The Pope’s Meetings With Canadian Indigenous Leaders: An Explainer

National Catholic Register, 28 March 2022

They are a continuation of the process of reconciliation that is underway because of the Catholic Church’s participation in Canada’s assimilationist residential-school policy for Indigenous children.

Canadian Indigenous leaders will meet with Pope Francis for four hours over three days this week in Rome. The papal encounter is the latest step in a decades-long “reconciliation” process, as it is known in Canada, dealing with the colonial and early confederation period. 

While American Catholics are aware of similar controversies related to St. Junípero Serra — canonized in 2015, after Pope Francis waived the usual requirements — the background to this Canadian delegation is less well known.

In 2021, Canada experienced something akin to the Black Lives Matter phenomenon of 2020. The number of demonstrations was not as great, but there was intense public anger. The cause was the discovery of unmarked gravesites — not mass graves, as was erroneously reported — at residential schools for Indigenous children. The painful legacy of residential schools was reawakened. 

The children were not killed, but died at the schools — tuberculosis often the culprit, along with poor health care in remote regions. 

The residential-school policy of the Canadian government took children from their families to attend schools where assimilation was the official goal — “to kill the Indian in the child,” according to the infamous words of the time. Aboriginal languages and cultural practices were suppressed.

While it was a government policy, with near-universal support in the late-19th century, most of the schools were run by churches, as they were the only institutions with people willing to serve in isolated areas under poor conditions. Most of the church-run schools were Catholic, and most of the Catholic schools were run by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. 

Over the century or so that the schools operated, some 150,000 children attended them. 

In the 1980s, adults who had attended the schools began to tell of their experiences there, including harrowing tales of emotional, spiritual, psychological, physical and sexual abuse. 

The Church responded with fulsome apologies. 

In 1991, the Oblates — who actually ran most of the schools — issued a comprehensive, four-page apology before a gathering of some 20,000 Indigenous Canadians on pilgrimage at Lac Ste. Anne. (Most Indigenous Canadians are Christian.)

The Oblate apology did not mince words:

“We apologize for the part we played in the cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious imperialism that was part of the mentality with which the peoples of Europe first met the aboriginal peoples and which consistently has lurked behind the way the Native peoples of Canada have been treated by civil governments and by the churches. We were, naively, part of this mentality and were, in fact, often a key player in its implementation.

“In sympathy with recent criticisms of Native Residential Schools, we wish to apologize for the part we played in the setting up and the maintaining of those schools. We apologize for the existence of the schools themselves, recognizing that the biggest abuse was not what happened in the schools, but that the schools themselves happened, that the primal bond inherent within families was violated as a matter of policy, that children were usurped from their natural communities.”

Since the early 1990s, there have been repeated apologies in the same vein from all levels of the Church in Canada, many of them part of the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” (TRC) set up by the federal government. The TRC reported in 2015.

In 2008, then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a formal apology in the House of Commons on behalf of the government of Canada. The other national churches involved — Anglican, Presbyterian and United Church of Canada — had made their national apologies earlier. In 2009, a delegation of Indigenous leaders met with Pope Benedict XVI in Rome, at which time the Holy Father apologized for what so many Indigenous children and families had suffered. 

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