leur offrent pour 300L.” La Barre au Ministre, 1682.