Roch Theriault was born in a tiny village near Chicoutimi in 1947 to Hyacinthe (papy) Theriault,a house painter, and Pierette (mamy) Tremblay, He grew up in Thetford - Mines, an asbestos- mining town 230km northeast of Montreal. His father was a supporter of an ultraright Catholic fringe group known as the "White Berets". As a teenager, a neighbor recalls Roch and his three brothers would play a game called "bone" with their father. "They would sit at the kitchen table with their heavy boots on and kick each other's shins until one of them gave in."Rock wrote in his 1983 autobiography that he grew up in the northern Quebec bush where he learned to talk to the animals and the trees. He told a prison psychiatrist that he was eight when he discovered that he had the power to heal sick people beginning with a friend who had broken his teeth. He soon was able to castrate cattle and pigs without the loss of blood. During his 20's, Theriault joined the Aramis Club, a Catholic group."He wanted to change the rituals", recalls Vachon Gregoire."he wanted the new members to wear the image of Satan on their backs and all kinds of weird stuff. We were a bunch of average Catholic guys. We couldn't accept his strange ideas." George Hermans was one of the most successful Seventh Day Adventist crusaders in Quebec. He met Rock in february, 1977 in Thetford Mines. "He struck me as the kind of person," Hermans recalls, "who could easily become a fanatic." Within two months of joining the church, Rock had attracted six women and two men who looked to him as religious mentor. Rock started an Adventist sponsored stop-smoking clinic and vegetarian banquet.The church eventually kicked Rock out. He apparently was responsible for the death of a woman dying of Leukemia. He talked the womans husband to release her from the hospital. He promised to cure her with a diet of health food, the cure failed and the woman died shortly after. Rock with his brood of six men, twelve women and two children moved to the bush in the remote Gaspe region of Quebec. Rock told his followers how, in the book of revelations the seventh angel unleashed the wrath of god upon the earth. There were flashes of lightening , peals of thunder and a great earthquake that toppled mountains and cities. Then "great hailstones, heavy as a hundredweight, dropped on men from heaven until men cursed God for the plague of the hail." The Biblical prophecy, Rock said, would come true on February 17, 1979. That was the bad news. The good news was that God had appointed Rock to be his personal emmisary. He and his disciples were to escape the evils of civilization and return to nature. They were to be the core of a new society that would usher in God's thousand year reign.They worked long, long, hours building a shelter. Rock exempted himself from most of the hard labour, claiming that his stomach problems and his cancer made it dangerous for him to exert himself. Rock assigned Biblical names to each of his followers. |