Michael Gauvreau, author of many superb studies on religion in Canada, especially Quebec, has delivered another excellent analysis in this biography of Claude Ryan as “public intellectual.” Because Ryan played a long and central role through the decades after World War II, which experienced rapid transformation of the religious, economic, and political life of Quebec, Gauvreau's biography, based on a wealth of secondary and primary sources, including the massive archives generated by Ryan himself, offers major new insights into many areas of Quebec and Canadian political and cultural history.

Born in 1925 in Montreal to a family impoverished by an absentee father who died young, Ryan was encouraged by a strong and resourceful mother to succeed in studies, sponsored largely by Quebec's ubiquitous Roman Catholic church, where, as a bright and disciplined student, he absorbed not only the classic Catholic curriculum but also mastered lifelong intellectual skills of learning and communication. Although Ryan would advance from his studies before receiving a university degree, his formation in the Catholic classic college system of Quebec left him deeply and widely educated in history, literature, philosophy, and theology—all infused with the neo-Thomism which was dominant in Quebec's culture before the disruptions of the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s.

Because the church financed much of his education, it was expected that Ryan would sense a call to the priesthood. Ryan chose otherwise but nevertheless felt that his secular career was always a religious vocation as worthy as any clerical ministry. Indeed, from his employment as national secretary of the church's principal organization for socializing and influencing young Catholic laity, L'Action Catholique Canadienne, through his later editorship and directorship of Quebec's foremost independent Catholic daily, Le Devoir, to his contested role during the “October Crisis” of 1970 and leadership after 1978 of the Quebec Liberal Party, Ryan always sensed what he was doing was most deeply a Christian vocation. Hence the title of this book: “The Hand of God.”

With his Catholic formation in neo-Thomist philosophy, nurtured powerfully by the influence of French intellectual and activist, Jacques Maritain, who visited Ontario and Quebec regularly, Ryan's Catholic mentors also included French “personalist” theorists, notably Emmanuel Mounier, whose influence on Leftist Catholic intellectuals in Quebec was pervasive in the middle years of the twentieth century. Ryan's principal political embrace would be with Quebec Liberalism, where Henri Bourassa's fusion of French-Canadian nationalism and Canadian federalism served as a guiding light, while his progressive Catholicism found expression in enthusiast reportage from Vatican II. As Ryan led L'Action Catholique effectively, mediating skillfully between the hierarchy of the church and the interests of postwar French-Canadian lay elites, he searched for political and religious renewal that would build a new Christendom in Quebec, projecting a social liberalism to nurture a distinct culture which could withstand pervasive American and Anglo-Canadian seductions.

Frustrated by the church's conservative turn following the Asbestos strike of 1949 and also alarmed by the rising anticlericalism of radical Catholic intellectuals like Gérard Pelletier and Pierre Trudeau, expressed through their new journal, Cité Libre, Ryan's vistas broadened in 1962 when he accepted an invitation to join the editorial team of Le Devoir, soon becoming its director. Here, Ryan's published editorials and archival correspondence, skillfully utilized by Gauvreau, give fresh understanding of the impassioned politics of Quebec's elites and the responses of Catholic lay leaders like Ryan. In the search for liberation from the legacy of Union Nationale Premier, Maurice Duplessis, and his Catholic supporters, Ryan propounded a combined “aggeornimento” of Catholic teaching and renewed Canadian federalism, based on the “compact theory” of Canada's two founding peoples and championed by Ryan's Catholic and ideological mentors, notably the Quebec nationalist patriarch, Henri Bourassa, the priest-historian Abbé Lionel Grouxl, and former editor of Le Devoir, André Laurendeau, cochair of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism after 1963.

Alas for Ryan's hopes for Catholic and Canadian constitutional renewal, the forces of secularism and separatist nationalism in Quebec led through the transformative years of the late 1960s to the “October Crisis” of 1970, where terrorists of the Front de Libération du Quebec (FLQ) kidnapped British trade commissioner, James Cross, and Provincial Justice Minister, Pierre Laporte, killing the latter.

Ryan's role as a public intellectual through this crisis has been the focus of much controversy. Gauvreau has used the events leading to the October Crisis to explore sympathetically Ryan's call for moderation and understanding of FLQ motivations, as well as his private musings and conversations on the possible formation of an emergency government to buttress the Liberal Government of Robert Bourassa, in hopes of negotiating a deal with the FLQ to save the lives of their captives. Gauvreau defends Ryan against those who charged him with conspiracy, dismissing the accusations as unfounded rumors seeded by “Trudeauites,” who applauded Trudeau's invocation as Prime Minster of the draconian War Measures Act to crush the terrorists. Gauvreau aligns with Ryan in considering Trudeau's intervention as unnecessary and unwise, with lasting negative consequences.

More deeply, Gauvreau focuses on the Ryan-Trudeau contestation to throw light on the cardinal differences within the nature of French Canadian liberalism as it evolved through the fateful decade of the 1960s. Gauvreau's analysis rehearses the standard liberal narrative, imprinted by the Trudeauites, of a struggle against nationalist, tribalist separatism now turned violent, vanquished by the cosmopolitan liberalism of Trudeau and his citélibriste and Anglophone allies, deploying an agenda of secularism, privatization of religion, post-ideological instrumentalism, and trenchant federalism giving no quarter to the recognition of Quebec's identity as a “distinct society,” while concentrating priority on the protection of individualist human rights – ultimately entrenched in a patriated constitutional charter. To this narrative Gauvreau contrasts the key elements of Ryan's liberalism: a revised federalism to accommodate the compact, bicultural theory of confederation, which recognized Quebec's distinct standing; moderation and civility in broadly inclusive dialogue; and, above all, the fusion of progressive Catholicism and social liberalism, which respected the communitarian elements of human rights, and the mediating functions of traditional institutions like student organizations, unions, the family, and the church. Ryan's liberalism remained informed by a progressive but still deeply orthodox Catholicism. It is perhaps the distinguishing strength of this study that the author gives full attention to the linkage of religion and politics, even as Canadian culture, most radically in Quebec, underwent secularization and dechristianization. In delineating the varieties of liberalism, moreover, Gauvreau's analysis serves to complicate the predominant historiography, in Canada and internationally, which posits a monolithic, totalizing liberalism—either positively or negatively.

When Trudeau was asked on live television during the October Crisis how far he would go, he responded with the memorable quip: “Just watch me.” We are still watching his powerful legacy in Canadian constitutional discourse and jurisprudence, as Trudeau's liberalism suborned Ryan's in politics and ideology, if not theology.

Gauvreau's book ends abruptly after his analysis of Ryan's role in the October Crisis. This reader is left hoping for a second volume, perhaps more tightly edited, dealing with the rest of Ryan's career as he took on leadership of the Liberal Party, and where the Hand of God led him in the constitutional discourse and decisions which followed.