POPE'S APOLOGIES HELPED ADVANCE RECONCILIATION

Historic visit continued decades-old efforts to mend relations in Canada

By flying to Canada to apologize to Indigenous Peoples, less than a year after they asked him to do so, Pope Francis revealed how much he cares about what his church imposed on them.

The response of Canadians, Indigenous and otherwise, ranged all over the map after the Pope asked forgiveness for “evil perpetrated by not a few Catholics who contributed to the policies of cultural assimilation.” Many expressed gratitude, while others criticized him for falling short.

Where do Canada and Catholicism go from here in regard to First Nations, Inuit and Métis people?

In some ways, it's surprising the physically ailing 85-year-old pontiff flew to Canada for five days of events, given he's responsible for 1.4 billion Catholics.

The entire population of Canada adds up to less than 1/40th of his church's faithful.

One-third of Canada's 35 million citizens count themselves Roman Catholics, as is the case with roughly one-third of the country's 1.6 million Indigenous people.

Still, at three different events in Canada, he chose to put a global spotlight on the 125 federally funded residential schools attended by roughly 150,000 First Nations people.

Sixty per cent of the schools were operated by Catholic orders, particularly the Oblates.

It's not the first time this pontiff has apologized to the Indigenous Peoples. The Jesuit from Argentina, the first pope from outside Europe, has also “humbly begged forgiveness” in South America for the sins and crimes committed by the Catholic Church against Indigenous Peoples during the so-called conquest of the Americas.

In Canada, many residential school survivors and others, Indigenous and non-indigenous, expressed respect to the Pope for bringing his apology to North America. Countless people appeared enamoured in the presence of a man widely considered humble, who holds more “liberal” and “left-wing” views than virtually any pope of past millennia.

Another cohort of Canadians was decidedly unimpressed, though, particularly journalists.

The media's narrative of suspicion plays to a significant audience. The Catholic Church in Canada, despite being the largest religious group in the country and made up almost equally of those born here and outside the country, is somewhat of a hard sell here.

Even though a 2015 Angus Reid Institute survey found two of three Canadians admire Pope Francis, the same pollster discovered this year that 24 per cent of Canadians believe Roman Catholicism has been damaging to the nation, while 21 per cent think it's been beneficial. Most of the rest think it's had no real impact. Islam does a bit worse than Catholicism. But Canadians' positive assessments of Protestantism, Judaism, Sikhism, Buddhism and atheism outweigh negative ones.

There is no doubt the Roman Catholic Church has been a laggard in apologizing, especially compared to the way United Church and Anglican leaders publicly lamented their churches' role in the schools more than 30 years ago.

The Oblates had apologized in 1991, but higher Catholic authorities held back, seemingly for legal reasons.

Last year, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was the highest-profile person pressing for the Pope to fly to Canada.

Although some suggest Trudeau was diverting the blame from Ottawa, which founded and (under-)funded the schools in 1881 before most were shut down by the 1970s, the prime minister has regularly expanded on former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper's apology of 2008.

The two biggest media talking points to come out of the Pope's apologies revolved around the terms “doctrine of discovery” and “genocide.”

Activists wanted Pope Francis to rescind the doctrine of discovery, which the Vatican, with Spanish and Portuguese monarchies, in 1493 produced to claim a right to the land explorers “discovered.”

Legal scholars, however, say the doctrine has been ignored for centuries and did not apply to the colonization of Canada, since the British king in 1763 issued the royal proclamation, which confirms the existence of Aboriginal title. The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops is going to release a statement on the convoluted issue.

Francis also acknowledged to reporters on the plane back to Rome that he believed what happened to Canada's Indigenous Peoples was “genocide.” By using the technical term the UN also applies to the extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust, the Pope was going further than Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which refers to the collective trauma of the schools as “cultural genocide.”

And what of the spark that ignited the Pope's visit — the media explosion in the spring of 2021 after it was announced potentially hundreds of unmarked graves had been found at the site of the former Kamloops residential school and others?

When the New York Times repeatedly reported that “mass graves” had been discovered, the story went globally viral. But, by the time the Pope arrived, things were more complicated.

A few journalists, like the National Post's Terry Glavin, a veteran Indigenous affairs writer who believes the residential schools amounted to cultural genocide, went to careful lengths to explain how no actual remains of students have been exhumed. Media editors began requiring reporters to change their references to “suspected” graves.

It may be the exact number of students' graves in existence is not the crucial point for most Canadians, Indigenous and otherwise. An earlier Angus Reid poll had found seven in 10 Canadians believe a “cultural genocide” took place in the residential schools and that Canada has a moral obligation to improve life on reserves.

A common view of the Pope's apologies was expressed by some ordinary Indigenous people. They talked about the need to get beyond symbolic acts and an emphasis on the meaning of thorny concepts. They suggested more productive energy go into the nuts and bolts of reconciliation.

That means working together to continue to tackle poverty and suicides among Indigenous Peoples, increase employment levels, get more young people into higher education and go further with billion-dollar business partnerships, whether in forestry, natural gas or Indigenous-led urban real estate developments.

Even though the Truth and Reconciliation Report came out in 2015, many Indigenous and other Canadians have been working on the process for four decades and longer. The Pope's historic in-canada apology, while viewed by some as highly imperfect, made continued efforts to mend relations seem even more dynamic.

With goodwill, there seems little to stop it continuing for generations to come.

In Canada, many residential-school survivors and others, Indigenous and non-indigenous, expressed respect to the Pope for bringing his apology to North America. Countless people appeared enamoured in the presence of a man widely considered humble, who holds more `liberal' and `left-wing' views than virtually any pope of past millennia. Douglas Todd