Parliament and the pope at odds over Indigenous apology
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Students at the Fort Albany Residential School. In many of the residential schools, children were harmed or tortured in an attempt to separate them from their Indigenous identity.
OTTAWA-Canada's Roman Catholic bishops recently announced that Pope Francis would not apologize in the foreseeable future for the boarding schools designed to force approximately 150,000 Indigenous children to obliterate their cultures and languages. Over 150 years, about 70 percent of children went to schools operated by the Catholic church.
Given this news, the Canadian House of Commons may soon, in a rare move, consider a motion to request that the bishops return to Rome pressing for a papal apology.
Thousands died in the schools between 1880 and 1996, and many were victims of physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Some priests and nuns at the Catholic schools were involved in the most depraved abuses, including at an Ontario school where students were shocked on a homemade electric chair.
"This wasn't the work of a few bad apples," said Charlie Angus, a practicing Catholic and New Democratic Party member of Parliament who introduced the motion, which is supported by the government and likely to pass. "The church's role was enormous."
"I've seen very little pushback to my motion from Catholics," Mr. Angus added. "People just don't understand how after all the information that's come out why the church isn't moving on this."
The federal government apologized for Canada's role in 2008, and has provided billions in financial compensation for survivors. Furthermore, a papal visit and personal apology was one of the 94 recommendations stemming from the final report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools in 2015.
"The Holy Father is aware of the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which
he takes seriously," Bishop Lionel Gendron, president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, wrote in an open letter to the Indigenous Peoples of Canada.
But despite the pleas of survivors and a formal request by the prime minister, no apology will be forthcoming in the near future.
Papal apologies were unheard of prior to John Paul II, who felt a deep conviction to address past wrongs and issued his first Pia Culpa in 1992. He eventually issued more than 100 of them over the next two decades to Jews, women, victims of the Inquisitions and many others he felt the Church had wronged.
His successor, Pope Benedict issued a notable apology to victims of sexual abuse by Irish Catholic priests in 2010. Pope Francis has apologized to gays and lesbians, to Rwandan officials regarding the Church's role in the Rwandan genocide, and to Chilean survivors of sexual abuse
Some speculate that part of the reason the pope will not visit Canada to apologize is because all of the costs of doing so-a 2002 visit to Canada by Pope John Paul II left the Canadian bishops' conferences 36 million CAD in debt, which was a strain for the country's dioceses.
Others speculate that because the pope tends to decentralize authority to the bishop's conferences around the world, that the Canadian bishops have not supported this apology. They have adopted the position that there have already been papal apologies for residential schools, citing a 2009 private meeting between Pope Benedict and Indigenous leaders, where the pope expressed sorrow about the schools. However most have not considered "sorrow" a formal apology. And this was before so many more atrocities were exposed through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Canada has no constitutional separation between church and state so it is unusual for Parliament to make requests of any church. However, Charlie Angus, the lawmaker who introduced the motion, said that because the church ran the schools on behalf of the government using government money, the measure does not inappropriately cross any lines between politics and religion.
