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12
Aug
2022
Sunday July 24, 2022
There is only one event worth writing about this week -- Pope Francis’s “penitential pilgrimage.”
“Penitential” means doing penance -- making amends for having done something wrong.
The name alone acknowledges that the Roman Catholic church failed its indigenous members.
Church doctrines have long taught that Jesus took upon himself the sins of the world. Figuratively, Pope Francis chose to do the same with his church’s involvement in residential schools.
People have mixed feelings about his trip and his apologies.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Pope, Indigenous, Francis, pilgrimage
9
Jul
Sunday June 26, 2022
“Forgive us our trespasses,” says the most familiar prayer in Christianity, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”
If those words are so important, why, in 80-odd years of attending worship services all over the world, have I never once heard a sermon connecting them with colonial peoples’ treatment of Indigenous inhabitants?
Indeed, I doubt if any preachers focussed on those words from the Lord’s Prayer even this week, which marked National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada.
Because there can be no doubt that we are trespassing on lands that did not originally belong to us.
Tags: Indigenous, Trespass, settler, colonial
8
Jan
Sunday January 9, 2002
Canada finally seems to have recognized that the original inhabitants of this continent have had a raw deal.
On Tuesday, the federal government announced a “historic agreement-in-principle” worth $40 billion to “compensate young people harmed by Canada's discriminatory child welfare system while reforming the system that tore First Nations children from their communities for decades.”
The discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Residential School, plus another 1,000 or so at other sites, shocked Canadians out of centuries of complacency.
It shouldn’t have come as a jolt.
For seven years, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission exposed story after story of persecution and discrimination.
The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls provided further evidence.
Did we listen?
Tags: Indigenous, aboriginal, invisible