Catholic Church owes more than an apology to Canadians
The discovery of the bodies of 215 children buried in unmarked graves at a former Catholic residential school has triggered outrage and immediate demands for an apology from the Pope.
The trouble with apologies is they rarely facilitate progress toward real justice and reconciliation. They are passing events, not engagements with people. Apologies are especially ineffective in an environment where public repentance has become so commonplace it is perceived as both inadequate and insincere. Words are not enough.
When, for example, the prime minister apologizes for injustices perpetrated against Indigenous peoples by the federal government, he does so in the name of the Canadian people. But how successful are such gestures in transforming how Indigenous people are viewed or treated in our country? How far does an apology go to solving, for example, the water crisis in Grassy Narrows
or the Grand River land dispute?
This is not to say that the Catholic Church should not apologize. Cardinal Collins, in a recent interview, insisted that the church should never have agreed to participate in the residential schools agenda of taking the child out of his or her family, “taking the Indian out of the child,” and overseeing conditions that led to the preventable deaths of possibly thousands of innocent children. But, in fact, the church did cooperate and for that it owes all of us a thorough explanation. No one is saying that the church today is responsible for those decisions and actions. But it is the same church and it can and must give an account of what happened.
Why did the church co-operate with what Collins recently called a system that violated core beliefs of the Catholic Church on family, culture and freedom of conscience? An apology that remains silent on these questions is worthless. What explanation is there — and there must be one — for the conditions and treatment that led to unnecessary illness, so many deaths, and lasting trauma in human beings entrusted to the care of the Catholic Church? And, finally, why did the church not undertake, before now and on its own initiative, an investigation into what happened in its residential schools?
An apology must acknowledge these injustices and the manner in which the church failed to deal with them. Opening archives will not accomplish this. The Catholic bishops of Canada owe an explanation not only to Indigenous communities, but to members of their own church. It must be, moreover, an explanation in the present tense. Apologies that only lament the “sins” of our ancestors or that appeal to “the circumstances of those times” will ring hollow.
The risk to the church, of course, is that an apology will appear to undermine its role of acting as the moral judge of public morality. An admission of complicity in an immoral practice, even one that is discontinued, mars the image of a holy church. But it also opens the door to a future church that is more about people, than the institution.
Whether Pope Francis is the right person to apologize or when or how the Pope might issue a formal apology for the church’s history with residential schools is beyond my knowledge. But if it happens, it must be more than an event. It must be a commitment that has the power to shape attitudes and behaviours, to move us from words to action, from sentiments to renewed relationships, and to motivate the sustained and substantive dialogue truth and reconciliation require.
The Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line is available 24 hours a day for anyone experiencing pain or distress as a result of a residential school experience. Support is available at 1-866-925-4419.