"The fans, they pray for two things. The first is that the Canadiens will win. The second thing is that they pray for the Canadiens to crush the Maple Leafs, but I think you don't need any God for that," he said with a laugh.

Bauer's book has six chapters, one of which was written by Benoît Melançon, author of the book Les Yeux de Maurice Richard (The Eyes of Maurice Richard, which will be published in English in April 2009 as The Rocket: A Cultural History of Maurice Richard).

Two years ago, shortly after the minister moved to Montreal, he and one of his students decided the university should offer the opportunity to study whether the Canadiens are, in fact, a faith.

The arena is their temple, the players are their saviours, and those who worship them pray that the sacrifices made on the ice — of blood, sweat and tears — will lead them to glory.

The melee, which forced the game to be suspended, ushered in arevolution. The Richard Riot is generally considered the firstexplosion of French-Canadian nationalism, the beginning of asocial and political dynamic that shapes Canada to this day

The gray weather on that St. Patrick's Day mirrored Montreal'smood. Mayor Jean Drapeau telephoned Campbell at the NHL officein town and begged him not to attend the game that night.

No athlete has embodied the soul of a city and the spirit of itspeople as Richard did in the 1940s and '50s in Montreal, my homefor the past 21 years.

There are moments when life gets in the way, when sports and thereal world collide at some intersection--which, almost 45 yearsago, happened to be the corner of Atwater and Ste. Catherinestreets in Montreal.

Forty-five, maybe 60 seconds later — at 9:11 p.m. — the bomb exploded. Twenty-five feet to Campbell’s left, a canister of tear gas detonated by Latreille’s group from the auto repair shop. The acrid smoke in the building gnawed the throats and scorched the eyes of those nearby. Suddenly, fear gripped the crowd. What next?

No sports decision ever hit the Montreal public with such impact. It seemed to strike at the very heart and soul of the city”

And so at le Forum, they cheered him with decibel-defying abandon. Goals were not just goals. Brian McKenna asserted in his documentary “Fire and Ice,” “Richard became the archangel of French Canada, avenging humiliation.”

Hockey in Canada was bigger than the church, and Rocket Richard was bigger than the Pope,” reflected Red Storey later. “He is God,” Frank Selke Sr. once said bluntly.

He had started playing this game as a 4-year-old on the backyard rink his father Onésime, a machinist at the Canadian Pacific Railway, built for him. It was quickly apparent he could play in ways other boys could not. By the time he reached his teens, his skills were in such high demand he played as often as he could, sometimes four games in a weekend, using aliases to play for multiple teams, often against grown men. The oldest of eight children, he quit school at 16 to work with his father in the factory. He began playing junior hockey the following year.

The Garden crowd is angry. Boston police come to the locker room. They want to arrest Richard for assault, to throw him in jail for the night. Montreal coach Dick Irvin blocks the entry to the Canadiens’ dressing room.

For five minutes, the tempest rages. The crowd, on its feet, cannot believe the madness before them. They’ve seen fights over the Garden’s past three decades in the days when players swung their sticks and fists more liberally, but nothing like this, nothing as determined and wild.

It’s March 13, 1955. The tension between the two rivals in the six-team NHL has been building inside the Boston Garden all night. This is their 14th and final meeting of the regular season, plenty of games to enflame the animosity between the two teams, but what’s about to happen is even more personal. Laycoe, the Bruins forward had nailed Richard in the first period. He served two minutes for charging. But the hit lit the fuse of Richard’s infamous temper.

Since then, larger thinkers on the Quebec scene have argued whether this was the beginning of Quebec's Quiet Revolution — officially pegged for 1960 with the election of Jean Lesage as Premier — or perhaps just the end of a time when hockey was more important than politics, as the latter began to take hold among French Canadian youth.

137 arrestsMontreal went nuts, both French and English, and with Detroit coming in for a St. Patrick's Day game at the Forum, revenge was on some fans' minds. However, nothing may have happened if Campbell hadn't made a tactical error — he showed up to the game (10 minutes late) with his secretary (future wife) and took his regular place.

But the fact was the Rocket was suspended for the final three games of the season plus the entire Stanley Cup playoffs.

Richard's story had linesman Cliff Thompson holding him back, arms pinned, while Laycoe was allowed to smack away. Rocket said he warned the linesman three times to let him go before he finally clocked the official.

How Richard himself, the Rocket, was so much a part of Quebec society that he transcended even organized religion. Red Storey, a former referee and long-time hockey commentator, once said of him that, in Quebec, "hockey was bigger than the Church, and Rocket Richard was bigger than the Pope." Roch Carrier perhaps explained it best in his famous book The Hockey Sweater.

How Francophone players in the NHL, almost exclusively the property of the Montreal Canadiens, believed they were more harshly treated by league president Clarence Campbell — especially Richard — when it came time to dish out suspensions and fines.

violent the National Hockey League was in those days.

The very last mosquito settled on the face of little Alma Rose. With great seriousness she pronounced the ritual words-"Fly, fly, get off my face, my nose is not a public place!" Then she made a swift end of the creature with a slap.

Ten days later he came, long after nightfall. The women were alone in the house with Tit'Bé and the children, the father having gone for seed-grain to Honfleur whence he would only return on the morrow. Telesphore and Alma Rose were asleep, Tit'Bé was having a last pipe before the family prayer, when Chien barked several times and got up to sniff at the closed door. Then two light taps were heard. The visitor waited for the invitation before he entered and stood before them.

It was the orthodox beginning to one of those talks among country folk which are like an interminable song, full of repetitions, each speaker agreeing with the words last uttered and adding more to the same effect.

It was the mother who replied:—"Alma Rose was not too naughty; but Telesphore has been a perfect torment to me. It is not so much that he does what is wrong; but the things he says! One might suppose that the boy had not all his wits."

And so the church is finished-a beautiful stone church, with pictures on the walls and coloured glass in the windows

"A surveyor from Roberval will be in the parish next week. If anyone wishes his land surveyed before mending his fences for the summer, this is to let him know.

Everyone drew his pipe from his pocket, and the pig's bladder filled with tobacco leaves cut by hand, and, after the hour and a half of restraint, began to smoke with evident satisfaction.

Christmas matins were said, the same as last year; one might be satisfied with ringing the last bell a little before 10 o'clock.

This fire made us very uneasy; we did not know whether it were enemies, or if the fire had caught in some of the huts of the village.

Your Paternity' s letter

they refuse to desert their flock in order to save their own lives; and, like Daniel, they devote themselves to comforting! encouraging, or baptizing all who need their ministrations. At last, the enemy forces an entrance, and most of the Christians are made prisoners, as well as the two Fathers

Everywhere, the progress of the Faith has surpassed our hopes,—most minds, even those formerly most fierce, becoming so docile, and submissive to the preaching of the Gospel,

These are little things, of course; but they show nevertheless that these Peoples [149] are not quite so rude and unpolished as one might suppose.

this is to render them fortunate in catching fish. Still, I am very glad that virginity receives among them this kind of honor; it will help us some day to make them understand the value of it. Fish, they say, do not like the dead; and hence they abstain from going fishing when one of their friends is dead.

Father Mercier, who had had good health all the way from France, was seized with a slight fever a day or two before his arrival among the Hurons; but the day after his arrival he was free from it, except for a slight disturbance, which was followed by perfect health. It is a blessing from Heaven, it seems, that as soon as we are in the Huron country we should have good health

The evil is, they are so attached to their old customs that, knowing the beauty of truth, they are content to approve it without embracing it. Their usual reply is, oniondechouten, "Such is the custom of our country." We have fought this excuse and have taken it from their mouths, but not yet from their hearts; our Lord will do that when it shall please him.

Now these rains have produced two good results one in that they have increased the fruits of the earth; the other that they stifled those false opinions and notions conceived against God, against the Cross, and against ourselves. For all the Savages that knew us, and especially those of our village, came expressly to see us, [28] to tell us that God was in truth good, and that we also were good; and that in the future they would serve God, adding a thousand abusive words in reference to all their Arendiowane, or soothsayers. To God be forever the glory of the whole; he permits the drought of the soil, to bedew all hearts with his blessings.

baptized eighty-six savages