The Confiteor is the prayer that the priest recites each time he prepares to go up to the altar to say mass. Beating his chest, he confesses to God and asks forgiveness for his faults. This shows the place that contrition holds in the Catholic religion.
It is therefore not surprising that repentance occupies an important place in a society like Quebec. It even happens to be combined with a virulent anticlericalism, the result of which can be explosive.
The Pope’s trip to Quebec, which will begin on Sunday, promises to be a “penitential pilgrimage”. The expression used by the Vatican is not trivial. Since the Middle Ages, the peregrinatio penitential is a particular category of pilgrimages which is not to be confused with the simple peregrinatio religiosa.
One thing is the approach of the pope with regard to believers, another thing is the secular opinion that everyone will be able to form on this trip. This comes in fact barely a year after the “discovery” by georadar of an alleged secret cemetery near the former Oblate boarding school on the Kamloops reserve in British Columbia.
The pope’s haste to go to Canada is all the more surprising since, 14 months after this “discovery”, no material proof of the presence in this place of the remains of some 200 Aboriginal children has been produced. In the opinion of even the experts, ground-penetrating radar surveys only detect irregularities in the ground, not bodies. However, against all logic, not a single one has yet been exhumed, and no one seems able to say when the judicial authorities will take their responsibilities.
Paradoxically, we did not wait for the slightest proof to lower the flags for five months and invite the pope to come and do penance. As if the main thing was not so much to shed light on what really happened as to participate in a form of generalized repentance that has been sweeping the West for a few years.
Can a serious and rational approach do without evidence? It should also make it possible, by distancing oneself from the past, to weigh the pros and cons of the fate that our societies have reserved for these young Aboriginal people. We would obviously denounce the cultural assimilation of which these boarding schools were the instrument. We would mention the difficult material conditions reserved for these children far from their parents. We would obviously castigate the attested presence of sexual abusers.
But why should we overlook the exemplary dedication of the vast majority of religious who have devoted their lives to these missions? Is it sacrilege to recall that, despite their wrongs, it was essentially religious people who taught the indigenous peoples to read and write and who, even more, gave a written form to their languages? Languages that were taught in these boarding schools, if we are to believe the historian Henri Goulet (History of Catholic Indian Residential Schools in QuebecPUL).
Is it too much to ask that, at the time of the balance sheets, we summon historians to take stock of things and no longer contrite shamans and politicians? Unfortunately, what happens to the West is happening to the Church. Since the year 2000, she seems engaged in a vast enterprise of repentance which no longer has much to do with the traditional repentance of believers. His mission was not to make an entire people feel guilty for the mistakes of their ancestors.
This is what historian Henry Laurens calls “penitential history”. “Symbolic trials for older times are on the rise,” he writes. The damnatio memoriae generalizes. To refuse it would be an additional suffering for those who claim to be the heirs of the victims of a sometimes very ancient time. On these times are projected the most recent legal concepts. » (The imposed pastFayard)
There are, however, limits to making entire generations grow up as if there were not the slightest reason for pride in a Christian civilization which, after having admittedly practiced slavery, is all the same the only one to have it. abolished. Moreover, these slayers of the West are not close to a contradiction, since all they have in their mouths is human rights… a Western invention if there ever was one!
We hope that the pope’s visit will not be an opportunity to take a new step in this penitential delirium. Common sense requires in particular that it be clearly emphasized that what some have believed should be qualified as “cultural genocide” has absolutely nothing to do with genocide. In short, let’s not turn hyperbole into a lie.
Our era seems to be in the process of abolishing the notion of prescription, which is dear to Roman law. Everything is judged by the yardstick of the present. This one being considered by the new progressive thought as the unequaled summit of the history of humanity. As if these great masses of repentance were basically only a way of ostentatiously displaying our moral superiority over all those who preceded us. We would almost forget that humility is also a Christian virtue…