he first half of the seventeenth century in France was mystical, which explains why the primary objective of the Church in Canada was its missionary work with the Amerindians. The "savages" were viewed as beings without a soul to whom the word of God must be spread. The first male religious orders to settle in the colony were the Récollets in 1615 and the Jesuits in 1625. Starting in 1632, several Jesuits travelled with the nomadic nations to learn their language and to convert them. They then set up missions and the people were slowly converted. Female religious orders also came to New France to help with the missionary process. The female order of the Hospitallers arrived in Quebec City in 1639 to establish a general hospital there to care for and convert the Amerindians; that same year, the Ursulines founded a boarding school for young Amerindians. The settlement of Montreal, called Ville-Marie at that time, was also a major missionary project that was assigned to a devout layman, Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve. There, Jeanne Mance soon opened a hospital, Marguerite Bourgeois taught, the Sulpiciens settled in 1657 and the Hospitallers followed in 1659.

With the growth of the Canadian population and since the evangelization of the Amerindians did not have the desired effect, the Church instituted structures to meet the needs of the French population. The bishop, who settled in Quebec in 1674, was at the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; he was chosen by the pope but his appointment was confirmed by the King of France. The secular clergy consisted of priests trained at the Quebec seminary, who served the parishes or missions. The regular clergy consisted of Sulpiciens, parish priests and seigneurs from Montreal, the Jesuits, missionaries and teachers, and a few Récollets. The nuns were either cloistered, like the Ursulines and the Hospitallers, or secular like the Notre-Dame congregation and the Grey Nuns; they devoted themselves to work in the hospitals and in education.

There were few parishes in the seventeenth century. They were not built until the population in an area warranted it and the tithe was sufficient to support a parish priest; otherwise, priests travelled from one place to another. Once parishes were established, parish priests were important figures in the community. They took part in the most important moments in an individual’s life: birth, marriage and death. In the eighteenth century, the religious practice of Canadians was strictly controlled by the clergy, and by the State, which still worked very closely with the Church; the colony’s inhabitants however did not always strictly adhere to this practice.