Moral ground lies buried at residential schools

By Letter to the Editor on July 15, 2021.

Editor:
The exceedingly measured tone of Mr. Giesbrecht’s letter to the editor, “Burning churches not the solution”, is truly a triumph of both compartmentalization and rationalization.
From the calm plateau of a spectator, he decries further vandalism and/or violence against church buildings, or more accurately, the religious ideas they represent, probably seeing this as profound disrespect for something that he has been taught to value, but also pointless retaliation for past “mistreatment” of Indigenous children. Here he masters the understatement.
If only such appalling crimes of adults against children, always the ultimate breach of faith and trust, actually did remain safely in the past, but we all know that sexual abuse continues as we speak, wherever in the world “celibate” Catholic priests are in proximity to unsuspecting children.
Aspiring to the airy “divine” of the supernatural with its soothing, immortalizing doctrine at the expense of their own common human natures, they have thrown out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Literally. If truth is the essential precursor to any real reconciliation, I challenge all who are sanguine about their continued affiliation with Catholicism to google the CBC interview with Bert Allen, whose story is only one of so many “survivors,” giving new meaning to the word. The unnecessary, casual cruelty and the utter depravity of these perpetrators in the name of their “beliefs” is simply stunning.
The government of the day has much culpability in establishing the residential “schools” in the first place, but imagine if they had recruited actual educators instead of Catholic nuns and priests who are more rightly associated with indoctrination. At the time, Catholicism was clearly seen as occupying the highest moral ground available, and so was the logical choice as a remedial, civilizing force for people who were primarily seen as “savages.”
But things change. At this point in time, that high moral ground lies buried with thousands of children in unmarked graves. Is that still not enough? My grandfather’s hired man who was in World War II spoke with horror about seeing baby skeletons at the bottom of a well outside a convent. A Catholic convent.
Patricia Pargeter
Lethbridge