The Catholic Church Needs to Do More Than Apologize over Residential Schools

By Tanya Talaga
The Star
January 17, 2019

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2019/01/17/the-catholic-church-needs-to-do-more-than-apologize-over-residential-schools.html

Evelyn Korkmaz is not waiting to see if she’ll receive an official invitation from the Vatican to attend the historic Papal Summit on sexual abuse.

While Pope Francis and the world’s Catholic bishops meet inside Vatican City walls from Feb. 21 to 24, Korkmaz, a survivor of the notorious St. Anne’s Indian Residential School, will join other global survivors in Rome as they hold an alternate “Ending Clergy Abuse” event.

Mi'kmaq girls are seen in sewing class at the Catholic-run Shubenacadie Indian Residential School in Shubenacadie, N.S. in 1929. (LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA)

Now 61, Korkmaz spent the most horrific years of her life as a student at St. Anne’s, which was run by Oblate Catholic nuns. Children who attended the school, which opened in 1906, were routinely abused, beaten and malnourished. Students lived in fear of the homemade electric chair used to punish them.

Korkmaz was sexually assaulted at the school, which was one of 139 Indian Residential Schools in Canada that existed from the mid-1800s to 1996. Nearly 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children were taken away from their families, homes and communities and placed in government-funded, church-run schools meant to erase their identities and to assimilate them into colonized, Christian Canada.

Pope Francis has refused to apologize for Canada’s residential school experience, even though many of the schools were Catholic. Last year, he acknowledged the abuse suffered at the hands of the clergy in Chile but still Indigenous people in Canada wait. “What have the Aboriginal people done that we don’t have the same respect as those in the other countries?” Korkmaz asks.

She understands an apology is not a panacea but it is a start, one that will help many to move on.

To that end, the church must own up to its moral obligation and pay the $21 million owed to survivors, as set out in the 2006 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. That would go a long way to taking responsibility.

Yet the church refuses to apologize or pay.

One of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 “Calls to Action” was for the Pope to apologize to survivors, their families and communities.

In fact, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took that request to the Pope, but the Pontiff refused. After an “extensive dialogue” with the Bishops of Canada, Pope Francis stated that “he could not personally respond,” according to a letter by Lionel Gendron, president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. It was later explained that given the structure of the church, it wasn’t proper for the Pope to be the one apologizing.

However, the letter did encourage the bishops to engage in “healing and solidarity” with Indigenous people and to collaborate in “concrete projects” aimed at improving living conditions.

But healing and solidarity are surely not possible until the church pays the money it owes. Under the settlement, the Catholic entities had three financial obligations: $29 million in cash, $25 million in in-kind services, and $25 million to be raised in a fundraising campaign.

During Question Period on Thursday, Marc Miller, the parliamentary secretary to the minister of Crown-Indigenous relations, said the church has only raised approximately $3.7 million of the $25 million owed.

The Church must do better.

It’s well past time it apologized to Residential School survivors.

But no one knows better than Korkmaz that an apology would be only a beginning.

Former prime minister Stephen Harper apologized to survivors in 2008.

And still, Canada is fighting Korkmaz and her fellow St. Anne’s survivors in court.

An apology is given real meaning with actions that demonstrate its sincerity.

Tanya Talaga is a Toronto-based columnist covering Indigenous issues. Follow her on Twitter: @tanyatalaga