It was May of 2021. Reports of “unmarked graves” of indigenous Canadian children were spreading like monkeypox at a George Michael concert. We were just coming out of our third lockdown in Canada. And as people started to gather again, the scuttlebutt around the dinner table centered on the supposed discovery of one of the worst sins in the history of the Catholic Church.
Not only had the Church participated in the awful Residential School system (more on this in a bit), but those dastardly priests and nuns who ran those places were not only pedophiles and colonizers, they were also murderers who unceremoniously chucked dead native children into holes in the ground.
The narrative quickly went from “unmarked graves” on one former Residential School site—a site now owned and operated by a native group—to “mass graves,” you know, like at a death camp.
The first “mass grave” that was discovered was supposedly home to about 215 children—there was no verification of whether they were children or not, but “dead children” makes for a better anti-Catholic headline. Then, another was discovered with about 700, which meant that the narrative was now “the Catholic Church killed a thousand indigenous children and threw them into mass graves to cover up their murders.”
Now, there have been evil men and women in the Church, this is to be sure, but the level of vitriol and fantastical imagination required to sell the story—and to buy it—was a new level of “fake news.”
You might be wondering what a Residential School even is.
Well, the Residential School system was a government program wherein native children from remote areas were taken—often against the will of their parents, which is wrong—to boarding schools. It was the national police who took the children, not the Church. Many of the schools were run by the Catholic Church, although many were run by Protestant groups.
Some will say that the Church should never have offered to use her schools for the school system, but the children would have gone somewhere regardless. Although perhaps misguided, the logic of the Catholic schools was: “It would be better if we could give them a Catholic education, rather than have them sent to Protestant or secular institutions.”
The official program ran for about 50 years, although many of the schools served native children before and after the program ended.
The experience of the children in these schools was mixed —s ome reported that they had the greatest time of their lives, while others sadly had the opposite experience. For some it was a chance at an education and an opportunity to learn the Catholic Faith. Many native children lived in the most remote locations, in abject poverty, and with no chance at a successful future; so for them it was enormously important. For others, they never adapted well to boarding school, and their families were strained as a result of the separation. Sadly, for some, they experienced sexual abuse at the hands of priests and nuns.
The scope of the time in history is too much to go into here.
At any rate, as Canada has declined in Christian sentiment, Marxist sentiment has risen. Thus, leftists have co-opted the legitimate grievances of real victims and turned the whole thing into an opportunity to have a Canadian “Black Lives Matter” situation. Claims of racism emanating from every white person abound, along with calls for social justice and demands that you use some cut-and-paste emoji or social media avatar.
Also, since there was legitimate abuse in some cases, it is basically impossible to dispute any of the claims or separate fact from fiction without being called a supporter of pedophilia or worse.
Taking all this into consideration, it is easy enough to see how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his legion of leftists could take the legitimate history of some real victims and mix the story with a bunch of fake-news vitriol in order to kick-start a call for social justice.
You see, leftists often hate the Church and Jesus Christ, and they view traditional religion as oppressive and outdated. But they of course are irate when Christians are caught not acting Christ-like!
Eventually, the mainstream conservative news had the courage—a rare occurrence—to roundly debunk the narrative in the national media. In a masterful piece entitled “The year of the graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves,” Canadian journalist Terry Glavin obliterated the claims that any such graves were discovered.
It only took the legacy media about four months to catch up to a story I had already written at LifeSite. Not bad, all things considered.
All children who ever attended the schools were accounted for, and the supposed mass graves were in fact community cemeteries that existed long before the school program. Oh, and in some places, there were no bodies seen via ground penetrating radar; instead there were aberrations in the soil, which is a fancy term for tree roots and big rocks.
Dozens of churches were burned to the ground—many of them native parishes. Flags were flown at half mast for six months at all federal sites per Trudeau’s orders. Canada was going to swallow the mass grave hoax, and we were going to swallow it all the way!
Even Canada Day was “cancelled” in 2021, which of course was a national reminder that the Catholic Church had so stained the country that she not only ruined religion and native children, but of course she ruined patriotism.
As anti-Catholic hatred spread across the country, calls for “apologies” from the Vatican grew. Of course, Pope Benedict already apologized more than a decade before, but that was when Conservative Stephen Harper was in charge, and now it was time for the Liberals to have their fun shaming the Church!
This spring, native leaders met with the pope…and he apologized to them again. And, just to seal the deal, he has now come to Canada to—you guessed it!—apologize again.
He made his official apology on Monday, and as I predicted the same day, the leftists who have co-opted native Canadian culture would not accept the apology.
Lo and behold! The leftists have rejected the pope’s mea culpa, and will not be satisfied until the Church admits she is the Whore of Babylon. Hopefully that’s not something even Pope Francis would do.
The above comes from a July 29 story by Kennedy Hall in Crisis magazine.
It will never stop as long as there’s either money or publicity to be made. Pope Francis fed the troll with his misguided visit.
The Church needs to be accountable for her sins and seek repentance just as each of us must do in our own lives through confession. Perhaps there was some exaggeration in the stories of abuse and deaths, however, there is evidence that some abuse occurred at these schools. The Church should have NEVER participated in this program. Pope Francis has done the right thing in seeking forgiveness and promoting healing. Now, it is time to move on and for the Church to continue its mission of evangelization and serving the poor.
Pope Francis needs to apologize for all the babies he’s let be aborted. He needs to apologize to the pro-life community in the United States for not standing up to Obama when he went and talked to the United States Congress and addressed them without even a mention of abortion. He’s had a chance in so many occasions to stand up for the unborn and yet he would rather stand up for dead people. Seems to me that he is part of the problem, part of the pro-death colonization of the planet that wants people to have only so many children if any children at all. He reminds me of the king in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Afraid of children, afraid to take responsibility. Not to worry God can raise people out of rocks. The more they try to destroy these children the more children will come. God will not be out done by hate. Love, openness to life. Willingness to sacrifice. Support of mothers and fathers and families. That’s what I want to see from the shepherd of my church.
It is not the Pope’s job to control people, even if people are doing something really really sinful.
Stop blaming people who have not done anything wrong for the actions of people who have.
You have diffused responsibility to the point where you are blaming the innocent.
“It is not the Pope’s job to control people, even if people are doing something really really sinful.” Well, you really had me there…until I considered your using the word “control.” Loaded as it is with totalitarian connotations, the word is used to counter Wheels assertion that Francis owes pro-lifers an apology. While the pope cannot control politicians like Obama, Biden et al., he can be a strong moral spokesman for the unborn but instead has blown an uncertain trumpet. And for this one could justly argue he owes pro-lifers an apology.
He has never been ambiguous about abortion.
Tell that to Biden.
He knows.
This is something that Christians take for granted-that an apology would be accepted. It used to be that way but less so today.
A lot of people just say that they are sorry to get out of the consequences of their behavior.
Or hoping to get people to shut up.
The Catholic Church needs to do whatever it can to honestly make reparation.
Families should be told how their children died. Every person’s story should be heard.
Instead of going around apologizing, we should be asking “How have we harmed you and your family?” first. Every individual in any country who has been harmed by the Church or an agent of the Church should have their opportunity to be heard and to make their own personal request for what they need to achieve peace and reconciliation.
Any thinking adult who is not in denial or delusional could have seen through this hoax in a New York minute. Hard to feel sorry for suckers.
The author himself needs to stop apologizing. There was no rampant abuse.
Trudeau, like Obama, is a red-diaper baby. Red Francis, well . . .
just a bunch of showbiz/boshizz