Pope's apology and a crime that Canadian government cannot escape

By Elham Abedini

On the very same days when the pictures of the murder of George Floyd, an African-American, by the US police hit the headlines and the citizens of many Western states, including the US, Canada and the UK, were protesting the systematic racism, just another news report shocked the world; the discovery of about a thousand mass graves in a place where special schools for the indigenous had been set up for years.

The activities of residential schools for Canadian aboriginal children in the 19th century until 1996, that is, less than 30 years ago, which aimed at what was called "cultural assimilation" and what actually was elimination of the language and customs of the aboriginals, was disgraceful and racist enough, but the fact that about three to six thousand children died in those schools turned the matter into a full-scale disaster. On the other hand, it was found that the Canadian government and the Catholic Church had a direct and strong role in setting up and running the schools.

Pope Francis, the leader of the world’s Catholics, who has traveled to Canada to apologize to the country’s aboriginals, stated in his speech in the city of Masquasis, “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil that so many Christians have committed against indigenous people.”

The Catholic Church was in charge of running more than 60 to 70 percent of the 139 residential schools, but for years, it refused to apologize despite pressure from the public and even the federal Canadian government. In those schools, more than 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly separated from their parents, and many of them were subjected to physical, mental, and sexual violence. The children in such schools were not allowed to speak their own language and had no right to acknowledge their native culture. In many independent research reports about these schools, their mechanism has been described as "cultural genocide." For example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada concluded in its 2015 report that what happened in Canada's aboriginal boarding schools was "cultural genocide.”

The Catholic Church has been involved in at least three scandals and serious crises in recent years. In the 1990s, the publication of revealing reports about the sexual abuse of children by church priests was the beginning of disclosing more cases and is still ongoing. So far, at least a thousand priests have been officially defrocked due to child abuse and sexual scandals. In 2013, the Vatican announced that the cases of child abuse by priests of the Catholic Church had annually reached about 600. In this matter, Pope Francis finally had to apologize to the victims while condemning the issue. In addition, criminal lawsuits against the moral scandals inflicted on the Catholic Church hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation and litigation.

The third scandal that the Catholic Church faced was the involvement of some church officials, including priests and cardinals, in financial corruption. Disclosure of cases of money laundering, use of tax havens, and receiving bribes and expensive gifts eventually caused Pope Francis to issue a decree to make it mandatory for the Vatican authorities to provide full financial disclosures. Also, according to the decree, no individual can accept personal gifts worth more than 40 euros.

A particularly important issue in the Pope's apology is the Catholic Church's recognition of "organized guilt." This means that for about a hundred years, in an organized, deliberate manner and with the knowledge of what is happening in residential schools, cultural genocide, physical, mental and sexual abuse of children, as well as the death of these natives due to disease and lack of treatment facilities, frostbite, suicide, fire, malnutrition, exhausting and forced labor and even physical harassment had occurred. On the other hand, these schools secretly buried the indigenous students in the same school place by digging mass graves, and in many cases even the families were not informed about the fate of their children.

Of course, the role of the Catholic Church in establishing and running such residential schools and cultural genocide against natives is not confined to Canada. According to reports by indigenous communities, the church has played a prominent role in running such schools in America.

The remarkable point about the Pope's apology for the church's responsibility in the incident is the reaction of many media and indigenous leaders who, despite talking about the Pope's apology and its reflection, stressed that the apology would in no way suffice. It shows how grave the disaster was and that its consequences entail emotional woes for the survivors as well as the negative impact of these schools in the destruction of indigenous culture.

Elham Abedini is a researcher in International Relations.

(This article was originally written in Persian and translated to English by Press TV staff. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

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