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The Wrong Men

Michael W. Higgins is Distinguished Professor of Catholic Thought, Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, past president of two Canadian Catholic universities, and co-author of Impressively Free: Henri Nouwen as Model for a Renewed Priesthood.

Source: The Wrong Men

The 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which was established with the express purpose of redressing “the legacy of residential schools,” included ninety-four recommendations and calls to action. One of those, No. 58, reads as follows:

We call upon the Pope to issue an apology to Survivors, their families, and communities for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children in Catholic-run residential schools. We call for that apology to be similar to the 2010 apology issued to Irish victims of abuse and occur within one year of the issuing of this Report and to be delivered by the Pope in Canada.

In a 2017 visit to the Vatican, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cited this recommendation in requesting that Francis come to Canada to deliver such an apology. A year later, the pope wrote and declined. Trudeau expressed sadness over the pope’s decision and declared, not for the last time, his personal dismay as a Catholic that the request was not to be honored. Relations between the Canadian government and the Catholic Church have been cool since then. But they have grown appreciably worse after the discoveries of unmarked graves [1] on the sites of former Indian residential schools in Kamloops, British Columbia, and Cowessess, Saskatchewan, in May and June. And there has plainly been an increase in anger across the nation: several Catholic churches have been torched, statues have been toppled, cathedral steps and doors have been splattered with red paint and otherwise defaced. Within the Catholic community, petitions calling for ecclesiastical accountability have circulated widely.

No manner of spin can make the Catholic Church in Canada look good right now. But the Catholic Church in Canada has only itself to blame.

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