For decades, indigenous leaders and what are always called residential school “survivors” — the latter being all students who attended Indian Residential Schools, including those who reported experiences that were positive, even positively life enhancing — have asked the Pope to apologize for the alleged harms that took place in these church-run schools..On Friday, April 1, they got one at the Vatican in Rome..Part of this apology read:.“I … feel shame and I’m saying it now ... in the lack of respect shown for your identity and culture.”.But this was not enough, just as acknowledgement or reparation seems never enough for indigenous activists and their enablers, so a virtue signaling papal trip to Canada was the next demand..In his regular Sunday Angelus audience and ceremony on July 17, a week before his planned arrival in Canada to deliver yet another apology, the Pope opined that:.“Next Sunday, God willing, I will leave for Canada; therefore I would now like to address all the inhabitants of that country. Dear brothers and sisters of Canada, as you know, I will come among you especially in the name of Jesus to meet and embrace the indigenous peoples. Unfortunately, in Canada, many Christians, including some members of religious institutes, have contributed to the policies of cultural assimilation that, in the past, have severely harmed native communities in various ways. For this reason, I recently received some groups in the Vatican [in late May and early April], representatives of indigenous peoples, to whom I expressed my sorrow and solidarity for the harm they have suffered. And now I am about to embark on a penitential pilgrimage, which I hope, with God's grace, will contribute to the journey of healing and reconciliation already undertaken.”.Taken together, these apologies, like those of the other churches involved in the education of some 150,000 indigenous children, represent a repudiation of the core missionary role of these Christian religious denominations, and the very basis for the Roman Catholic involvement with the Indian Residential Schools..To damn cultural assimilation is to damn the teaching of reading, writing, and arithmetic, the internalization of scientific understanding and knowledge, the learning about other peoples, places, and history — in short, assimilating the best of Western civilization — and, most of all, understanding the content of the gospels..Is the Pope going to state, albeit implicitly, that a multiplicity of pre-contact polytheistic indigenous spiritual systems are morally and supernaturally equivalent to his church’s fundamental beliefs: that Jesus is the Son of God and equal to God; that He was crucified to pay the penalty for all human sins; that He rose from the dead; that all humans are saved by the grace of God; and that salvation and the inheritance of the Kingdom of God can be achieved only by a deep belief in these core principles and the renunciation of any contrary anti-Christian ones?.Is the ancient battle against moral and ideological indifference — the core of our current postmodern fad — the Pope’s priests, brothers, and nuns were fighting against during the Indian Residential School era what he is going to apologize for on his “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada? If so, his “in the name of Jesus” and “with God’s grace,” should be seen for the hypocrisy it represents..Perhaps, it would be far better for this moral agnostic, masquerading as the heir to Saint Peter, to just stay home..Hymie Rubenstein is editor of The REAL Indian Residential Schools newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology, The University of Manitoba
