Recently I encountered a woman who said to me that many people have left the Church as a direct result of the news of the unmarked graves on the property of the old Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia — including her husband. Of course, there is no denying that the residential school system, at its origin, constituted a fundamental violation of the basic human rights of the Indigenous peoples of Canada. In 1883, Prime Minister John A. MacDonald wrote:
When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the Department, that the Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.
Despite the fact that a number of First Peoples had positive and memorable experiences in their residential schools, the entire system originated in and existed under the umbrella of this utterly racist conceptual frame of mind and culturally genocidal purpose. It goes without saying that the Catholic Church should never have cooperated with the Canadian government in this. But they, along with the rest of the country, did cooperate with it.
In light of this history, why would I want to belong to such an organization as the Roman Catholic Church? I guess it is the same reason that I choose to belong to my country, Canada, which obviously has a very sordid history. It is not on account of this country’s sins that I wish to belong to it, but on account of the tremendous goods that this country has managed to achieve throughout its long history. In belonging to the Church, I certainly belong to an institution that has a very sordid past, but is there a nation or institution in this world that does not? Is it even possible for an individual person, a saint even, not to have a relatively sordid history? Don’t we all look back at our lives and shake our heads?
The process of coming to belong to the Church is not in any way the same as the process of coming to belong to any other institution, such as a corporation like Pepsi or Bell Canada, or a hospital or educational institution. The reason is that the object of faith is not the Church as such, but Christ.
When we believe in Christ and enter into his death through baptism, we become — by virtue of that baptismal immersion — a part of his Mystical Body, and our eyes are still on Christ, not on his Church; for we have become that Church, members thereof, and are taught to say every day: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.” The reason for this is we remain sinners, but we have been “deified,” filled with divine grace, not by virtue of anything we have done, but simply by virtue of the unutterable mercy of God.
Our lives become a battle to overcome the effects of our wounded nature — namely, death, concupiscence, and the dulling of the mind. The life of the Christian will therefore be one of continual reform. This is why the Church as a whole is in continual reform, for the Church is made up of sinful and flawed human beings whose minds are to a degree blinded by sin. There is no getting around this. And that is why the study of the history of the Church is a rather painful experience for the Catholic who has an idealized image of the Church. Just as a child has an idealized image of his own mother and father, the child chooses not to see what he simply does not want to see.
Those who condemn the Church due to highly scandalous behavior by clergy or religious often fail to recognize the complicity of the entire culture. We were all complicit at the time — practically everyone operated within the arrogance of a Eurocentric worldview that looked down upon Indigenous culture. This was a worldview that kept us from appreciating the beauty and value of Indigenous cultural traditions. We are all complicit today in the perpetuation of the injustices that First Peoples continue to endure, such as lack of clean drinking water on the reserves, healthcare inequality, and fewer educational opportunities. And we are complicit in the injustices that Canadian young people and young families are forced to endure, such as high housing prices and the increased cost of living, as a result of political and economic decisions made by an unjust and incompetent government that we put into power and kept in power. This notion of universal complicity is not a new concept, by any means. In 1923, the Anglican priest and poet G. Studdert Kennedy wrote:
Not long ago, a man was sentenced to ten years penal servitude for holding up a post office and shooting at a policeman. He was one of the army of unemployed in London. He had a wife and two children; he paid 8s. 3d [8 shillings, 3 pence] a week for two rooms in Whitechapel, which were so dark that the gas had to be kept burning all the time; he had fought in the army and been wounded, and he had done 10 weeks work in 18 months. He was not a good character, being weak and easily led; but in any decent community rightly ordered, he would in all probability have led quite a decent life. But in “justice“ he is to serve ten years. I am not disposed to rail at the courts – I think the sentence was inevitable for the protection of society, but purely for that reason, and not because it is just. He is suffering as much for the sin of the world, for your sin and mine, as for his own (The Wicket Gate, p. 73).
Should we judge the Church’s past by the standards of today? I believe that to do so is to misunderstand the nature of human progress. I am what I am today because of the imperfections and mistakes of my past, and what I know today was the result of a decision to continually reflect upon my life as it was unfolding and to look back on what had unfolded. In other words, it was a result of a continued reflection upon my experiences, which are now past. All of us are expected to grow from experience, but how can a person be changed for the better unless he was in some ways worse than he is today?
If we are changing for the better, as we have a responsibility to do, then we can reasonably expect to experience disappointments and missteps when looking back on our lives. Individually, we cannot help but judge our own pasts by the standards we currently live by. That said, it seems we have no choice but to forgive ourselves. The standards we hold up for ourselves today are the result of our decisions to reflect on our past experiences in light of moral principles we have discovered along the way and the resolution to improve.
We should not judge others’ histories with less patience than we do our own. We have a tendency to forget the growing process is the same for every person, nation, and institution. It is true that we remain responsible for certain past decisions and may still have to seek forgiveness and make reparations for things we have said and done long ago. But I cannot walk away from the Church that Christ established — the Church that abandoned him on Holy Thursday night — for being exactly the kind of developing organism that I have always been and cannot otherwise be.
Image: By Unknown author – CBC: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/cree-residential-school-fort-george-1.6065307, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=152010295
Douglas McManaman was born in Toronto and grew up in Montreal. He studied philosophy at the University of St. Jerome’s College (Waterloo) and theology at the University of Montreal. He is a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Toronto and ministers to those with mental illness. He taught Religion, Philosophy and the Theory of Knowledge for 32 years in Southern Ontario, and he is the current chaplain of the Toronto Chapter of the Catholic Teachers Guild. He is a Senior Lecturer at Niagara University and teach Marriage Prep for the Archdiocese of Toronto. His recent books include Why Be Afraid? (Justin Press, 2014) and The Logic of Anger (Justin Press, 2015), and Christ Lives! (Justin Press, 2017), as well as The Morally Beautiful (Amazon.ca), Introduction to Philosophy for Young People (Amazon.ca), Readings in the Theory of Knowledge, Basic Catholicism, and A Treatise on the Four Cardinal Virtues. He has two podcast channels: Podcasts for the Religious, and Podcasts for Young Philosophers. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Ontario, Canada.
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