Glen Argan

Glen Argan

Glen Argan, former editor of Western Catholic Reporter, writes from Edmonton. See www.glenargan.com.

It has been more than four months since the end of Pope Francis’ visit to Canada to meet with Indigenous people and apologize for the Catholic Church’s involvement and acts of terror in the Indian residential school system. It’s long enough for the next steps in the journey of reconciliation to have been at least discussed. Yet, there has been next to nothing.

Since my teenage years, I have wondered what a better world would look like. What sort of society should we hope for? I also wonder if our world did become better, would we even know that to be the case. That is, what criteria would enable us to determine when the state of the world had improved?

People in the modern Western world are often shocked when they read Plato’s Republic and see the great philosopher criticizing democracy as one of the lowest forms of governing society. For Plato, democracy and tyranny (the lowest form) are as one with the tyrant merely the most self-centred type of ruler. 

The world today has numerous crises — climate change, pandemic, growing discrepancies of power and wealth, the nuclear threat and war, not only in Ukraine but wars in places that go underreported. Perhaps the greatest crisis is the lack of leadership capable of dealing with these substantive crises.

The overriding “reform” of the Second Vatican Council was a renewed call to mission to the world. The reform of the liturgy, the expanded sense of Church as the pilgrim people of God, the openness to ecumenism and the paring back of Catholic triumphalism are all to be of service to that central idea.

The aspect of the proposed Alberta sovereignty act which most gives me pause is not the legal chaos into which it will throw this province if enacted — although that is worrisome enough — but the spirit of division which it seeks to codify in law.

Pope Francis has fulfilled his mission in Canada. He has apologized in Canada “to survivors, their families and communities for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical and sexual abuse of First Nations, Inuit and Metis children in Catholic-run residential schools.” That was Call to Action 58 in the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Pope did not come here within one year of the report’s release, as the call to action specifies, but he did get here, apologized sincerely several times and met with groups of survivors from the schools.

Pope Francis will lead a consistory to install new cardinals on Aug. 27. The 16 new cardinal electors, eligible to vote in the next election of a pope, come from surprising places, and many are involved with people on society’s margins. As observers note, the men this Pope has named princes of the Church often have no pretensions to royalty. They are God’s servants in the vineyard of life.

Pope Francis’ July 24-29 visit to Indigenous people in Canada will be the most public step yet in the Catholic Church’s escalating efforts to grow in reconciliation with the First Peoples of our vast country. Not only the most public, but also the most involving. Tens of thousands of Catholics will participate in the papal Masses in Edmonton and near Quebec City. Millions more may watch on TV. 

In doing so, we will be drawn into the web of reconciliation that the Church and Indigenous people have been weaving since at least the 1970s. In that era the Canadian bishops raised critical questions about how a proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline would affect the culture and lives of the people of the North.

The bishops drew considerable flak for daring to question the axiom of the developed world that traditional cultures are less important than the march of economic progress. Although Pope Francis was likely unaware of the pipeline controversy, he took the same stance when in 2015 he visited Santa Cruz, Bolivia — the home of that country’s economic elites — and declared, “The economy should not be a mechanism for accumulating goods, but rather the proper administration of our common home.”

The growing cooperation between the Canadian Church and Indigenous peoples was disrupted when residential school survivors began speaking publicly about the abuse they suffered in those Church-run schools. Catholics with eyes to see recognized that our Church had been an integral part of a system of colonialism and oppression.

Even with those revelations, that recognition is still not universal among Canadian Catholics. Our Church has been slower to respond to the calls to repentance and reconciliation than the Anglican and Protestant churches.

This papal visit stands as a kairos moment, a time of opportunity to move in a new direction — in relations between the Church and Indigenous people as well as a new direction for the Church herself. Since the Oblates of Mary Immaculates’ apology at Lac Ste. Anne, Alta., in 1991, numerous religious orders and dioceses have apologized for serving as pillars in structures which oppressed First Nations, Metis and Inuit people.

Some suggest we have apologized enough. But that assertion betrays an ignorance that a sin against God and humans is an infinite offence only forgivable through an act of Divine mercy. It also ignores that the effects of sin ripple down through the generations. We can never be freed from the role of oppressor until all the oppressed are set free.

That calls us to be a different sort of Church, a Church which liberates. Instead of being a Church which preaches morality, we must become a Church striving to make a common home for all Canadians, especially the First Peoples.

Today this is palpably not the case. How can Canada be the common home for all if Indigenous people are the most frequent victims of violence, a violence which police too often ignore? How can it be our common home if the First Peoples of our land live in poverty and despair and have exponentially higher rates of suicide and incarceration? 

The Church is a centre of worship of the living God. The Old Testament prophets repeatedly said such worship is worthless unless it is accompanied by action to end oppression. Our action must be to free our society of the scourge of racism and to make human equality a reality.

When Pope Francis spoke to the delegation of Indigenous people and Canadian bishops on April 1, he drew attention not only to the suffering of the Indigenous but also to the gifts they offer society. He spoke of their view of the land as a gift of God rather than a resource to be exploited. He spoke of the emphasis on community, of an understanding of the person not as an isolated being but as part of a web of relationships.

The papal visit will not be the culmination of the journey but an important step in nurturing a new relationship. It will be a time of hope, a hope we are all challenged to make real.

(Argan is a writer in Edmonton.) 

The decision of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to close the domestic operations of Catholic News Service strikes at the heart of the notion of synodality which Pope Francis is encouraging through the Catholic Church. The current reflections on synodality call the members of Christ’s Body to consider the proper way for authority in the Church to be shared.