On March 26, 1663, Bishop François de Laval signed the founding charter for the Séminaire de Québec, creating an institution whose purpose was to sustain the mission of the Catholic Church across the vast territory of North America. Within two years he had linked it to the Seminary of Foreign Missions of Paris, giving the fledgling school a lifeline to European scholarship and resources. The seminary's reach was extraordinary for its era -- it trained young men for ordination and dispatched them to parishes and missions as far south as Louisiana. By 1668, at the urging of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's powerful minister, Laval opened the doors wider still, welcoming Indigenous students alongside the children of French settlers. This was the birth of the Petit Séminaire de Québec, the minor seminary that would grow into something far larger than anyone anticipated.

The English conquest of 1760 could have ended the seminary's story. Instead, it transformed it. When the Jesuits were suppressed after the conquest, the seminary's directors absorbed their educational role, and the Petit Séminaire evolved from a boarding school into a full college open to any boy with an appetite for learning. The quality of instruction became so widely recognized that in 1852, Queen Victoria granted a royal charter establishing Université Laval -- the first Catholic French-language university in North America, born directly from the seminary's classrooms. For over a century, the seminary's Superior simultaneously served as the university's Rector, a dual role that persisted until 1970 when the university was finally spun off into its own corporation. The minor seminary followed suit in 1987, becoming an independent Catholic secondary school. Today, neither institution retains legal ties to the seminary, but their shared DNA is unmistakable.

The seminary's buildings in Old Quebec tell the story of New France in mortar and stone. The Vieux-Séminaire was built on the model of 17th-century French colleges, with interior courtyards that still feel more like Normandy than North America. Some walls date to the original construction, surviving fires, bombardments, and Quebec's punishing winters. Later additions expanded the complex to serve the growing university: the Camille-Roy Building, with its distinctive pinnacles perpetually flying the coat of arms of Bishop de Laval, and the Jean-Olivier-Briand Building, which houses the priests' residence and the Grand Séminaire. The site at 1 Rempart Street was designated a National Historic Site of Canada in 1929. Since 1987, the Université Laval's school of architecture has occupied a section of the Vieux-Séminaire -- a fitting tenancy, given that the building itself is one of the finest lessons in architectural history the students could hope to study.

François de Laval understood that institutions survive on more than faith. He bequeathed to the seminary a vast tract of lakes and forests northeast of Quebec City, purchased from the Compagnie des 100 Associés. Known today as the Beaupré Seigneury, this land has funded the seminary's work continuously for over 350 years -- one of the longest-running endowments in the Americas. That financial foundation allowed the seminary to weather every crisis that befell Quebec: the English conquest, the suppression of religious orders, two world wars, and the Quiet Revolution that transformed the province's relationship with the Catholic Church. The seminary today continues to operate its major seminary, a vocations centre, a diocesan minor seminary, and a Catholic centre at Université Laval, training priests and pastoral leaders just as Laval envisioned when he signed that founding charter in 1663.