I was interested in hearing the Pope's apology to the aboriginal peoples about Catholic involvement in the residential school system. But after I saw it, I came away underwhelmed. I didn't seem to me that this was a statement by a thoughtful man or someone who really understands the meaning of the term "contrition". I thought my readers might be interested in my reasoning, so that's the subject of this post.
First---for those who might want to hear it but haven't yet---here's his address in full, care of the Aboriginal People's Television Network (APTN).
Next, here's a short excerpt that isolates the specific parts that really got me thinking.
Let's start by thinking about that word "tragedy". I know that it's common for people to use it to denote just about anything bad that happens to anyone, but it isn't what the word originally meant. In my judgement, we diminish our understanding of the world by not using the original meaning. In Shakespeare's time, a tragedy was a story of a great person's rise and fall, specifically with regard to how the very qualities that made him great were exactly what led to his fall. I think the word can also be applied to entire peoples, but I believe that it shouldn't be used to describe what has happened to the First Nations, Metis, and, Innuit children in residential schools. What happened to them wasn't a tragedy---it was a crime perpetrated by the powerful against people with very little control over their own lives.
It might be that the Catholic orders administering the residential schools were "merely" accessories to the actions of the government, but accessories are also criminals because they at least have an opportunity to say "no". Moreover, this wasn't just a "one off". The Catholic church is a repeat offender. The sorts of things that were done to aboriginal children also happened to orphans in Newfoundland (remember Mount Cashell?), "naughty girls" in Ireland (how about the Magdalene Laundries?), and, altar boys in parishes all over North America and the world (ever see the movie Spotlight?).
Where the word "tragedy" might accurately be used, however, would be to describe the Roman Catholic church itself. That's because even though many, many people of good will are members of it, it seems incapable of protecting the children that have been placed under its care. Why is that? I'd suggest that it isn't because of the moral failings of individuals, but rather because of deep flaws that are inherent in the structure of the institution itself and the teachings it holds dear. (That's the sort of thing I believe Shakespeare was getting at in those plays of his we call "tragedies".)
What could those flaws be? Well, one of them could be the way the church apes the old Roman Empire. Most people probably don't know this, but one of the names that the Pope uses is "Pontifex Maximus" (Latin for "greatest priest") and that was a title of an officer from the old Roman Republic. One that---starting with Augustus Caesar---became part of the formal list of titles used by Roman Emperors. The Pope isn't just---or even primarily---a religious leader, he's also the Emperor of an ancient political organization. And, I cannot help but think that a lot of the problems that we see in the church come about when the political need to protect the institution conflict with and overcome the spiritual needs of basic human decency.
And that's how people need to see the apology that he's given to the aboriginal peoples of Canada. What he offered was a diplomatic response to a moral question. That's why dragging children off to the residential schools was described as a "tragedy" instead of being a crime. The way modern people use the word "tragedy" seems to mean anything bad that happens to innocent people. That leaves aside the issue of human guilt. It may be that there is also human culpability, but it could also free from it---like if an meteor came crashing down on a city. And that's what I thought about the Pope's "apology", it really seemed like he was describing something that "just happened" to the aboriginal people's of Canada---not something the his organization was deeply involved with.
In contrast, what we call "crimes" involve human agency. The church freely chose to participate in the residential school system. Church officials decided that they knew better than these children's families and sent their minions out to find the children and drag them out of their community. And once they were there, other officials decided how much to spend per student, how much medical care they would receive, and, where to bury their bodies when they succumbed to their mistreatment. And the last thing that the Pope wants to do is admit punk and plain that the church has committed crimes against children.
A truly honest, spiritual, and, moral response to the delegation would have involved Pope Francis publicly admitting that there is something rotten at the heart of the church and asking the question "What is it about church teaching and ecclesiastic organization that results in our inability to respond genuinely to complaints that we are abusing children?" That is what real contrition looks like. It's hard to do and requires really heavy-duty soul searching. Nowhere in Francis' apology do I hear a hint of this sort of self-analysis or soul-searching. Instead, I heard a diplomat make general comments about something bad having happened. Once again, the Roman Catholic church was just an innocent bystander when someone "in an office" (presumably not even a clerical one) made bad decisions.
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This was a pig of an article to write. It involved a lot of research, learning a new video-editing program, and, deep soul-searching on my part. (I know that what I write here may deeply offend many people.) But I believe it needs to be said, and if I don't write this sort of thing, no one will. That's because the mainstream media is a business, and businesses don't prosper by telling subscribers what they might not want to hear. If you happen to think this sort of thing needs to be written---and you can afford it---why not subscribe? Patreon and Pay Pal make it easy to do.
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People might say that this is asking too much of the church. Nonsense. There are modern examples of societies that have gone through acts of real contrition and soul-searching. Take the example of modern Germany. It actually admitted it's collective guilt and showed what most people consider real contrition towards the people it horribly wronged under the NAZI regime. In an article on the subject from Johns Hopkins Magazine Joanna Neborsky interviewed Lily Gardner Feldman---a scholar at Johns Hopkins who has studied this issue for 40 years.
"Germany's ongoing relationship with Israel is unique, Gardner Feldman says, but one can see similar reconciliatory themes, approaches, and patterns through Germany's relations with its other former enemies. In her book, she argues that the "cornerstone, perhaps the very definition, of German foreign policy after World War II became, progressively, reconciliation." Germany had to reconcile with the countries and people it had attacked, occupied, and slaughtered during a brutal six years of war and destruction. Gardner Feldman examined all German chancellors from Adenauer to Merkel and found a common strain: an imperative to repay a deep moral debt."
How this happened was through deep soul-searching on the part of the German government. That deep reflection resulted in actions that showed the depth of guilt that if felt for the crimes of the German people.
- it paid significant reparations to Israel
- negotiated strong treaties of friendship with both France and Poland
- made teaching the Holocaust a core part of the public education system
- showed through sincere, symbolic gestures that the German leadership really did feel a sense of shame and guilt for the past behaviour of the German nation
The last point bears significant importance. Consider the following images. These are permanent memorials aimed at reminding citizens of the crimes perpetuated by Germans under the NAZI regime.
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| The Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. |
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| The Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism, Berlin. |
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| Memorial to the Sinti and Roma People Persecuted Under National Socialism, Berlin. |
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| "Stolpersteine" or "Stumbling Blocks", that memorialize the last known address of an individual, named Holocaust victim. Over 7,000 exist in Berlin, but they have spread across Europe, where over 60,000 now exist in 21 countries. |
Here's another memorial, but it isn't in Germany, but rather Poland. It commemorates a spontaneous, unscripted act of contrition by a German Chancellor, Willi Brandt.
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| Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons, photo by Szczebrzeszynski. |
Willi Brandt was the Chancellor of Germany. He had escaped to Sweden after the NAZIs took power, and worked as a leftist journalist during war. (Indeed, his original name was Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm---he adopted the other name to help hide from agents of the German secret police.) He had zero personal responsibility for the Holocaust. But as a post-war leader of the country, he felt a genuine sense of responsibility for the horrors done in its name. In 1970 he came to Poland to sign an agreement that renounced permanently any German claims to Polish territory. As part of this he came to lay a wreathe at The Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw. Afterwards he spontaneously dropped to his knees for silent reflection in a gesture that the majority of those present felt reflected genuine emotion.
Here's a photo of the event. It had such an impact that it even has it's own title: "The Warsaw Genuflection".
Will we see something like this act of Contrition from the Catholic church? Will it freely give significant financial restitution to the First Nations, Metis, and, Inuit of Canada? Will it undertake to teach all Catholics of the horrible way that the Church has treated innocent children under it's care? Will it create monuments within the seats of Catholic power showing the depth of contrition towards it's own victims? For example, could Pope Francis order that the painting below be prominently and permanently placed on display in St. Peter's Basilica?
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| How a First Nation's artist understands the crime perpetuated by the Catholic Church. Kent Monkman's The Scream, 2017. |
Will Pope Paul throw away all the pomp and dignity that comes with his office and humbly beg forgiveness from church elders the way Willi Brandt did with the Warsaw Genuflection?
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The next point in the short excerpt of the longer apology I want to focus on has to do with his phrase "ideological colonization". I'd never heard it before and I wondered what Francis was talking about. Luckily, in this day and age it's relatively easy to do a search of the Web to find out what a weird turn of phrase could mean. And what I found was surprising, to say the least.
It turns out that Francis uses "ideological colonization" to describe when a country offers aid to another but puts stipulations on it. Specifically, he's referring to European aid that says to a country "you don't get the help unless you use part of the money to offer birth control and safe therapeutic abortions to women so they don't have to carry unwanted children to term". So, in effect, when a group of people come to the Pope to complain about how their children were horribly abused, he felt compelled to get in yet one more dig against abortion and birth control.
The evidence I found for this comes from a statement that the Vatican on January 10th of 2022 titled ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS TO THE MEMBERS OF THE DIPLOMATIC CORPS ACCREDITED TO THE HOLY SEE.
"The diminished effectiveness of many international organizations is also due to their members entertaining differing visions of the ends they wish to pursue. Not infrequently, the centre of interest has shifted to matters that by their divisive nature do not strictly belong to the aims of the organization. As a result, agendas are increasingly dictated by a mindset that rejects the natural foundations of humanity and the cultural roots that constitute the identity of many peoples. As I have stated on other occasions, I consider this a form of ideological colonization, one that leaves no room for freedom of expression and is now taking the form of the “cancel culture” invading many circles and public institutions. Under the guise of defending diversity, it ends up cancelling all sense of identity, with the risk of silencing positions that defend a respectful and balanced understanding of various sensibilities. A kind of dangerous “one-track thinking” [pensée unique] is taking shape, one constrained to deny history or, worse yet, to rewrite it in terms of present-day categories, whereas any historical situation must be interpreted in the light of a hermeneutics of that particular time, not that of today."
P-5 of ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS et al
This is part of the tragedy that is Roman Catholicism. It is obsessed by trivialities while ignoring the beams of oppression hanging from its empty moral eye sockets. Even if there were a defensible argument to say that abortion is murder and birth control "anti-life", it is tremendously wrong of the pontiff to be thinking about abortion, birth control, and, foreign aid when he is supposed to be apologizing for a terrible crime that the church has committed against children---one that has been repeated over, and over again in other communities too.
It's like any other bully who gets called to task for some offense and is ordered by a higher up to apologize to the victim, but is so obsessed by his petty personal obsessions that he drifts into complaining about something else before he can even finish the so-called apology.
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What's truly galling about this reference to "ideological colonialism" is I cannot think of a worse perpetrator of this than the Catholic church itself. Forcing it's ideas onto other cultures is what the church has been in the business of doing since it stopped hiding in the catacombs and became the official religion of Rome. Just what the Hell is missionary work supposed to be but "ideological colonialization"? Has the Pope never heard of the long history of charity support given as a "quid pro quo" for conversion to Christianity (that's what's known as a "rice Christian")? Has he never heard about the British forcing China to allow missionaries in their country at gunpoint (along with capitalism and opium) after the First and Second Opium Wars? Or the Pueblo Revolt against Roman Catholicism being imposed at gun point in New Mexico?
Pope Francis is exactly spot on to mention "cancel culture" in his marching orders to papal diplomats. Just as "cancel culture" is what people of privilege call it when the "nobodies" call them out for their outrageous behaviour. It's pretty much the same thing when other nations of the world tell him "you don't get to define 'the natural foundations of humanity'".
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This gets back to why I think that the Roman Catholic church is a tragic organization, even though I believe that what happened to the First Nations, Metis, and, Inuit was just a crime. Besides being modeled on the extremely hierarchical Roman Imperial system, there is another fatal and tragic flaw at the root of the Papal system: historical revelation. By this I mean the basic foundation of Christianity as most people understand it.
Years ago I saw short clip on tv where a First Nation's medicine person explained the difference between what he called "revealed religion" and "inspired religion". As he defined the terms, a revealed religion is based on someone's claims about what happened a long time ago. Since people nowadays can only go on what was written down and what other people have told him, they simply have to accept what they are told. In other words, the religion is based on "faith". In contrast, an inspired religion is based on what a person learns about life after looking inside and at the world around her. This means the core is knowledge based on direct personal experience.
Of course it's a lot more complicated than that simple statement would imply. Revealed religions have practices that allow some people to promote experiences too---but they tend to have very harsh penalties for anyone who believes that she has learned things that contradict what the authorities believe to be true. Similarly, inspired religions have respected teachers who give advice---but ideally this should only be taken provisionally until someone has their own direct experiences themselves.
The old world of Imperial Rome and the absolute monarchies was based on the idea of revelation. You believed what you believed mostly on what someone else told you---either directly or from reading an ancient book. If you disagreed strenuously enough, well, ultimately there was torture and execution.
But the modern world doesn't act that way. It is based on inspiration and evidence. If someone comes up with a good argument with solid evidence they try to explain it to people and see if they also think it's a good idea too. That's how our democratic governments work. It's how science works too---that's how we got the vaccines for Covid and it's how the computer you are reading this article with was designed.
A religion based on revelation has to find some way to convince people that what they are saying is true. And since they don't have rational arguments with convincing proof, they have to fall back on what the Pope calls "ideological colonialism", and which I believe the Roman Catholic church has used during it's entire history to spread "the faith". And that's exactly what the problem with the residential school system was all about. The church was absolutely sure that it was right---but had no way to prove it using logical arguments or evidence, so they tried to bludgeon it into the children. And in the process, they did terrible harm to both individuals and entire cultures.
That's the second part of the tragedy that is the Roman Catholic church. It has the allegiance of many, many genuinely good people. But it gets that support by requiring that they believe in a worldview that cannot be justified by anything approaching proper evidence. And, if it cannot get that support, it becomes infuriated by anyone who calls them on their bullshit. That's when the "gloves come off" and that's when the unmarked graves get dug.
There are many parts of the Gospels that have wonderful teachings that the human race would benefit greatly from following. There are also many wonderful members of the church who've devoted their lives to making the world a better place. But there are good teachings in lots of books, and good people everywhere. And the forces that have been harnessed to create and sustain the Catholic institutions are based on are incompatible with an enlightened, decent world.
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Bill, you've nailed it!
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