Book excerpt: The Catholic Origins of Quebec's Quiet Revolution challenges a versionof history central to modern Quebec's understanding of itself: that theQuiet Revolution began in the 1960s as a secular vision of state andsociety which rapidly displaced an obsolete, clericalized Catholicism.Michael Gauvreau argues that organizations such as Catholic youthmovements played a central role in formulating the Personalist Catholicideology that underlay the Quiet Revolution and that ordinaryQuebecers experienced the Quiet Revolution primarily through a seriesof transformations in the expression of their Catholic identity. In sodoing Gauvreau offers a new understanding of Catholicism's place intwentieth-century Quebec.