Category: Oblates of Mary Immaculate

Oblates pledge to loosen privacy policy on personnel records

By Kathleen Martens

The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation is doing a deep dive into the backgrounds of religious personnel who ran residential schools for the federal government.

The Centre’s head archivist recently returned from Rome where he spent five days viewing, among other things, personnel records of Catholic Oblate priests.

“We know very, very little about the teachers, the professors, the priests,” said Raymond Frogner in an interview.

“And I think that’s wrong.”

Frogner said the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a missionary arm of the Catholic Church, staffed 48 of the 139 federally funded residential schools in Canada.

He said the group opened its archives to the Centre after the public outcry that followed the discovery of 215 suspected unmarked graves located at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in B.C.  The Oblates ran the Kamloops school.

“If we want a complete story of the residential school system – how it was run, what the experience was like – then we need to know more about the teachers who served there,” Frogner added.

“We are currently in discussion with the Oblates to open up the personnel files, and they have agreed to that.”

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215 graves

The 215 graves announced by Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc leadership are believed to be that of children who died at the school. More suspected graves have been discovered on other First Nations and more searches are planned.

Research by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified 3,213 deaths at residential schools between the 1880s and 1990s.

Frogner said he has a list of approximately 15 Oblate priests who were convicted of crimes against children forced to attend the schools and he specifically located those personnel files in the Rome archives.

But he was unable to copy the information due to the Oblates’ privacy policy.

APTN News was denied the personnel file of Fr. Joannes Rivoire, who is accused of sexually abusing an Inuk girl in the 1970s while serving as a church priest in Nunavut for 30 years. Rivoire said he didn’t do it.

Fr. Ken Thorson, who speaks for the Oblates in Canada, said he couldn’t release the information due to government regulations.

“As mentioned in our release, we are actively working with our archival partners to make personnel records of Oblates as accessible as privacy law allows,” he wrote in an email.

“Unfortunately, as Johannes Rivoire is a living Oblate who is currently under investigation by secular authorities, Canadian privacy law prevents us from sharing his personnel records at this time. We have committed to cooperate with the ongoing investigation and will make any relevant records available to law enforcement.”

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Oblates’ policy 

Thorson did not mention the Oblates’ own policy that protects the information for up to 50 years until after a priest has died.

Frogner said the Oblates’ have told him they may loosen their policy.

“We are currently in discussion with the Oblates to open up the personnel files and they have agreed to that,” he said.

“For one thing, they’re going to reconsider and reduce this 50-year restriction they have on files.”

Frogner said the residential schools were staffed by Oblates from abroad and Quebec.

“We don’t have a hard number of how many missionaries came from other countries but that’s something we are working on getting,” he said.

“We don’t yet have a hard number of the Canadians either. We know a large, predominant amount of them came from Quebec.”

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The ‘formation’

Frogner said the personnel files gave him a glimpse of the men who became priests. The Catholic church operated 60 per cent of the schools.

“They took those vows [of poverty, chastity and obedience] when they joined as Oblates, and they had to go through what they called the formation…,” he said.

“And there’s kind of a report card from their superior that graded them on their scholastic work, their moral character, their service, their devotion – all that kind of stuff.”

Frogner noted it’s not just the Centre, which is located at the University of Manitoba, that wants the information. But Indigenous communities have been asking who had access to their children.

“[They] have asked for a more accountable, transparent record of what these priests were doing,” he said of Indigenous leaders and families.

“Really, the [Kamloops grave] discoveries from 2021 cast such a bright spotlight on the activities of the Oblates.”

The Centre wants to tell as full a story as possible about the 100-year school system designed to assimilate Indigenous children into colonial society, Frogner added.

“People can take the records and do with them what they wish,” he said. “I’m quite content to see the records used in court.

“It’s all about a better, more accountable understanding of what happened.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

By James Murray

After an 11-year investigation into abuse at the Fort Alexander residential school, RCMP charged a retired priest on Friday for the sexual assault of a 10-year-old girl.

The charge against Arthur Masse was hardly a surprise. You don’t have to travel far to hear from survivors who live mostly in Sagkeeng First Nation that conditions at the school were horrific, abuse was rampant and that predators were everywhere.

The only surprise for most of us is that a charge happened at all.

For decades, victims of abuse have told strikingly similar stories about life at Fort Alexander residential school, which was run by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate until 1970.

Survivors have shared with their families, clergy, political leaders and police about what they have experienced. Some have even published books, like author Theodore Fontaine, or appeared on the nightly news, like Phil Fontaine did in 1990.

In 2010, when documents corroborating accounts of the abuse came to light, Manitoba RCMP opened up an investigation.

Eleven years, 700 interviews, 80 investigators, and 75 witness and victim statements later, a single charge was announced.

A single charge.

“The question may be asked: Why, with all this work, was there one charge laid and not many?” RCMP spokesperson Sgt. Paul Manaigre told media on Friday. “Unfortunately, due to the passage of time, many of the victims are not able to participate in the investigation, whether that be for mental or physical health reasons, or because the victim is now deceased.”

A far more likely truth is that “authorities” don’t believe survivors.

I know this first hand.

My grandfather experienced brutal abuse at Fort Alexander.

One day, while working in the field, he couldn’t lift a pail of water. When he started crying, the priest beat him so badly in the head he lost much of his hearing on one side.

He was six.

In the basement of the school was a room students who were forced to sit silently for hours on threat of violence or work in dangerous conditions with scalding water in the laundry room.

If anyone acted out — or sometimes for little reason at all — beatings with the “lash” were a regular occurrence, and would take place for all to see.

My uncle Elmer, my grandfather’s older brother who attended alongside him, told our family that some nights boys who had been lashed would cry all night in bed from the pain.

“I often wondered how men and women who professed to be Christians and were serving in religious orders could be so mean and cruel. Their sole purpose seemed to be to break our spirits,” he said.

Then, my uncle said something else about Fort Alexander residential school I’ll never forget.

“I don’t remember ever hearing a kind word during my three-year stay in the school,” he said. “I suppose being brought up in such a cruel and loveless environment affected our later lives.”

This raises the toughest reality to discuss about Fort Alexander residential school: the sexual abuse.

My grandfather experienced it there too, leading to decades of self-harm, alcoholism and his abuse (physically, not sexually) of his own children.

I share these horrific details not because I want to, but because I have to.

It’s a story our family carries.

To change cycles and patterns of violence, I must face this horrific legacy from my life.

This is why survivors should guide our next move.

In this case, the alleged perpetrator is almost finished his life. If found guilty, and if the family of the survivor wants him to go to jail, we should not argue with them.

Most survivors, however, do not want “justice” in the form of jail time but reconciliation for their families, communities and future generations.

The justice system, both provincially and nationally, is sorely inadequate in this regard.

It is not enough to simply charge an old man, but rather to help heal the thousands of lives damaged by the institutions that hired, protected and ignored the stories for decades.

This means Indigenous-led health supports, particularly for abuse survivors and their families. It means language revitalization programs. It means restoring and recognizing Indigenous governments on their own terms.

And not doubting survivors when they share their stories.

It shouldn’t take millions of dollars and hours of work to legitimize dozens of similar accounts, but apparently it does if you’re Indigenous.

Let’s change that.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!