Althouse: "Despite a personal appeal from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Roman Catholic Church has said that Pope Francis will not apologize..."

March 29, 2018

"Despite a personal appeal from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the Roman Catholic Church has said that Pope Francis will not apologize..."

"... for its role in a Canadian system that forced generations of Indigenous children into boarding schools. The residential school system, as it is commonly known in Canada, was described as a form of 'cultural genocide' by a national Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 that also concluded that many students were physically and emotionally abused.... The schools operated from 1883 until the last one closed in 1998. The commission found that children were severely punished for speaking Indigenous languages or following their cultural practices. It concluded that 3,201 students died while in the schools, often from mistreatment or neglect. About 80,000 former students are still alive."

The NYT reports.

48 comments:

The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...: Well, he's going to Hell.; 3/29/18, 5:45 PM
holdfast said...: The idea behind the Residential Schools was, for its time, actually pretty progressive - to give Native children a shot at integrating into the modern world.

The execution was nothing short of monstrous. Besides the official punishments described above, the Residential School system became a hunting ground for the pervo pedophile priests with which the RC Church seems to be so infested.; 3/29/18, 5:45 PM
Leland said...: "We demand Free Education", except when we don't like the educator.; 3/29/18, 5:45 PM
The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...: In other Pope news...; 3/29/18, 5:45 PM
The Cracker Emcee Refulgent said...: "The idea behind the Residential Schools was, for its time, actually pretty progressive - to give Native children a shot at integrating into the modern world."

Similar to the Country Life movement in early 20th-Century America. Unfortunately, being progressive, the wishes of the benighted heathens being helped were ignored.; 3/29/18, 5:48 PM
tcrosse said...: The Pontiff was unmoved by a personal appeal from Justin Trudeau. The man must have a heart of stone.; 3/29/18, 5:55 PM
Virgil Hilts said...: So the country of Canada basically created this school system for this purpose and operated it for 100 years to achieve these ends (even, gasp, while Trudeau senior was head of the government), and Trudeau is now asking for an apology from the church for not stopping Canada (and presumably Trudeau senior) from doing what it was trying to do? Makes sense to me.; 3/29/18, 5:56 PM
Oso Negro said...: The Pope made us do it, eh?; 3/29/18, 5:58 PM
rcocean said...: Mr Trudeau,speaking an Indian dialect, eating curry, and wearing an Kurta Pyjama, attacked the Catholic Church for its treatment of Indigenous peoples.

When apprised of his mistaken attire, Mr. Trudeau remarked "Once you've seen one Indian, you've seen them all"; 3/29/18, 6:00 PM
holdfast said...: I don't think that the Canadian government at any point actually required all those RC priests who were running the schools to sexually abuse the students. Clearly they failed to stop it, but it wasn't part of the contract.

The RC Church isn't responsible for the existence of the schools - but their personnel and agents behaved monstrously.; 3/29/18, 6:01 PM
holdfast said...: "When apprised of his mistaken attire, Mr. Trudeau remarked "Once you've seen one Indian, you've seen them all""

Dot or feather.; 3/29/18, 6:02 PM
rcocean said...: I'm amazed that the Pope has not apologized upon the urging of a friend of Fidel Castro's.

'Cause nothing says Catholic like Fidel Castro and Communism.; 3/29/18, 6:04 PM
WK said...: If the Pope does apologize Tredeau should refuse to accept it and demand a boycott of the Roman Catholic Church. Or something. I am having a hard time keeping up on apology etiquette.; 3/29/18, 6:11 PM
Michael K said...: The Jesuit member of the Sandinista government of Nicaragua could not be reached for comment.; 3/29/18, 6:12 PM
Rick said...: “We don’t give up,” Chief Bellegarde said. “It would be a great act of healing and a great act of reconciliation if it were to happen. Let’s see if we can alleviate their fears, whatever they are.”

Be serious, this is lawsuit preparation. Reparations don't bring healing or reconciliation, they bring ever more rancorous claims and demonization. Whatever it takes to keep the gravy train rolling.; 3/29/18, 6:15 PM
buwaya said...: Note that exactly this sort of residential school have been common for black children - this used to be much more popular -

Black Boarding Schools

More recently much more of this, or rather a revival of this, has been proposed to take black kids away from their dysfunctional families and "fix" them by completely replacing their environment.

In some ways this has also been the intention of the early day care/head start programs. And every other sort of education intervention to take up kids time and place them in a structured environment away from home. Free breakfast, free lunch, free dinner, "midnight basketball" and etc.; 3/29/18, 6:21 PM
Virgil Hilts said...: Is allowing ongoing systematic rape/sex abuse of large numbers of children just a British Empire thing? I thought Rotherham must be a one-off but similar stuff has gone on in Rochdale, Peterborough, Newcastle, Oxford, and Bristol.
There is an abbey on the south shore of Loch Lomond in Scotland that now rents out rooms ala airbnb. https://lochlomondlodge.co.uk/the-penthouse/
It used to be one of the most prestigious catholic schools in the UK, until the press somehow "discovered" five decades of systematic physical and sexual abuse carried out by a series of sadistic and predatory pedophile monks. Maybe people in the BE just don't give a shit about children. How else can one possibly explain the Canada schools or what's been happening in Rochdale?; 3/29/18, 6:24 PM
Anonymous said...: Canada has a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission"?

Progressives have no sense of history, no sense humility, and no sense of irony.; 3/29/18, 6:24 PM
buwaya said...: 3000 deaths out of a cumulative 250,000 or more kids, from the 1880's, through things like the Spanish Flu of 1918, makes me think that the death rate was normal for such a population no matter what their residential arrangements.; 3/29/18, 6:24 PM
JaimeRoberto said...: Oh Canada.; 3/29/18, 6:32 PM
holdfast said...: @buwaya - Probably true. The mortality rate doesn't seem shocking for those days. But a bit rough to be dying hundreds of miles from loves ones and friends.; 3/29/18, 6:33 PM
YoungHegelian said...: In the past, every Brit who could afford it routinely sent their kids to boarding school. It was just what was done.

Every kid was taken out of his/her home and surrounded by strangers at a young age. If you do it to your own kids, why not help out the indigenes & do it to them, too?

And all you folks who are rattling on about "pedophile priests & monks": do you just not watch your local news? Back when I still watched the local news, not a month in the academic year would pass without some teacher in the greater DC area getting fired/arrested/accused of having sex with his/her student(s). Teacher sex seems to be a re-occurring topic at Insty, & he never seems to run out of new examples.; 3/29/18, 6:42 PM
Owen said...: Looking Unto Jesus

In Red Deer as elsewhere
It was always about God
Who had kindly intention
And an iron hand

From our fathers' camps
We were gathered
Into the hard clean corridors
And square everything

Our hair was shorn
And our skins exchanged
For woollen uniforms
And the phrases of submission

It was our chance to shed
Our peoples' tales like lice
And proudly enter the pool
Of skilled industrial labor

Many of us are buried
Outside little towns
Where the nuns and priests
Fought to bring us Jesus

But lost us to cholera
Tuberculosis
And to the oldest killer
Homesickness; 3/29/18, 6:59 PM
gilbar said...: "If the Pope does apologize Tredeau should refuse to accept it and demand a boycott of the Roman Catholic Church. Or something. I am having a hard time keeping up on apology etiquette."

He could post a list, and tell people to pick a random number between 1 and 10, and then boycott that commandment; 3/29/18, 7:01 PM
Michael K said...: Fidel Castro would be so proud of his son Justin.; 3/29/18, 7:14 PM
WK said...: It seems the new phrase should be “I except your apology”.; 3/29/18, 7:17 PM
Bay Area Guy said...: Justin Castreau......; 3/29/18, 7:18 PM
Owen said...: Bay Area Guy: Justin Castrato?; 3/29/18, 7:19 PM
n.n said...: So, opening abortion fields for native whites and blacks in South Africa to end separation, to redistribute resources, and promote a favorable faction; destroying the productivity of some of the most fertile land on Earth in Africa that lead to decades of starvation and disease; carrying out social justice adventures that are a first-order forcing of immigration reform; dividing people into diversity classes and constructing congruences; and promoting the wicked solution, the final solution to reduce the child population, earns the secular faithful a progressive level in hell that was only today deprecated.; 3/29/18, 7:23 PM
MadisonMan said...: We should judge everyone in the past by the mores of today.

What a silly notion.; 3/29/18, 7:30 PM
tcrosse said...: FWIW in Canada the people who are called Native Americans in the US are called First Nations. Nomenclature is Destiny.; 3/29/18, 7:40 PM
john said...: "Truth and Reconciliation" crashed and exploded taking everything with it. Having broke with the covenant, it was practically ordained.

Masterchief had no native children left to teach or to abuse.; 3/29/18, 7:42 PM
Gahrie said...: I'm amazed that the Pope has not apologized upon the urging of a friend of Fidel Castro's.

You misspelled "son".; 3/29/18, 8:09 PM
tim maguire said...: The Catholic Church (among others) should apologize for their role in running residential schools, but as Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau is in no position to demand it. He reminds me of the Harvey Weinstein acolytes wearing black and demanding equity at award shows.; 3/29/18, 8:10 PM
Owen said...: Tcrosse: "...are called First Nations." Itself an ex post facto artifice that obscures the elisions of one tribe over another, as they migrated and warred with one another. When exactly was the census and ethnography taken down for the First Nations, as if in the white man's Genesis? How could it be taken down, before marks on bark or stone were agreed to be the medium that could outlast a story by the fire?

We are being offered stories as if they could bring absolution or at least a reconciliation. They are perhaps the best we can do. But let's not confuse them with fact.; 3/29/18, 8:15 PM
themightypuck said...: "Looking Unto Jesus..."

Moving.; 3/29/18, 8:20 PM
Known Unknown said...: Trudeau Apology Tour '18 continues ...; 3/29/18, 8:45 PM
Owen said...: Themightypuck: thanks. One of those strange moments. I grew up with "Hostel Kids," exactly these people, but being a coeval I had no appreciation for their plight. And who knows, perhaps the kids I knew were more fortunate. But we kept to our respective precincts, no contact outside school and, in school, we whites suffered their attentions as best we could. Fact is, they were usually 2-3 years older and completely indifferent to standard school discipline; so it was an odd mixing.

That said, I missed them after I went on into White World. And when I saw a photography exhibit that seemed to sketch out their condition, it moved me to write that poem.

Short version: poor bastards.; 3/29/18, 8:49 PM
themightypuck said...: @Owen. It is a very good poem. I grew up in Canada but had no notion of the residential schools until a famous acquaintance (who was my partner in a film class in College and later famous as lead singer for The Tragically Hip) took up the cause. The title caught me because it is, as far as I can recall, the words on the doors of these schools.; 3/29/18, 9:33 PM
holdfast said...: The Canadian government has already apologized on numerous occasions, and paid a boatload of taxpayer $$ as compensation.; 3/29/18, 9:47 PM
Roughcoat said...: tcrosse:

You're cracking me up, man.

You know why.; 3/29/18, 9:55 PM
William said...: An Eton education mirrored the prison yard experience: cold showers, bad food, sexual abuse from one's fellows and physical abuse from the authorities if you got out of line. Th British ruling class should apologize to the British ruling class and pay them reparations.; 3/29/18, 10:21 PM
Kirk Parker said...: tcrosse,

"The Pontiff was unmoved by a personal appeal from Justin Trudeau. The man must have a heart of stone."

Maybe the Pope reads Vox Day.; 3/29/18, 11:52 PM
Yancey Ward said...: Well, admission opens a floodgate of payments. This Pope may not really be a Catholic, but he does see the problems of having to pay out settlements.; 3/30/18, 12:28 AM
Bob Loblaw said...: Be serious, this is lawsuit preparation. Reparations don't bring healing or reconciliation, they bring ever more rancorous claims and demonization. Whatever it takes to keep the gravy train rolling.

This. No matter how much they're given it will never be enough. The people involved have been dead for generations - when does the statute of limitations expire for this kind of stuff?; 3/30/18, 1:51 AM
Kevin said...: Apologies
Reparations
Shunning
Banning
Confiscation of property
Killing of those who still believe

I think we’ve seen this movie before.; 3/30/18, 6:47 AM
ccscientist said...: I have read accounts that many Indian leaders (this was the US) felt that to avoid extermination, the best possible thing for Indians was to marry whites and send their kids to the boarding schools. The forced removal of children of course is not the same, but remember this is what progressives did then and now--the elite knows better than the deplorables (whether white or Indian).; 3/30/18, 3:03 PM
Nancy Reyes said...: People really haven't thought this one through.

Do you educate children to be able to cope with the modern world, or allow them to stay in their own culture?

IF you say: let them keep their own culture, you are defending the idea of apartheid:
That blacks shouldn't study European Subjects or live like Europeans, but stay on the farm growing maize, and live the lives similar to their ancestors and don't change their culture, instad of becoming engineers or lawyers.; 3/30/18, 6:28 PM