A Thought for National Day for Truth and Reconciliation

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Each year, a number of my students studying to be teachers wonder about how best to deal with the issue of Residential schools and the Church’s involvement with them. Let me say two things here. First, don’t hide it. Bring it out in the open. This is precisely what is so unique about the Jewish people and the Hebrew Scriptures. When you read the Old Testament, which is the history of the Jewish people, the sins of the patriarchs and kings are completely out in the open. There is no attempt to hide such rotten behaviour on the part of Israel’s patriarchs and leaders, from the sins of Abraham, the lying of Rebecca, the indifference of Esau who sells his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of stew, the sons of Jacob who out of jealousy threw Joseph down a well and lied to their father about it, the sin of David who committed adultery and murdered in order to cover it up, the great king Solomon who ended up with 700 wives and 300 concubines, the book of Judges and the infidelity of Israel, to the murder of the prophet Zechariah and Uriah, etc. The bible is not about glorifying Israel, but about glorifying the steadfast love (hesed) and fidelity of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And if you study the history of the Catholic Church, you’ll see enough sin and stupidity to send chills up and down your spine. 

Some people, however, like to hide all that and present a very sanitized and harmonious history that is simply not true to the facts. We are a sinful people; every day we pray: “…forgive us of our sins and we forgive those who sinned against us”. So, it is important not to hide these sins, unless of course we are under the mistaken impression that Catholicism is about us, the Church, and not Christ. We cooperated with the Canadian government in the oppression of the Indigenous peoples of Canada. We don’t make excuses for that. The Catholic faith is not at all about us; much less is it about the clergy or the hierarchy. It’s all about Christ. The Church is his body, and he knew right from the beginning that the twelve would betray him. He said to Peter: “…this very night before the cock crows, you will deny me three times”. He knew Judas would betray him, but chose him as one of the twelve nonetheless. When we gloss over the sins of the Church, we set our students up for disillusionment in the future, because eventually they will discover the humanness of the Church. Pope Francis warned not to put clergy on pedestals, but we continue to do so all the same.  

The next point I’d like to make is that it is certainly true and tragic that the Canadian government decided to remove indigenous children from their homes and send them to the Residential schools, and it is true that certain Catholic religious orders, like the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, cooperated with the Canadian government in this unjust usurpation of parental rights, but it is important to realize that doing so was a violation of the Church’s very own principles (the principle of subsidiarity), and although hindsight is 20/20, the religious orders should have known better. In fact, the Church as a whole should have known better, for she knows that it is parents, not the Federal government, who are the primary educators of their children. And so Catholics today need to be very careful about jumping on the government bandwagon and cooperating with government initiatives that are contrary to the express teachings of the Church, especially on the basis of her teaching on human dignity, the rights of immigrants, and so on. The Church has a fundamental obligation to Christ, not to a government bureaucracy whose authority is subordinate to the divine law. That is why it is so important for Catholic parents and Catholic educators to know the faith, to study it, study its principles, and know well the Church’s understanding of the human person. Governments clash with one another because they have a radically different understanding of the human person, and this is true within democracies, like Canada. In a nation like ours, although certain parties embrace the principle of democratic rule, some parties do tend towards a more totalitarian view of the relationship between the individual and the state as a whole, and so we need to watch for that. It is also true that some parties tend towards a more extreme libertarian view of the human person, which is also problematic in many ways.