Kamloops Discovery Fuels Questions of Evangelization and Mission Backed by the State

National Catholic Register, 11 June 2021

The issue is as old as colonialism.

Pope Francis expressed his pain and solidarity with the Indigenous peoples of Canada after the recent discovery of 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. The discovery convulsed Canadian public life like few issues in recent years.

There had been increasing calls in the previous days for a formal papal apology, including from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Those who called for it found the Holy Father’s comments at the Angelus on June 6 to be inadequate.

The issue has wider relevance beyond Canada. How does the Church think today about evangelization and mission backed by state power — the story of the missions nearly everywhere, whether in Canada, Mexico, India or Brazil? If the European colonial project was morally wrong, how then to think about the fact that the vast majority of the world’s Catholics received the faith because of it? 

It is not a new issue. Perhaps the best Catholic film ever made, The Mission (1986), examined the entanglement of mission, evangelization, slavery, colonial politics and Church-state relations in 18th-century South America. In 1992, on the quincentennial of Columbus sailing to America, the issue was engaged in a public discourse largely sympathetic to Columbus. By 2020, as statues of St. Junipero Serra were being toppled in California, the public debate had shifted markedly.

Residential Schools

In the late 19th century, the federal government in Canada initiated a policy to provide education for aboriginal children — then called “Indians” and now called “Indigenous.” The education was intended to provide basic rudiments of European education and to facilitate the participation of Indigenous peoples in the wider economy. 

But the project had a more fundamental cultural purpose, which was to foster assimilation by suppressing Indian languages, clothing, hairstyles and culture. In one infamous phrase, the goal was to “kill the Indian in the child.” 

The government built boarding schools to house the Indigenous children and made it mandatory for children to attend. Some families sent their children voluntarily; many had their children taken by the state and forced to live in the “residential schools” during the school year.

While it was a government policy and the schools were built by the government, the operation of the schools was largely turned over to various Christian churches, who had the missionary energy to send teachers to remote areas. Catholic dioceses and religious orders ran about 60% of the residential schools.

The policy enjoyed widespread support across all elements of Canadian government and society. The residential schools endured well into the 1960s. The last one closed in the 1990s. As late as 1969, the formal policy of then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and future prime minister Jean Chretien was to favor assimilation of Indigenous peoples.

Abuse and Apology

In the late 1980s, former students at the residential schools began telling their stories of widespread physical and sexual abuse. Of the 150,000 Indigenous children who attended the schools, some 6,000 died while there due to contagious diseases, poor medical care and neglect.

In addition to abuse, the entire premise of the residential schools was challenged as unjust. A landmark 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report detailed not only the abuse, but condemned the entire enterprise as “cultural genocide.” 

The TRC process fundamentally changed the consensus view of Canadian history in government, universities and the media, so much so that even statues of Sir John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister, have been removed in cities across the country. “Sir John A,” as he is commonly known, is held in lower esteem in elite circles than would be the case with comparable U.S. slaveholding founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson.

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