Pope has one last chance to get it right

A papal apology to Indigenous survivors of residential schools in the right spirit could provide much needed inspiration and guidance to Canadians.

The time for residential schools apologies would appear to be over. Repeated expressions of regret for past wrongs become meaningless, or worse, when related present-day injustices pile up and their long-standing causes go unaddressed.

The Yellowhead Institute’s Eva Jewell and Ian Mosby expressed this conclusion while monitoring Ottawa’s failure to act on the substance of the 94 Calls to Action in the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) report. Their prescription is clear. We must end our “Groundhog Day” cycle of “symbolic gestures and apologies punctuated by colonial violence.”

The Roman Catholic Church is certainly part of the cycle. It operated roughly 60 per cent of Canada’s residential schools — genocidal institutions of child death, illness and abuse that aimed to eliminate Indigenous nations and help Canadians seize Indigenous territories by destroying spiritualities, governance capacities, languages, family ties and community cohesion.

The 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement spared Canadian Catholic organizations from potentially catastrophic class-action damages. The so-called Catholic Entities, created to represent these organizations in the legal process, promised under the agreement to raise $25 million for Indigenous reconciliation programs.

However, they secured only $3.7 million, pleading incapacity — although the Catholic institutions hold at least $4.1 billion in net assets in Canada, and the church spent $28.5 million on a new cathedral in Saskatoon in 2012.

The Vatican and Canadian Catholic leaders have been similarly unimpressive on the 2015 TRC Report’s Call to Action No. 58, which urged the Pope to come to Canada and apologize to residential school survivors. Three years later, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops explained that the Pope “felt he could not personally respond.”

This year, former TRC Commissioner Chief Wilton Littlechild observed that roughly four survivors die each day, which means that as many as 10,000 survivors may have passed away in the seven years since the TRC called for a papal apology visit. What good could possibly come from an apology as glaringly belated as it is painfully forced?

Judgment, of course, belongs to survivors, their families, communities and nations. But given the church’s historic resistance to accountability, there could be good in apologies that convey — in dramatic, memorable form — the Pope’s submission to survivor demands.

Beyond the important symbolism of apologizing on Indigenous lands after having previously claimed impossibility, there is also the matter of the apology’s substance. Just last year, while offering words of regret to the 2021 Indigenous delegation to the Vatican, Pope Francis refused the very notion of church responsibility, blaming “a number of Catholics, particularly those with educational responsibilities,” instead.

As Dr. Suzanne Shoush of the University of Toronto said, this pattern is deeply entrenched. On the one hand, Catholic leaders insist on “doctrinal and sacramental unity”; on the other, they appear to deny the possibility of institutional, collective, or even financial obligation beyond the level of the diocese or parish.

Pope Francis now has a historic and possibly last opportunity to alter this pattern. He could start by declaring that his church is directly responsible for helping to organize and lead the sustained assault on Indigenous nations and Indigeneity that was residential schooling in Canada.

He could also admit forthrightly that the church’s past stance on the TRC’s call for a papal apology visit was wrong. He could announce the impending return of the sacred Indigenous objects held by the Vatican. He could order the release of the archival records long sought by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

He could heed TRC Call to Action No. 49 and directly renounce the Doctrine of Discovery, which, as expressed in the infamous Papal Bull of May 4, 1493, commanded that “the Catholic faith and the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread … and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.”

Perhaps above all, the Pope could demonstrate through these actions that he comes to Indigenous lands committing his church to humble responsiveness and meaningful, equal collaboration with Indigenous peoples.

An apology visit in this spirit could provide much needed inspiration and guidance to Canadians.

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