TORONTO – I am at a loss as to how acts of arson against icons of religious affiliation is supposed to gain sympathy or tug at anyone’s sense of guilt for perceived wrongs committed in the past.
It does not help that the brush of guilt by association is tarring everyone and all things Catholic. Maybe that is the intended out-come.
A two-thousand-year-old Christian movement is seemingly the whipping boy for all self-declared marginalized, oppressed and “offended” minority community – the so called “great reset” movement. So, one religion may be torn
down, and along with it the ideologies and tenets that form the bases of the cultural-legal concepts guiding the Western Civilization that we call our own.
You know, the one that says: “love your neighbour as you love yourself and God above all others”; Or, in more secular terms, “egalite’, fraternite’, liberte’” that emerged from one of the more violent “great resets” in one of the world’s biggest colonizer-countries (Revolutionary France).
Which set of values and philosophies do we offer up as substitutes? How do we ensure that a monitoring, enforcement system will work more efficiently and
effectively than the one we tear down? Has anyone heard it yet? What has whipped up the “public outrage” against Catholics, Catholicism and the Church?
The Corriere Canadese is in the reporting business. It is not a church or educational organization. We try to get the facts, verify and analyze as much as possible, then critique and criticize. We ask what is new; what is different from what we knew before?
June has been a month when those questions have never been more pertinent or forgotten. We have been told for example that “ground penetrating” sensors have identified the presence of gravesites adjacent to former Residential schools. May the souls of the deceased rest in peace. The souls of the departed merit dignity was our first reaction.
The “holy grounds” have been closed and abandoned for half a century. The sites are unmarked. Whatever the accuracy of the technology, no one has yet indicated the ages of the deceased how, when or why they passed.
We do know that the Government of Canada (more properly Her Majesty’s Dominion of Canada) established the Residential Schools as part of the effort to integrate the Aboriginal communities into the “Canadian mainstream”. The Clergy or churches that ran them were agents of those governments. If there are
records (why wouldn’t there be?) to help us understand better what happened then the heirs of those governments should be best equipped to divulge the information.
Until that happens, everyone is steered to believing and expecting the worst for the 150,000 registrants in those schools at the
hands of men and women who themselves have long since died.
TO READ PREVIOUS COMMENTS: https://www.corriere.ca/english-articles
