Then whydja do it?
The pope has said sorry about those residential schools.
Pope Francis issued a historic apology Monday for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s “catastrophic” policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations in ways still being felt today.
“I am sorry,” Francis said, to applause from school survivors and Indigenous community members gathered at a former residential school south of Edmonton, Alberta, the first event of Francis’ weeklong “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada.
The morning after he arrived in the country, Francis traveled to the lands of four Cree nations to pray at a cemetery. Four chiefs then escorted the pontiff in his wheelchair to powwow ceremonial grounds where he delivered the long-sought apology and was given a feathered headdress.
All very nice, no doubt, but what I want to know is, how does he explain this to himself? And then to Catholics in general? And then to the rest of us?
The church is the church. It tells us what to do, not the other way around. It’s supposed to be holy, and good, and right about everything. It’s not supposed to be blundering around making horrible mistakes like the rest of us.
So how did it get this so hideously wrong? Why did its people treat those children so cruelly? And while we’re on the subject how did it get the Magdalen laundries so wrong? And the Irish industrial schools and mother and baby homes? Why were nuns and priests so notoriously cruel to children and women and poor people? Why did the church protect rapey child-abusing priests decade after decade? And why, in light of all that, is Francis pope? Why does he stick with the evil institution? What does he even mean by apologizing?
None of it makes any kind of sense.
I remember, maybe 20-30 years ago, when the investigations into Catholic church abuses, i.e., rapey priests against both boys and girls in the USA, who were simply shuffled to new places, to rape more kids, caused the first major conference of US Catholic officials, cardinals or bishops and whatnot, to consider what to do about this serious problem.
They fell on their craven, conniving, wicked faces in the most outrageous hypocritical way at this very first hurdle. The crux of the problem was the conspiracy and the cover-up. They deliberately lied to everyone. They protected the criminals instead of the victims. They enabled the rapists to harm many-fold more children than would have happened if they had treated the criminals like the criminals they are/were.
The conference wrangled for one or two weeks, and the ONLY resolution they passed was a declaration of “no tolerance” within the church for pedophile priests. Really?
The very first commitment they should have made was to fire any higher-up who sanctioned the shuffling about of the rapists. That’s where the enormity of the problem lies. Heads should have rolled. That, and only that, would have been a good faith start toward atonement for the decades (and centuries) of rape and enslavement perpetrated by the church on women and children. The “conference” was a complete whitewash, and refusal to accept responsibility for their own nefarious deeds.
The second principle should have been to establish procedures and lines of communication to turn over both perpetrators and conspiracies to the civil arm of the law. They didn’t do that either.
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conspiracists, not “conspiracies.” Stupid auto correct!
Maddog, exactly. It is infuriating that the RCC thinks the issue is one of reputation of the church, rather than protecting children. Handling these issues internally is precisely what they should not do.
It is also infuriating that their response has been to blame gay men, to presume publicly that keeping gay men out of the priesthood will solve the problem. This is wrong in so many ways.
I am sorry
I find the amount of deference granted to Franky (often even by avowed atheists) to be somewhere between inexplicable and infuriating. Despite all the pomp and ceremony of the apologetic visit (costing Canadian taxpayers ~$35 million), there has been precious little actual action taken by the church – in fact there is continuing resistance by the church to pay any sort of compensation.
Case in point: Parishioners in a Catholic church in Ottawa that is being sold had requested to have the proceeds directed toward reconciliation and residential school survivors. This seemed like a just and reasonable request, especially in view of the fact that the construction of the church was originally funded by donations from grass-roots parishioners, and also is standing on unceded Algonquin Anishinābeg territory. However, the request was refused by the archdiocese, who apparently had their own plans for the money
[…] a comment by Seanna Watson on Then whydja do […]
It was the hypocrisy, and the hubris of roping the congregation into the coverup, which made me leave the church. I was outraged. I’m still furious that so many people chose to stay, believing the lies instead of the facts.