---
title: "Tabernacle, chalice, Christ: how Quebec turned the Church’s own words against it"
description: "Quebec’s sacres were once punished with fines and prison. They outlived the clergy’s power and now hang on museum walls and T-shirts"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-11-05T13:00:00Z
modified: 2026-11-05T16:39:47Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/tabernacle-chalice-christ-how-quebec-turned-the-church-s-own-71a778
language: en
tags: ["language", "history", "religion", "quebec", "french", "culture"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Tabernacle, chalice, Christ: how Quebec turned the Church’s own words against it

*Quebec’s sacres were once punished with fines and prison. They outlived the clergy’s power and now hang on museum walls and T-shirts*

By Jan Sokol · November 5, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/tabernacle-chalice-christ-how-quebec-turned-the-church-s-own-71a778

## In brief

- Québécois sacres are curses built from Catholic terms such as tabarnak (tabernacle), câlisse (chalice) and Criss (Christ)
- Folklorist Jean-Pierre Pichette recorded about 1,800 sacres in 1980, and some linguists now put the number near 2,000
- Blasphemy was illegal in New France, where a third offence could mean a month in prison, according to Pichette
- Historians link the rise of sacres to the Church’s grip on public life after 1840, and its loss of power in the 1960s Quiet Revolution
- Canada’s Criminal Code banned blasphemous libel until Bill C-51 repealed it with Royal Assent on 13 December 2018

On a Thursday night at Bar Sainte-Angèle, a jazz bar in Quebec City where old hands share the open mic with students from the music conservatory nearby, a customer raised his eyebrows towards the timbered ceiling and said: “Sacrement d’ostie de tabarnak.” Jen Rose Smith, [writing for BBC Travel](https://bbc.com/travel/article/20261104-the-swear-words-that-used-to-be-illegal-in-canada), overheard him. Word for word it means “sacrament of the communion host of the tabernacle.” In practice it means nothing of the kind.

Québécois French has a whole class of curses built from the furniture of the Catholic Mass. They are called sacres. Tabarnak (tabernacle) carries about the weight of the English F-word. Câlisse (chalice) sits nearer to “damn.” Criss (Christ) belongs to the same family. These are the vessels and rites of the altar, and in Quebec they became ammunition.

## An inventory

For his 1980 book *Le Guide Raisonné des Jurons*, the folklorist Jean-Pierre Pichette recorded some 1,800 of them. Some linguists now put the figure at closer to 2,000. Jean-François Joubert, who teaches at Quebec City’s Cégep Garneau and wrote *Le Sacre du Québec*, reaches for ecology to describe it: “It’s like the Amazon rainforest of swear words.”

Some of the species are obscure. Simonaque refers to simony, the sale of holy things, and is a little milder than tabarnak. Ciboire, the vessel that holds the Eucharist, sits in the middle of the scale. Others are almost absurd: the Virgin Mary with her bottom bare, the Virgin Mary on a bicycle. Asked for a favourite, Joubert offered one that translates as “consecrated communion host in a pig’s ass.”

Yulia Bosworth, an associate professor of linguistics at Binghamton University who studies Quebec French, sets this against the roughly 7,000 languages of the world. For variety of curse words, she would put Quebec French “in the top 25 – maybe top 10.”

![A textured illustration shows coral pink goblets, lidded cups, small shrines, and circular ornaments growing among teal leaves on a cream background.](https://rews.cc/img/7834013c550df767f65be4eabd73ecbbd7f51883.webp)

## The law and the sinner

Nobody can say exactly where the sacres began, because for a long time the people who used them most did not write them down. There were reasons for that. In New France, blasphemy was a crime, and in the early years the colony enforced it. According to Pichette, a first offence brought a heavy fine. A third could bring a month in prison.

Joubert has a theory. He traces the habit to settlers from French cities such as Rouen and La Rochelle, places with a Protestant past whose people had been converted to Catholicism by force. “Even though on paper they’re Catholic, they come from regions that had strife and religious conflict,” he says. Religious orders were everywhere in the colony, and he thinks the settlers must have resented them. “If you look at the words, they’re mainly about the Mass, like the classic ostie, câlisse and tabarnak,” he says. “They were taking some of the mystery, or mystique, away from the Mass.”

Not every historian accepts this. There is wider agreement about what came later.

## After the rebels lost

In 1837 and 1838, British forces put down two armed risings by French-speaking nationalists, most of them secular. After the defeat, the Catholic Church took over, and ran everything from schools to hospitals with a rigid conservatism. “Starting in the 1840s, \[Catholicism\] became omnipresent in nearly every aspect of public life,” says René Hardy, professor emeritus of history at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. He has studied the swearing that rose up against it, and his evidence is the Church’s own paperwork. “When the bishops’ council met in 1886, they concurred that using sacres had become the cardinal sin of all French Canadians,” he says.

![Three people stand beneath a giant church bell, with a red ribbon of sound curling from its clapper toward them.](https://rews.cc/img/f48763594af8727a29976a31fd646fee2c13a228.webp)

Here is a reflection, not a finding: a power that claims every part of life leaves its subjects only its own vocabulary to fight back with. The bishops supplied the words. The people only turned them over.

## The churches empty, the words stay

In the 1960s the Quiet Revolution broke the Church’s hold, and Quebec secularised fast. *Canada’s History* magazine [notes](https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/politics-law/at-cross-purposes) that in 1958, 75 per cent of Quebecers went to mass every Sunday, and that the figure fell quickly after that. The sacres did not fall with it. According to Bosworth, they became a way for French speakers to recognise each other, at a time when their language could feel squeezed by an English-speaking country on one side and the wider French-speaking world on the other. It is a sensitivity that still shapes the politics of a province that [handed power to the Parti Québécois](https://rews.cc/a/quebec-s-pq-takes-power-on-28-of-the-vote-and-ottawa-s-unity-bea937) in October.

> The religious meaning is lost, but in the 1960s these terms acquired a countercultural significance that still remains. Today, sacres are probably the most emblematic and recognisable element of Quebec’s linguistic identity.

The state took longer than the people to give up. Until recently, Canada’s Criminal Code still contained section 296, which made publishing a “blasphemous libel” an indictable offence carrying up to two years in prison. The [Library of Parliament’s summary](https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/LegislativeSummaries/421C51E) of Bill C-51 shows that the bill repealed it. The bill [received Royal Assent](https://www.globenewswire.com/en/news-release/2018/12/14/1667079/0/en/Repeal-of-Canada-s-Blasphemy-Law-Applauded-by-National-Secularist-Organization.html) on 13 December 2018, about two centuries after the bishops began fighting the words and close to sixty years after the pews emptied.

![A small stone church casts a long shadow that becomes a large pink speech bubble across a textured teal landscape beneath a pale peach sky.](https://rews.cc/img/5d13e126e0004b6808660643a675ab6a6a733abf.webp)

## Flat-pack blasphemy

Their grammar is as flexible as their history. One sacre can work as a noun, an adjective, a verb or an adverb, which the bilingual Canadian action-comedy *Bon Cop, Bad Cop* shows off in a well-known scene. “English is capable of this kind of creativity, with the F-word and others, but the degree to which Quebec French has taken it is absolutely remarkable,” Bosworth says. They can also be stacked. Nir Guzinski, a Montreal actor and YouTuber, compares the process to assembling Ikea furniture, and builds an example: “esti de câlisse de tabarnak de maudit de Criss.” There is an online generator that produces curses a paragraph long. For beginners there are softened versions, the way English has “darn” and “fudge”: tabarnouche, tabarouette, tabarslack.

What was once worth a month in prison now sells in souvenir shops. In Quebec City and Montreal, T-shirts carry “Je m’en câlisse,” a crude way of saying “I don’t care.” At Musée POP in Trois-Rivières, an exhibition on Québécois popular culture has curses printed on its wall. “They’re so much a part of our life,” says Michelle Bélanger, the museum’s general director. “Sacres are a very important part of our history, culture, and identity.”

Frédéric Patenaude, a Montreal language teacher who hosts the Quebec French Podcast and wrote *Quebec French for Beginners*, includes them in his lessons. He also tells his students to use them with care. The Church lost its power over Quebec long ago, but these words still carry some of the force it gave them.