The Pope’s Very Expensive Hollow Apology
Taxpayers foot the bill for the emptiest of gestures.
Pope Francis has arrived in Canada to finally apologize for the church’s role in the residential school program. For those who don’t know, Canada’s residential schools took indigenous children from their families by force to place them in ‘educational’ gulags where they were punished for speaking their own language or using their indigenous names and indoctrinated to assimilate into their colonizers’ culture. Taking children away from their parents to raise them in accordance with a different culture is one of the internationally agreed upon legal definitions of genocide. Ground penetrating radar has thus far been used at about one quarter of former residential school facilities to locate upwards of 1800 unmarked graves to date, and thousands more children whose families never saw them again may be at others yet to find. If indeed they are ever found at all. Records are spotty, in part by deliberate design. This institutional crime against humanity carried on until the last residential school finally closed in 2008.
Taxpayers funded them. Churches administered them. The Roman Catholic church was by far the dominant faction involved, operating 70% of these hellish blights on the face of human decency.
