The title of Au risque de la conversion. L'expérience québécoise de la mission au XXe siècle, a new book by Catherine Foisy, professor of Religious Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal, captures a significant paradox. While French-speaking Roman Catholics from the Canadian province of Quebec sought to convert “pagans” in the global South to Catholicism, the experience of missionary work transformed the consciousness of a significant number of the missionaries. Meeting people of other faiths and working with them in the face of poverty, injustice, and oppression converted them to a more open, pluralistic form of Catholicism that respected other religions and organized its missions around the “preferential option for the poor.” Thus the “risk of conversion” in her title cuts both ways. While many from Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Latin America became Christians, the missionaries themselves were often “converted” to a new consciousness that made them critical of the paternalism and chauvinism of traditional Catholicism and Quebec society.

Foisy traces the evolution of the Quebec missions in these societies from 1945 to 1980, chronicling the changes to Quebec society and the global Roman Catholic Church—along with the rise of post-colonialism in the 1960s and 1970s—that led to a dramatic change to the Quebec Church's sense of mission and transformed its missionary societies into some of the most radical and progressive voices in the Church and Quebec society. She outlines the changes in theology and missiology of four religious communities: three women's groups (Les Soeurs Missionnaires de l”Immaculée-Conceptions [MIC], les Soeurs Missionaires de Notre-Dame des Anges [MNDA], and les Soeurs Missionaires du Christ-Roi [MCR]) and one men's group (the Société des Missions-Étrangères du Québec). Foisy adds an important gender analysis, showing how the experiences of female missionaries differed from those of their male counterparts. She also examines Entraide missionaire, the umbrella organization for Quebec missionaries founded in 1958 and closed in 2018.

Au risque de la conversion is divided into two parts. The first part (1945–1968) traces the origins, rapid growth, and success of the Quebec missions, with one chapter outlining the challenges posed by the expulsion after 1949 of missions from Communist China, an area in which the Quebec religious communities had invested heavily. This setback actually led to renewal, scattering the expelled mission societies throughout Asia, Oceania, and Latin America. The period of growth from 1945 to the 1960s, however, ends in uncertainty, as the twin shocks of Vatican II and the Quiet Revolution challenge the foundations of the missions. The second part (1968–1980) traces the collapse of the Quebec missionary project, marked as it was by dwindling resources and falling vocations, both products of the aftermath of Quiet Revolution and the secularization it engendered. Despite the very real losses, many of the missionaries felt that the Church made enormous leaps forward by letting go of its exclusionary and chauvinistic theology, ecclesiology, and missiology, by recognizing the importance of religious liberty and pluralism (including the value of non-Christian religions), and by respecting the right to self-determination of local peoples and churches in the face of Western neo-colonialism and continued Roman Catholic centralization.

While Foisy examines the official documents of these five organizations, the richness of her study comes from her interviews with the missionaries themselves who add a wealth of detail and color. Her oral history is populated, for example, by stories of nuns, young women in their twenties from small towns in Quebec who survived the bombing of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) only to be expelled from China by Mao's Communist Party after 1949. Shuttling deftly between official, published sources and the voices of her interview subjects, Foisy exercises appropriate critical distance. Firsthand accounts as much as official records can be distorted, she notes, by elisions, bias, pride, and self-justification.

Au risque de la conversion is an ambitious work. Foisy's main method is oral history, but she complements interviews with a careful reading of official documents. She interprets the transformation of the missionary project in the context of powerful social forces such as the rise of post-colonialism, the secularization of Quebec, economic development, and political ruptures, but also affirms the autonomy of religious actors. The missionaries are portrayed as agents reacting to monumental shifts in Quebec society and global geopolitics, but they maintain, in Foisy's account, their religious and moral convictions and motivations. Finally, Foisy succeeds in tying together the lives of individuals to broad social developments as those societies move through history.

If there is criticism of this book, it is that one would have like to have heard even more from the missionaries themselves and how they experienced this tumultuous transition. The interview questions included at the end of the book suggest that Foisy has a rich storehouse of material, and one hopes that she will develop it into further scholarship on this and related topics. One also hopes that this book will inspire Foisy or others to look at the experiences of those who received the missionaries from French Quebec. The current book needs to be complemented by the voices from the local churches of the global South as well as broader studies on the impact of the missionary endeavor on the societies of the South—not an uncontroversial topic.

Naturally, this book will interest church historians, especially those interested in missions or Quebec Catholicism. However, it should also interest historians and sociologists of Quebec. In the popular imagination in Quebec today—and in much scholarship–the Quiet Revolution is understood as a popular revolt by secular modernizers led against a clerical elite that led French Quebecers out of “la grande noirceur” into the light of liberal democracy, human rights, technological progress, and economic prosperity. Au risque de la conversion adds to the work of Quebec historians and sociologists who show that much of Quebec's Catholic leadership supported, and indeed led, many of the innovations of the 1960s.