“I ask forgiveness, especially for the ways in which many members of the Church and the religious communities cooperated, and also for the indifference they showed, in those projects that destroyed cultures and in the forced assimilation to which the governments of that time resorted, and which reached its climax in the system of compulsory residential schools”.
Pope Francis’s apology to the indigenous peoples of Canada was not the first; his predecessors had preceded him, after the Second Vatican Council opened the way for religious leaders to review the community’s history and its practices throughout history in every field, and to correct errors, emphasizing: “The men of the Church today must take steps toward reform”
For the errors of the Catholic ecclesiastical authority, like those of any other religious authority, have imprinted history with many sins and errors and altered it, being a sovereign authority that transgressed against its peoples, to determine the destinies of many peoples and countries, from the Inquisition to the Crusades to the committing of sexual assaults, and the wars with the Protestants, and the Church’s diminishing of the dignity of woman, and the violation of the rights of the indigenous peoples in the Americas. And the greatest tragedy is that these errors contributed to the formation of the collective memory of peoples, and shaped the relations between societies upon them thereafter. It is true that history cannot be erased, but this apology is not for the past but for the future. The Catholics understood the weight of the history that the community made in times past, and so they wished to write the history of the future anew. The Catholic community understood that there had been no infallibility, and the more the religious community or its members persisted in infallibility, the more their apologies multiplied. “Some of the Fathers said that the Church is an adulteress whom Christ washes with His blood to make her a bride without blemish; for this reason the Church lives always by repentance and thanksgiving”(Dialogue with Patriarch Athenagoras, vol. 1, p. 225)
And what is striking from another angle is that there are influential leaders in the Church who still insist on denying the heinous history and see even the symbolic apology as an unnecessary concession. This indicates, in one way or another, the sickness of the religious institution and the casting of errors upon individuals rather than upon the community’s approach in a certain era.
First point: Confronting history, and confronting papal infallibility
Second point: But as for us, the Orthodox, what then?
First point: The Catholic leadership was able to confront history with a genuine, precise confrontation without fear. It accepted to acknowledge its errors against many, and to be reconciled with itself, and to accept its history without papal pride and its infallibility. It said to itself, “We were not infallible,” and then cried out, “We have erred; we apologize.” It said publicly that we have written history in a wrong way, and caused many wounds, and here we are offering repentance and asking forgiveness. And by declaring its error it wished repentance for its people, in order to win back its children. And what is beautiful here is that the Church which calls for repentance and confession practiced it publicly.
When the Pope apologized in Bolivia in the year 2015, he asked pardon for the crimes committed by the Catholic Church against the indigenous peoples at the time of the colonial era. Before this acknowledgment and request for pardon, the former Bolivian president Evo Morales declared, saying: “For the first time I feel that I have a Pope”.
But in Canada, the leaders of the indigenous peoples later placed a traditional headdress made of feathers upon the Pope’s head. In Eastern language, if you give someone your garment, you make him of yourself.
Some will see these as merely formal matters, but it is difficult for the renunciation of pride and infallibility to be merely formal. And this is what the Governor General of Canada, Mary Simon, affirmed: “It is difficult to confront our true history”.
But as for us, what then?
The Catholic Church was able to precede all the religious leaders in reading its history. As for us, the Orthodox, do we always read that the community’s history was full of errors from identifying with authority to glorifying the emperor, to the suppression of freedoms, the elimination of the role of the other, the schisms and their wars and conflicts ….. And do we have the desire, one day, to carry the burden of the community’s history as though it were our history and we are responsible for it? Why do we see only the history of the saints? It is our history, says Patriarch Athenagoras: what the men of the Church lack most is the spirit of Christ, humility, self-denial, and acceptance of the other stripped of self-interest, and the ability to see the best in him. We are afraid and want to cling to what is worn out because we have grown accustomed to it; we seek always to be in the right against others, and we hide; moldy expressions of humility, a spirit of pride and domination, and we play on the margin of life (Dialogue with Patriarch Athenagoras, vol. 1, p. 212) Therefore, if we do not carry out a genuine critical process of our history and our conduct, we will have condemned ourselves, and consequently Orthodoxy, to spiritual and geographical emigration and to contentment with a symbolic existence.