Tag: Oblates Of Mary Immaculate

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Amid calls for Catholic Church to take responsibility for residential schools, Pope meets with Canadian Cardinals

The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate ran about 47 per cent of Canada’s residential schools, including the one in Kamloops. They have refused to release their records to help identify the remains

In this file photo, Pope Francis arrives to lead Holy Rosary prayer in Vatican gardens to end the month of May, at the Vatican, May 31, 2021.

By Sarah Smellie

Pope Francis met with two Canadian Cardinals on Saturday amid mounting pressure on the Catholic Church to take responsibility for Canada’s residential school system, though it’s not known what was discussed.

No information was immediately available about why the Pope met with Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, and Cardinal Michael Czerny, a top official in the Vatican’s migrants and refugees portfolio.

The meetings were disclosed in the Vatican’s daily roster of papal audiences.

Past appointment listings show Pope Francis meets with Oulette every Saturday, but meetings with Czerny are rare. The two last met on May 10, but Czerny’s name does not appear in previous agendas.

The Vatican did not respond to request for comment on the meeting, and attempts to reach the cardinals were unsuccessful.

The appointments came a day after nine United Nations human rights experts implored the Catholic Church, as well as Canadian authorities, “to conduct prompt and thorough investigations” into an unmarked burial site believed to contain the remains of 215 Indigenous children found at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.

The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation announced last week that ground-penetrating radar confirmed the findings.

“Large scale human rights violations have been committed against children belonging to Indigenous communities, it is inconceivable that Canada and the Holy See would leave such heinous crimes unaccounted for and without full redress,” said a Friday release from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

The Kamloops school operated between 1890 and 1969, when the federal government took over operations from the Catholic Church and ran it as a day school until it closed in 1978.

Some 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children were forcibly sent to residential schools, where many suffered abuse and even death.

The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate ran about 47 per cent of Canada’s residential schools, including the one in Kamloops. The Oblates have refused to release their records to help identify the remains.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also put pressure on the Catholic Church Friday, calling on officials to “step up” and take responsibility for its role in the system and urging the release of records related to the schools.

It is inconceivable that Canada and the Holy See would leave such heinous crimes unaccounted for and without full redress
Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights

Trudeau said he was “deeply disappointed” by the position the Catholic Church has taken, adding that he personally asked Pope Francis in 2017 to consider apologizing for the institution’s part in the government-sponsored, church-run schools.

“It’s something we are all still waiting for the Catholic Church to do,” Trudeau said.

Ouellet is originally from La Motte, Que., and was said to be a frontrunner to succeed Pope Benedict XVI as head of the Church in 2013. He plays a key role in the selection of bishops and archbishops around the world.

Czerny is a Czech-born Canadian whose family settled in Montreal. He is the Vatican’s under-secretary of the Migrants and Refugees Section of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development.

Friday’s release from the nine independent experts from the UN’s human rights office said they expect the church to provide judicial authorities with “full access …. to the archives of the residential schools run by the institution,” as well as thoroughly investigate allegations concerning the schools and publicly disclose the results of their efforts.

The release also took aim at Ottawa, saying Canada’s Indigenous people have been waiting “for too many years” for the federal government to implement the recommendations in the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, released in 2015.

Ottawa must investigate the sites of all other residential schools in Canada, the release said.

“The judiciary should conduct criminal investigations into all suspicious death and allegations of torture and sexual violence against children hosted in residential schools, and prosecute and sanction the perpetrators and concealers who may still be alive,” the experts said in the release.

The signatories to the release included Mama Fatima Singhateh, an expert on the sexual exploitation of children, and Francisco Cali Tzay, an expert on the rights of Indigenous people.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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First Nation calls on Catholic Church to apologize for residential schools

— and release records on Kamloops

amloops residents and First Nations people gather to listen to drummers and singers at a memorial in front of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School after the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old, were located at the site last week, in Kamloops.

‘What we do want, is an apology, a public apology, not just for us but for the world … holding the Catholic Church to account’

By Tyler Dawson

The chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation has called upon the Catholic Church to issue a public apology for residential schools and for the order that ran the residential school in Kamloops, B.C., to release all of its records.

“What we do want, is an apology, a public apology, not just for us but for the world … holding the Catholic Church to account. There has never been an apology from the Roman Catholics,” said Rosanne Casimir, chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, on Friday, just over a week after the preliminary discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

In the days since the announcement, “our nation has been consciously, collectively grappling with the heart-wrenching truth brought to light by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc,” Casimir said in her first press conference, held over Zoom, since the discovery was announced.

Casimir said it was too soon to answer technical questions regarding the research itself or the costs and details of the preliminary findings, though reporters were told there would be weekly briefings. Instead, she thanked people for the outpouring of support and mentioned meetings the nation had held with B.C. Premier John Horgan and Carolyn Bennett, the federal Crown-Indigenous relations minister.

This is only the beginning

“This is only the beginning,” Casimir said. “We have a lot of work to do together. While the reality is shocking and we feel some level of anger, it is time to be gentle with ourselves and with each other.”

Casimir also took a moment to clarify a major piece of misinformation circulated by some media. “This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites that are, to our knowledge, also undocumented. These are preliminary findings,” she said.

Last Thursday, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation said the use of ground-penetrating radar had revealed “an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented.”

“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” said Casimir said in a news release. “Some were as young as three years old.”

Official records kept by the Department of Indian Affairs, and recorded by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, show that 51 students died at the Kamloops school while it was in operation, from a wide array of causes: drowning, tuberculosis, food poisoning and sleeping sickness.

Overall the Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated more than 6,000 deaths at residential schools across the country; the last closed in Saskatchewan in 1996. Murray Sinclair, a former senator and the chair of the commission, told CBC Radio that he believes the total could be as high as 25,000 dead, and called for an inquiry into all possible burial sites.“I suspect, quite frankly, that every school had a burial site,” Sinclair said.

The Oblates of Mary Immaculate, a Catholic missionary order, ran the school in Kamloops; it operated as a residential school between 1890 and 1969 before being taken over by the federal government and ran as a residence for nearby day schools until its closure in 1978.

An historic photograph of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the largest of Canada’s 130 residential schools. Ground-penetrating radar has found 215 unmarked graves on the former school property.
An historic photograph of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the largest of Canada’s 130 residential schools. Ground-penetrating radar has found 215 unmarked graves on the former school property.

Casimir called on the order to release all of its records regarding the Kamloops school. Father Ken Thorson, with the OMI, said the order has already sent its archives to the Royal British Columbia Museum, but it is looking through other records to see if there is further valuable information.

Casimir noted that there was a “large discrepancy” between the number of dead previously identified through their records and what ground-penetrating radar has found.

“I don’t know if our records will shed further light on this discrepancy, but I’d hope it will, in service to the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc, in their search for clarity and understanding regarding the discovery in Kamloops last week,” Thorson said in a statement.

In the days since, there has been an outpouring of grief across the country and otherwise stalled or neglected acts of reconciliation, suddenly, became front of agenda.A school board in Calgary immediately moved to change the name of a school affiliated with one of the architects of the residential school program; the Senate created a national holiday in September; and many wore orange to commemorate those who died at the residential school.

The former Kamloops Indian Residential School where the discovery of the remains of 215 children in a mass grave became world news. China’s Communist Party has not been silent about it.
The former Kamloops Indian Residential School where the discovery of the remains of 215 children in a mass grave became world news. China’s Communist Party has not been silent about it.

Meanwhile, in Kamloops, the work continued.

The researcher, who has not spoken publicly, has continued the work of analyzing the ground-penetrating radar data; the nation says this preliminary work will be done by the end of June.

Ground-penetrating radar is technology used in archaeology, often to explore historic graveyards, that shows differences in soil beneath the surface; it doesn’t map underground, but rather shows changes that can be analyzed further to draw conclusions about what’s been found.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and B.C. Coroners Office have been contacted and are involved, though in what capacity remains unclear, both having deferred to the leadership of the First Nation, which noted the historically fraught relationship between police and Indigenous people in Friday’s press conference.

Asked whether the former Kamloops Indian Residential School should be torn down, Casimir said the First Nation believes it should remain standing.

“It is a very huge piece of history that we do not want to be forgotten.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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No longer ‘the disappeared’: Mourning the 215 children found in a mass grave at Kamloops Indian Residential School

People across Canada, including this scene in Edmonton, have left shoes and candles at public displays in recognition of the discovery of children’s remains at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

By

A macabre part of Canada’s hidden history made headlines last week after ground-penetrating radar located the remains of 215 First Nations children in a mass unmarked grave on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Like 150,000 Indigenous children that were taken from their families and nations and placed in residential schools, the 215 bodies of children, some as young as three, located in Tk’emlúps were part of a larger colonial program to liquidate Indigenous nations of their histories, culture and foreclose on any future. To do this, Canada put into motion a system to “kill the Indian in the child.”

This system often killed the child.

While we currently have no evidence to determine the cause of death for each child, we know that they died a political death — these children were the disappeared.

Colonial population management projects

The chilling discovery in Tk’emlúps reminds us of the larger project of aggressive assimilation.

Indian Residential Schools were centres for state-directed violence against Indigenous nations, where the children — the heirs of Indigenous nations — were programmatically stripped of their Indianness.

Indigenous lives were broken down, sterilized of any trace of the gifts inherited from their parents and ancestors and re-packaged into Canadian bodies.

The brute nation-making scheme of the Canadian state looked to the existing infrastructure laid down by the prominent Christian churches. The churches were involved in population management almost from the moment of contact between European Crowns and Indigenous nations. The Catholic Church, which would go on to operate about 60 per cent of these schools, was a hawkish occupier.

Like branch plants in a vast production scheme, the state made good use of the extensive church network to co-ordinate the extraction of raw material—Indigenous children.

But the revelation of a mass disposal site for children — unrecorded and hidden — on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School tells us that the regulation of Indigenous life extended into death.

A black and white photo of dozens of Indigenous boys and girls lined up in front of the school while a row of church and school officials sit in the front of the picture.
A 1937 photograph of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

The politics of death and mourning

A fact many Indigenous people understand is that life’s benefits and burdens are shot through the colonial prism. As we go through life, we quickly learn that the weight of history’s finger is pressing firmly on the scale.

What is often overlooked is how that uneven distribution in life carries on through death.

Just as in life, how Indigenous death is mourned and remembered has been a matter of political control. The Canadian state, in partnership with the churches, has long unilaterally assumed sovereignty over Indigenous mortality and bereavement.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the atrocity at Tk’emlúps which has sharpened this for many Indigenous nations, as we see how the Catholic church not only denied these children the capacity to shape the means of and choose the ends of their life, but also they denied their communities control over their death.

In Tk’emlúps, the Catholic church decided that neither their lives nor their deaths were worthy of being known, remembered and commemorated.

Woman stands holding candle that reads '215' crowd of grieving people wearing orange stand behind her
Through Indian Residential Schools, Canada put into motion a system to ‘kill the Indian in the child.’

One of the more appalling acts by the Catholic church in Tk’emlúps was how the children were deliberately forgotten; they were omitted from the official records that would verify their passing.

Documentation of death may seem clinical and lacking the human touch, but for some it has become crucial to contemporary remembrance. It is one way, of many culturally divergent methods, of confirming death and allowing the dead to have a social afterlife with the living. The painful void that lingers is what researcher Pauline Boss called ambiguous loss, “a loss that remains unclear because there is no death certificate or official verification of loss; there is no resolution, no closure.”

The memory of the person and their remains may strike us as two separate matters, but they are intimately connected in many cultures.

Not unlike Catholicism, the material body figures centrally amongst many Indigenous rites and ceremonies that cultivate social continuity with the dead. Matthew Engelke, who studies the anthropology of death, tells us that:

“(W)hat commemoration often involves is much more than remembering the dead. It requires a serious engagement with the things that ghosts and ancestors want: a proper burial, a pot of beer, a feast, money, a fitting grave-stone, the blood of a reindeer, the blood of kin.”

The truth about the disappeared

The truth about the atrocity at Tk’emlúps escaped examination during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In the weeks before the TRC launched in 2008, the Catholic church was confronted with the allegations of a mass grave. Back then, the church denied any knowledge.

Until their remains were recently located, the Catholic church was content to leave 215 children as ‘disappeared.’

The disappeared — those that have been secretly disposed — produce a unique grieving. They leave families and communities in a state of suspended mourning, never sure whether their loved one is alive or dead, or where their remains have been left.

It is life abandoned to death with no chance of the living to intervene.

Now that they have been located, the surviving families, communities and Nations can begin to think about custodianship of the remains, mourning and memorialization. That much is up to them and every support and resource ought to be provided.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Survivor calls on Trudeau to release St. Anne’s residential-school abuse documents

Edmund Metatawabin, a survivor of St. Anne’s residential school in Fort Albany, Ont., is seen outside Osgoode Hall in Toronto on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2013.

By Maan Alhmidi

Residential school survivor Evelyn Korkmaz is calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to release thousands of documents that detail the sexual and physical abuse of thousands of Indigenous children at St. Anne’s residential school in the last century.

Korkmaz said the federal government has not turned over 12,300 reports from Ontario Provincial Police investigations of violations at St. Anne’s in Fort Albany, Ont. despite an Ontario Superior Court order.

Following the court order in 2014, Ottawa released heavily redacted copies of materials generated by the OPP between 1992 and 1996.

“They’re useless if they’re redacted,” Korkmaz said in an interview with The Canadian Press. “This is part of Canada’s Indigenous history. We can learn from this.”

St. Anne’s Indian Residential School was run by the Catholic orders of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate and the Grey Sisters of the Cross from 1902 until 1976 and was funded by the federal government starting in 1906.

It was one of Canada’s most notorious residential schools. Indigenous children from Fort Albany First Nation in northern Ontario were sexually abused, punished by shocks delivered in electric chairs and forced to eat their own vomit, according to Edmund Metatawabin, a survivor and former chief of the First Nation.

Metatawabin was forced to attend the school between 1956 and 1963. He became a chief of his nation in 1988 and used his position to sponsor a panel for survivors to share their stories, putting together a report that triggered the police investigation in autumn 1992.

“The residential school issue is a very sensitive case for us. It was an embarrassing thing for us to face.” he said in an interview.

“It’s hard to say you were abused as a child. You want to keep that private.”

Metatawabin said more than 900 survivors of St. Anne’s decided to talk about their painful memories and testified to the police in the 1990s, resulting in a trove of information and criminal convictions of six former employees at the school.

In 2006, lawyers for former students and for the churches that ran residential schools, the Assembly of First Nations, other Indigenous organizations and the government approved the Indian Residential School Settlement, which included independent assessment processes to set compensation for claims of sexual or serious physical abuse.

However, many survivors of St. Anne’s have taken the federal government to court, seeking to reopen compensation cases that were settled before the partial release of the police documents in 2014.

A group of 60 survivors launched a case in 2013, claiming that the federal government failed to turn over those documents and breached the settlement agreement.

Ontario Superior Court Justice Paul Perell, who has spent years supervising implementation of the settlement agreement, ruled earlier this year the case should be heard by a judge in British Columbia.

Perell had recused himself over his previous criticism of one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

In November, the Ontario Court of Appeal found Perell wrong to order the legal fight to be heard in B.C., saying the case pressed by survivors of St. Anne’s should remain in Ontario. The next hearing is to take place virtually on Dec. 31.

But Justice Brenda Brown of British Columbia Supreme Court issued a court order in May that permits the federal government to destroy the police documents in the new year.

The federal Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Department said in a statement Tuesday the government will retain the police reports until the courts determine the matters before them.

Metatawabin said the documents reveal wrongdoing by the government and the churches. “Instead of making amends, (the government) tried to hide these documents from survivors and from the public.”

The documents have significant value for the Fort Albany First Nation people because they contain elders’ testimonies on their history, Metatawabin said.

“These are sacred words from the elders,” he said. “It’s an insult to the memory of those elders that told their story, that the government took their words from them, and now they want to erase history.”

Korkmaz said these documents are important evidence of the violations committed at St. Anne’s.

“The government for some strange reason is protecting the pedophiles that were at our school,” she said. “A normal citizen of any country, who is caught sexually abusing a child goes to jail. … Why are the priests, the bishops, the cardinals being protected? Why are they allowed to do it?”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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A tale of two priests and the future of the Catholic Church

By Bob Kustra

Recent news of the Vatican defrocking a Boise priest now serving 25 years without parole for possessing violent and extreme child pornography brought back memories long forgotten. Raised in the Catholic Church, I spent my youth as an altar boy with clergy officiating at daily Masses, funerals, weddings and who often assumed administrative or teaching roles in the Catholic schools I attended.

One priest, the principal of my high school, invited his favorite students to his cabin on the river to fish and enjoy water sports in the summer. Looking back on it all, it never once occurred to me during those outings that some of the questions he would ask about our personal lives might be an indicator of some repressed sexual desires that the church seemed to ignore with its vow of celibacy for priests.

It wasn’t until a few years ago when I read an account of the director of the film, “Guardians of the Galaxy”, James Gunn, that I realized the same priest/principal who was befriending boys in my high school was also prominent in the young life of this successful director in a parish across town from my experience. According to Gunn, that same priest would give young boys in his class alcohol and pornography.

In July 2019, the St. Louis Archdiocese would release the names of St. Louis priests with “substantiated allegations of sexual abuse of a minor.” And there on the list was the priest that James Gunn and I encountered in our formative years. He had risen to a top administrative post in the Archdiocese, but it was only after his death that the Archdiocese would identify him as a child abuser.

He died of cancer in 2000 in retirement and was never held accountable. Like Gunn, I was never victimized by this priest, but how many young students around us were violated by this man and had their lives ruined or destroyed in the process?

Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist (Boise, Idaho)

Years later, when I was lieutenant governor of Illinois, the flip side of this sad tale of priestly abuse would enter my life when I was asked by Father Mike Ivers to walk the streets of the near west side of Chicago to see firsthand the impact of failed government policies on the powerless and the poor. Father Mike was pastor of a parish in Chicago’s North Lawndale community, drug- and gang-infested at the time. It was a dangerous assignment for a white priest who requested parish work on Chicago’s south and west side and who, at one point in his ministry, was threatened with a gang hit.

Father Mike fought for his parishioners before the Chicago Housing Authority to improve housing conditions. He worked with police and the courts to rescue juveniles from gangs and a criminal justice system that too often consigned them to a life of crime. He would rail against social service agencies that failed to protect children. But he saved most of his wrath for his own church and its mishandling of countless cases of priest pedophilia. He would take on the Cardinal in advocating for a tougher stance against accused priests and the system of assignment that moved pedophiles from parish to parish.

Father Mike Ivers was a man who lived his faith daily and never once strayed from his priestly vows. He officiated at our daughter’s wedding and at my father’s funeral. We attended Mass at his parish and met some of the finest people of faith we’ve met in our lives. My office staff would assist at Christmastime with the distribution of gifts to kids whose families couldn’t afford Christmas presents. Throughout our friendship, Mike talked often about the toll the celibacy vow had taken on the priesthood, about how its refusal to ordain women held back the church from being the religious and community force it could be in our lives.

In a mid-career correction, Mike realized his own need for an intimacy that he felt should only be achieved with the sacrament of matrimony. He wanted to marry. And because his church forbade married priests, he left the church and his beloved parish. He married, assumed a new life and career in social services.

What happened next you would think is the work of a novelist twisting and turning the plot. It was not. Father Mike, this arch-critic of Archdiocesan complicity in priestly child abuse, was succeeded as pastor of his parish by a priest who became the most notorious child sex-abuser in the history of the Chicago Archdiocese. In yet another failure of the Archdiocese, the priest was not removed after the first offense and went on to commit more crimes of pedophilia. He was sentenced to prison, served his term and has since been confined indefinitely to a state facility for sex offenders for his failure to even admit he has a problem.

Mike Ivers died a few years ago, a humble servant of his God, a man who lived the good life and along the way enriched the lives of his parishioners, friends and family. His life offers hope to Catholics who decry the church’s role in these scandals over the years but look to a time when priests like Mike Ivers are the stories in the news, not pedophiles and church officials who cover up.

There is one thing missing from this account. That would be the Vatican dropping the vow of celibacy from priests’ ordinations. On a recent visit to South America, Pope Francis seemed open to married priests and enhanced roles for women in the church. Will the Vatican admit men and women to the priesthood without the requirement of celibacy? Who knows, but that’s when I know my friend Mike Ivers will rest in peace.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!