Even if the American aboriginals have "moved from being the powerless victims of the European expansion to being often decisive actors" "in a dynamics of encounters", the "theatre of action of which was the New World", for experts of colonial expansions "the prevailing model" remains the traditional one. This was explained this morning by Luca Codignola (Istituto di storia dell’Europa mediterranea, Cnr), as he spoke at the XXX European Week (Villa Cagnola Gazzada) about "Europe and its religious expansion in the North American continent". According to Codignola, who spoke of the European colonial expansion in the North American continent until 1701, "the stories of the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese expansions mostly remain separate worlds". "Out of 7 bishops of Québec from 1658 to 1784, only 4 really worked", remarked Bernard Plongeron of the Institut Catholique de Paris, who thinks mgr. Francois de Laval – Montmorency (1658-1688) made "the Canadian Church survive through a strong centralism". In the early eighteenth century, he stated, it was bishop J.B. de Saint-Vallier who "gave prominence to the parish as a ‘spiritual family’". "Four he adds are the ‘sins of the Canadian parishioner’: an immoderate will to show off, blasphemy, drunkenness, lust".
