I don’t think the Catholic Church gets to pull the “Now Look What You Made Me Do!” card-they freely participated in this attempted destruction of a culture through mistreatment of its children.
Indeed, Rome is bereft of cards at this point in the game.
And the Catholic Church did a hell of a lot more than “house the children”.
Indeed. Even if you overlook the sexual abuse that took place over decades and decades (if you haven’t read some of the testimony of residential school survivors, this was a common occurrence), then there are many, many other horrific abuses that went on. Like beatings to unconsciousness. Like ignoring children who had run away in sub-zero temperature for days, until they froze to death. Like nuns smashing children’s teeth out for talking back. Like withholding food for the crime of speaking their own language - in some cases until death. These abuses were not necessary- they were egregiously sadistic in nature, and the people who did them were nothing less than monsters.
Sure some of these children’s deaths were due to disease. Many others were due to outright abuse and even manslaughter. How many? Well that’s hard to tell, because the church covered it up, hid the bodies of the victims in mass graves then, and continues to withhold records. The coverup of the deliberate sadistic abuse continues to this very day.
“We instil in them a pronounced distaste for native life so that they will be humiliated when reminded of their origin. When they graduate from our institutions, the children have lost everything native except their blood.”
Bishop Grandin, 1875
(Wish I could find the full letter this quote is from. It actually gets worse.)
The Church is in this up to their necks, don’t kid yourself.
The government took the opportunity, because all the children were so malnourished, to perform some experiments in malnutrition, further reducing their food intake. Yknow in the name of science!
One survivors story.
Oh, I wasn’t trying to acquit the church. I was trying to condemn the state. I believe it was the state that decided it was a good idea to kidnap children from their homes and blot out any memory of their language or culture. I think it was the state that decided to commit cultural genocide. The Catholic church was just one of several willing helpers in this goal.
But just like we have to accept that the US murdered, cheated, and displaced our own indigenous people, I think Canada needs to own up to that, too.
Oh, certainly. That was meant as shorthand. They starved and humiliated the children, and no doubt beat them and raped them, too. But… I suspect that if the Catholic Church hadn’t been handy to do the dirty work, the state would have found some other group, probably just as bad, to do the same thing.
Sorry, but I don’t think the Catholic Church can be absolved of even the slightest amount guilt be bringing up what-if “it probably woulda happened anyway” imaginary situations. What other powerful group at that time could and would have been so willing to do what the Catholic Church did?
Why are you assuming that this is a case of the government finding a willing accomplice to genocide in the church, and not the church finding a willing accomplice to genocide in the government?
Same reason why when the Crusades were considered morally justified campaigns the Church was last credited as the prime mover.
When the tide turned, they were wars of conquest, personal ambition and looting, with just a veneer of religious justification.
Because there were other groups involved in running those group homes.
I guess if you want to blame it on “Organized Christianity” rather than “The Canadian Government”, you might have a case. But
Makes it sound to me like someone outside the churches was organizing this.
Oh, the prime movers in this were most certainly the government, foremost among them Sir John A himself. However, unlike the RCC, the Canadian government has admitted wrongdoing, apologized, and made some attempts at recompense and reconciliation, however inadequate all of those things might be.
Two points. One on religion. Canada has historically turned Education over to the churches, and in at least two provinces (Quebec and Newfoundland), schools were entirely administered by religious denomination at least to the 90s and maybe to this day.
Second, there is nothing new about Canadian institutions devaluing the lives of children with marginal prospects, such as Nova Scotia’s Butterbox Babies in the 30s. This is not to justify it, but to equate it with abortion in later generations. It had nothing to do with ethnicity, and in fact, many babies buried in butterboxes had New York parents.
The schools under discussion clearly and explicitly had to do with ethnicity. They were designed and intended to destroy an ethnicity by forcing children to abandon it.
No. It is true that Canada allows the Roman Catholic church to run schools alongside the public school system, and for Roman Catholic taxpayers to fund that system, but it allows no other religion to do the same. For example, Jewish taxpayers can send their children to private Jewish schools, but those Jewish taxpayers still pay taxes into the public system. It’s the same for other faiths.
I went to public schools in Toronto, and none was religious in any way. They weren’t allowed to be. Old-timey things like saying the Lord’s Prayer at the start of the day, followed by reading a Bible verse, which my parents both remembered from their days as students in Ontario, had been done away with by the time I went to school.
I’m not sure how old you are @Spoons but we moved from a majority (or at least a largely) Jewish area to a more mixed area of North York in 1976 and started every day with the Lord’s Prayer. I remember my mother having a heated discussion with my older brother’s teacher when she sent a note home about my brother not reciting it. Prayer continued into the early 80s.
Odd (to me), but I don’t doubt you. When I was very small–like, 5 or 6–the Toronto Board of Education allowed the Lord’s Prayer and a Bible reading. A couple of years later, those had gone by the wayside. They may still have been permitted, but my schools’ administrations just didn’t do them any longer. It sounds like things were different in North York.
Newfoundland, for 70 years until now, has had as many as eight church based education systen, self-governing, obliged only to meet state academic standards. Public funding paid a per-pupil cost. These included RCC, Pentecostal. Seventh-Day Adventist, Salvation Army a few I’ve forgotten. Early on, the Anglican school Board merged with United School Board to form the largest, but the churches neveer gave up their power to educate.
I don’t know Quebec’s history as well, but it is similar. French-speaking schools are administered by the Roman Catholic Church, and English run under a united system controlled by the non-Catholic sects. I’m going by memory here, no doubt there are exceptions, and maybe changes in the past decade or two.
Education is free and tax-supported in those two provinces, but is fully under the control os the churches. Other provinces may have variations on that that I’m not aware of.
A similar event took plade in Newfoundland,n the 60. not because theywere ethnic, but simply because they were nit economically viable. Mane, but not all non-viable commodities happen to be first-nation.
Premier Joseph Smallwood, in the 1960s, ordered a forcible abandonment and resettlement of 400 remote fishing villages and destroyed any houses left behind by residents moving to accessible towns. Not because of ethnicity,
if a couple of the villages happened to be Micmac, that does not make the movement “genocide”. Sadly, ethnic people get in the way of “progress”, but that does not mean they are targeted by design.