Charles-François Bailly de Messein | |
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Coadjutor Bishop of Quebec | |
See | Quebec |
Installed | September 26, 1788 |
Term ended | May 20, 1794 |
Predecessor | Jean-François Hubert |
Successor | Pierre Denaut |
Orders | |
Ordination | March 20, 1767 |
Personal details | |
Born |
Varennes, near Montreal, Canada, New France |
November 4, 1740
Died | May 20, 1794 Quebec City, Lower Canada |
(aged 53)
Charles François Bailly de Messein (4 November 1740 – 20 May 1794) was a priest active in the British province of Quebec during the American Revolutionary War. He is best known for his Loyalist activism during the American invasion of Quebec, when he was injured during the Battle of Saint-Pierre, and for publicly supporting a planned university that his bishop opposed.
Charles François Bailly de Messein was born in Varennes on November 11, 1740. His parents sent him to study at the College Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He was ordained to the priesthood at the Quebec Seminary on March 10, 1767. He was sent as a missionary to Nova Scotia from 1767 to 1771.
On his return to Quebec in 1772, Bailly became professor of rhetoric at the Quebec Seminary, a post he held for four years. He was admitted as a member of the board of directors of the seminary in December 1774, the same year he wrote his paper Rhetorica in Seminario Quebecensi.
During American invasion of Quebec, Bailly travelled in the spring 1776 to the southern coast of the Saint Lawrence River, preaching fidelity to England to his compatriots. Wounded in the abdomen, he convalesced at the seminary, and then became parish priest in Point-aux-Trembles (now Neuville), near Quebec City, in September 1777. In 1778, Bailly became a tutor to the children of Guy Carleton, the governor of the province, and accompanied the family on a voyage to London. In June 1786, Carleton was elevated to the peerage as Baron Dorchester and succeeded in imposing Bailly's candidature as coadjutor to the bishop of Quebec. The bishop, Monseigneur Jean-François Hubert, did not agree with the governor's choice. Bailly had a letter published in the Quebec Gazette on April 29, 1790 openly criticizing his superior.