Reaction to Pope Francis' Visit to Canada

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Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com

If you don’t know, Pope Francis visited my northern neck of the woods in response to outcry over the Church’s involvement in what was known as the “Indian Residential Schools” program that was operated by the Federal Government of Canada.

I’m not going to revisit that topic in any detail because I’ve spent quite a bit of time on it in past videos which I’ll try to remember to link in the description. So, for the sake of my reaction to the Pope’s visit to my hometown, I’d like to start by offering a massive concession to the popular narrative here.

Let’s say that the worst accusations about the Church’s involvement in residential schools are accurate. If so, I’d like to explore if calls for the Pope to come and apologize were sincere and justified and was his submission to those calls helpful?

As I listened to representatives of the Truth and Reconciliation commission and indigenous communities, I heard, more than a few times, that the reason it was felt necessary for the Pope to come is because this wasn’t merely the failure of a few, but rather a crime by the whole Church and that since he is the head of that Church, he must repent for the crimes of that Church.

But the Church isn’t just an institution. In reality, it’s all the people who confess the creed of Catholicism. It includes lay people like me, religious people, clergy, bishops, and obviously the Pope. It’s a whole global community of people who confess a particular creed.
 
You could destroy all the legal agreements that affiliate us with an institution and we would still be the Catholic Church. That is what is essential to our identity. So to say that the whole Church is guilty of the crimes that took place in Residential Schools would require us to identify some common thread that all Catholics share in order to accuse the entire Church of collective guilt.

And what binds us all together in that shared identity is, again, our creed and our culture. So if you’re going to accuse all Catholics of something good or bad, it must be something that you can trace to the common thread of the creed we all profess.

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