“Oblivion leads to indifference. The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. The opposite of life is not death, it is indifference. »
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Addressing the audience gathered at Maskwacis Stadium on Monday, near the former Ermineskin, Alta., residential school, Pope Francis spoke important words long awaited by those among the Indigenous people who wished for his visit. . But those words resonate far beyond Christianity and speak to a much, much larger audience than the one gathered before him.
The pope responded to the invitation of the delegation to meet him at the Vatican in May. He comes to visit the Aboriginals in their homes, on their lands. Meanwhile, non-Aboriginals and non-Catholics might be tempted to look elsewhere, since they are not directly affected by this visit.
But it would be a mistake to be indifferent. We are all affected by this visit.
The pope’s visit is a response to recommendation 58 made in the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. When it was released in 2015, the commissioners called for an apology from the head of the Roman Catholic Church, and for it to be presented by the Pope in Canada, within a year of the report’s release.
This response has been slow to catch on, and it’s not just because of the pandemic…
In May 2017, during a visit to the Vatican, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally asked the pope to provide an apology. A request that will be officially refused in March 2018. Pressure continued to be exerted, especially on Catholic representatives in Canada – according to papal protocol, it is the bishops themselves who must invite the pope to the country. However, it was only last September, after having long been reluctant to do so, that the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops finally apologized to the First Nations for the abuses committed in residential schools for Aboriginal people.
During this time, Canadian attitudes towards the suffering inflicted on aboriginal peoples have also come a long way.
Too many of us were indifferent or unaware of what happened in residential schools until the 1970s and 1980s. The Commission has contributed to our collective awakening, and the discovery of the graves of 215 children on the grounds of the Kamloops residential school, in 2021, was met with amazement and outrage.
Indifference must be fought, the pope said in substance. In his apology on Monday, he extended the fault of Catholics directly responsible for abuses to “many members of the Church and religious communities” who have “cooperated, even through indifference, in these projects of cultural destruction and of forced assimilation of the governments of the time”.
The Pope used harsh words that sweep away the ambiguity behind which too many people in this country still take refuge. The encounter between indigenous peoples and European settlers should have been fruitful, he said, but in the majority of cases, “it didn’t happen”. And even if there were examples of devotion and “Christian charity” in certain residential schools, the policies of assimilation in which they were part had “catastrophic” consequences on the Aboriginal peoples.
Words that non-Aboriginal people should hear. If they are not individually responsible for the acts committed by the federal government and the religious communities of the time, they have the duty to assume this dark part of the history of this country.
And now ? The pope is expected from Wednesday in Quebec, where there too, we want to hear him apologize.
And then the dialogue will have to continue. Especially on the words that the pope has not (yet?) pronounced. He did not, for example, call the entire assimilation enterprise of the residential schools a “cultural genocide,” in the words of the commissioners. He mentioned the need for “reparation”, the importance of an “investigation” to continue to shed light on this past, but did not speak of financial compensation. He also did not mention the restitution of indigenous objects or documents kept in the Vatican.
Not everyone walks at the same pace on this path to healing. But like a fog, indifference prevented us from seeing the whole road ahead together. Its lifting will allow us to take the next steps towards reconciliation.