RUBENSTEIN: A not-so-sacred covenant

On June 21, the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, legally known as the Kamloops Indian Band, finally released the full text of a sacred covenant that was signed on March 31, Easter Sunday, with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver and the Diocese of Kamloops.The original April 1 press release claimed “The Covenant … reflects our mutual acknowledgment of past wrongs, particularly the Catholic Church's role in the Residential School System, and a shared commitment to truth, reconciliation, and the future.”According to the covenant, these “past wrongs” included chronic “spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of Indigenous children in Catholic-run residential schools,” most of it them uncorroborated, distorted, or exaggerated, as detailed here, here, here, here, and here. The covenant also included recognition that:“In May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation reported that preliminary findings from a ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the grounds at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School revealed ‘approximately 200’ anomalies, some of which might be unmarked graves of former students.”This statement is false: the May 27, 2021, Kamloops Band press release referred to “the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School,” not “anomalies” — soil disturbances of unknown contents — a window into the many factual errors in the covenant.A message from Pope Francis shared during the ceremony accompanying the covenant’s ceremonial signing on the Kamloops reserve said:“The Pope extended his greetings and support for the Covenant, viewing it as a step towards fulfilling the call for the Church and Indigenous Peoples of Canada to walk together, pray together, and work together" towards reconciliation for these “past wrongs.”What the press release failed to mention is that the Catholic Church, an institution still loosely anchored in Old Testament beliefs, has nearly always restricted such holy compacts to mutual agreements between a Judeo-Christian God and His believers. Covenants are mentioned over 270 times in the Bible, but none are listed as contracts between groups of people.According to the National Catholic Education Commission:"… covenants are “Initiated by God; it is the agreement that creates and sustains a sacred relationship between God and God's people. The great covenants are God's with the people of Israel at Sinai and the New Covenant established by Jesus through his death and resurrection.”More particularly, unlike its holy sacraments like baptism and Holy Communion (also called Eucharist,) Catholicism restricts “sacred covenants,” indeed covenants in general, to five transactional agreements, only one of which involves New Testament Christianity, between God and His followers.The Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which recommended ways for the clergy to better connect to the laity in an increasingly secularized world, may have led to arbitrary expansion of the meaning and significance of sacred covenants. As an agreement between Church bodies and Indigenous people, many of whom are neither faithful Catholics nor practicing Christians, the holy covenant can also be seen as an attempt to fulfill the Second Vatican Council’s decree on ecumenism.Still, most Catholic beliefs about sacredness have remained intact. For example, although all Sundays are considered Catholic “holy days of obligation,” neither Easter Sunday nor Good Friday are specifically regarded as sacred ones.Monotheistic Catholic beliefs need to be contrasted with the animistic indigenous ones that have always co-existed alongside them. Indigenous revivalism is now resurrecting the broader notion of traditional Aboriginal sacredness that reveres all of nature. More recently, indigenous holiness includes whatever leaders or “knowledge keepers” spontaneously decide to call “sacred.” Kimberly Murray, Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools, has called her efforts “sacred work,” suggesting the term is so elastic that it can be used to describe any activity influential indigenous people wish to assign to it, including any time and at any place a sacred fire is lit.Similarly, most indigenous leaders now routinely call the treaties signed by their ancestors with the British and Canadian governments “sacred agreements,” a term never used when they were enacted.All of this suggests the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc insisted that this new covenant be termed a sacred one, a position endorsed by the other parties, including the Holy See, even though it has all the features of a non-transactional, non-binding Memorandum of Understanding.This acceptance explains why Archbishop J. Michael Miller, head of the Vancouver Catholic Archdiocese, beggared logic by arguing that “the new covenant is more than a simple written agreement, and represents a sacred, spiritual commitment.” In saying so, he was simply adopting an indigenous-only understanding of the terms “spiritual” and “sacred,” a position many traditional clerical and lay Catholics might term blasphemous.Compounding this New World Order direction the Catholic Church has taken under the reign of Pope Francis is its chronic unwillingness to embrace a truthful account of its role in the Indian Residential School project, in general, and the Kamloops “burial” findings, in particular, its traditional Catholic theology.Rooted in recrimination from indigenous people, repentance now marks the Church’s involvement with Aboriginals, especially in regard to its 113-year association, 1883-1996, with Canada’s government-funded Indian Residential Schools. With that comes verbal self-flagellation.To be sure, there is a deep historical basis for such repentance. Founded on the Old Testament Jewish notion of showing remorse for and turning away from sinful behaviour, repentance is a key stage in Catholic salvation. In the New Testament, John the Baptist called for repentance during his sermons, as did Jesus when he proclaimed the Gospel for Salvation. A corollary of this assertion is that the Church cannot fight back, partly fearing that this would label it as embracing Indian Residential School denialism.Though ostensibly linked to the interaction of its clergy with indigenous schoolchildren, the Church’s near-psychotic obsession with repentance may also be tied to the disproportionate number of Aboriginal people suffering from all manner of adversities and pathologies, many of them seen by secular activists as the legacy of Indian Residential School attendance. This unwarranted assumption has made these adversities and pathologies easy to attribute Church malfeasance, a good example of undeserved scapegoating if there ever was one, but a sure trigger for a constant stream of repentance statements over the decades, every one more extreme than the other.These remorse statements are also rooted in “liberation theology,” a neo-Marxist spiritual notion connected with the Church power hierarchy. Pope Francis, a Latin American liberation theologian, believes the world is divided between oppressors and oppressed, a simplistic woke binary distinction between evil Europeans and sacred indigenous people, in this case between murderous white priests and nuns and hapless but noble red-skinned indigenous children.This reductionist outlook may be exacerbated by the soft bigotry of low indigenous expectations: around the world, indigenous people have long been seen as “noble savages” uncorrupted by Western civilization, a 16th-century trope today’s leftist activists habitually embrace as well without employing the “savage” label. Such activists are indifferent to the way this can infantilize Aboriginals as intellectually and emotionally incapable of understanding that their current downtrodden status is not a product of the experience of their ancestors in the boarding schools. Instead, it reflects the overarching experience of colonial subjugation and loss of traditional livelihood strategies the residential schools were meant to overcome.As useful as some of these observations may be, they should not be employed to obscure that the Church is not just in repentance mode; it is also fully in obstruction of truth mode.Why would the Church discredit the generations of good works by so many of its very own devoted priests and nuns, along with the current efforts of skilled researchers who are using historical documents, including provincial death certificates and other archival records, to ascertain the truth about alleged unmarked graves containing missing students at Kamloops and elsewhere?What this obstruction and vilification means is that the Catholic Church is standing squarely against the communication of truth about the residential schools. It also means Archbishop Miller has betrayed his motto – Veritati Servire (To Serve the Truth) — by gladly signing this profane sacred covenant.Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report. A retired professor of anthropology and senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, he was a board member of, and taught for many years at St. Paul’s College, University of Manitoba, the only Roman Catholic higher education institution in Manitoba.

RUBENSTEIN: A not-so-sacred covenant

Related Stories