Week 103.
A preliminary confession. Elder Advice is a creationist. He does not believe that the Pope could have evolved by chance. He was designed and sent here by God to test us. Like James Webb Space Telescope images. And fossils. And facts.
After a week of the Pope, I am pooped.
The relentless, massive and mind-numbing media coverage. The pundits’ parsing of every syllable he utters (deliberately in Spanish so any verbal mis-step can be conveniently blamed on translation). The apparent claim to speak on behalf of all Christendom when he said: “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples”. Elder Advice humbly suggests that attempts to dilute the Catholic Church’s guilt when it comes to offenses against indigenous peoples by slyly including others are inappropriate. Especially when those others begged forgiveness some time ago - the United Church in 1986 and the Anglican Church in 1993.
It would not be all quite so excruciating if Canada did not have a federal government equally devoted to performative activism and deflection. Which, in flagrant breach of basic diplomatic rules, trotted out the Minister of Indigenous Services to whine that the papal groveling was insufficient and that the Catholic Church owed Canada’s native peoples more than mere words. Which is rich coming from a government that can’t even manage to keep its promise to provide those same people with clean drinking water.
Anyway, Elder Advice confesses that it is a relief to have another leader wandering about the countryside with a bottomless sack of sorrys. I am still recovering from Justin’s egregious apology to long-dead but dedicated Italian Fascists who Canada rightly incarcerated during World War II.
Apologies and forgiveness. Despite the fact that Elder Advice has limited experience, having never made an error requiring either … to speak of … his counsel on those subjects is at least as worthy of consideration as the views expressed by the thousands of other Canadians piling on the papacy this week.
Elder Advice? Well, there are three points to be made.
The first is that there must be clarity on what the required apology is for.
An estimated 150,000 First Nations children were taken from their homes starting in 1920, when attendance became compulsory at schools intended isolate them from the influence of their families and culture. Duncan Campbell Scott, Canada’s Deputy Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs from 1913, was the villain responsible for that decision. Residential schools were intended to transform aboriginal Canadians into mainstream Christians, and have been assigned blame for the decline and disappearance of aboriginal languages and cultural practices, as well as physical and sexual abuse of some children who attended. As we all discovered: a man of the cloth is not necessarily a man of God.
That is the misconduct for which the Catholic Church needs to apologize. Conduct for which there is ample, irrefutable evidence.
What it does not need to apologize for is alleged misconduct for which there is no evidence. Elder Advice speaks here of the “news” story of the year 2021 as chosen by editors in newsrooms across the country: the “discovery” of mass graves at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia and elsewhere, and the countrywide furor it triggered.
In May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced both the existence of GPR (ground-penetrating radar) data that indicated soil disturbances on the school grounds and the belief that those disturbances corresponded to unmarked graves of indigenous children who had died while attending the school between 1893 and the 1970s. Canadians were subjected to months of media moral panic. Other indigenous groups announced that they too would be undertaking GPR surveys. Reports of as many as 751 unmarked graves of mainly children at the Marieval Indian Residential School in Sakatchewan were published in North American media. Churches were burned and vandalized. The world was told, by more than one hysterical commentator, that this may be Canada’s “Holocaust moment”. Now, 14 months later, even though:
the GPR expert retained by the First Nation candidly acknowledged that the Kamloops radar survey results did not demonstrate the presence of graves, much less graves of indigenous children;
it is well known that GPR technology is limited and the findings may well be evidence of, for example, old irrigation ditches;
Canada’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation itself identifies only nine children dying at the Marieval Indian Residential School during the 100 years it operated and that the graveyard now identified was a well known cemetery of Catholic settlers and indigenous people;
no physical evidence, of any kind, has been found supporting the “mass” or even “unmarked” graves speculation; and
there have been no site excavations, or apparent plans to conduct them, by either police authorities or indigenous leaders,
those on the overcrowded bandwagon - politicians, pundits and journalists alike - refuse to acknowledge that it is a story; it is not “news”. 1 Although the damage to trust in media and government may yet prove fatal, the only certain death that can be tied to all of this is the death of fact-checking.
The reality of residential schools is tragic enough. We do not need false narratives.
The second point is: what should forgiveness look like?
Elder Advice has always been under the impression that a tenet of the Catholic faith is the requirement to actually atone for sins as well as confessing them. That saying: “sorry” is not enough and that restitution is a necessary precursor to forgiveness. Perhaps Elder Advice, a mere lapsed Anglican after all, is wrong on this issue. Perhaps there is some nuance which an infallible prelate like Francis can rely on to avoid the need to redress the balance. Some “jiggery-popery,” if you will.
In any event, in this case, “restitution” should not be a synonym for “money”. Canada, which legislated, funded and then neglected residential schools, is already paying 2 billion dollars to residential school survivors.
Elder Advice proposes a far better mechanism for making amends.
The Anima Mundi Ethnological Museum is located in the Vatican. Near the food court. Really. It houses thousands of artifacts made by Canada’s indigenous peoples, the majority of it “acquired” and sent to Rome by Catholic missionaries for a 1925 papal exhibition. How appropriate and poignant would it have been for the Pope to repatriate all of it? To hand back to Canada’s indigenous communities the very symbols of the cultures the Church sought to extinguish through its participation in the residential school system. Or, since he arrived here empty-handed, promise to do it promptly?
The third point, while we are on the subject, is that Mel Gibson should be apologizing and begging forgiveness for his 2004 remake of Life of Brian. It wasn’t anywhere near as funny as the original.
For more on the extraordinary media and government failures on this issue, see: https://quillette.com/2022/07/22/how-fake-news-in-the-new-york-times-led-to-a-canadian-social-panic-over-unmarked-graves/? and utm_source=substack&utm_medium=emailhttps://nationalpost.com/opinion/the-year-of-the-graves-how-the-worlds-media-got-it-wrong-on-residential-school-graves
One of your best Tim. Very interesting and lots of good reasons to reread your thoughts. Thanks for writing Elder Advice every week. I look forward to seeing it.
Performative action and deflection are apt words for Mr. T and his crew. You have also rightly pointed out the limitations of ground penetrating radar and the hysteria that has followed its use. Keep up the excellent Elder Advice, Tim.