Penance is required for the church’s residential school sins – by Diane Francis (Financial Post – July 6, 2021)

https://financialpost.com/

Guaranteeing the security and well-being of children in a society is a sacred trust. Both church and state were to blame in Canada for this terrible stain on the country’s history

My late mother spent her childhood in a Roman Catholic orphanage in Chicago with her siblings. She never talked about it. She eventually left the church when I was young. She never fully explained why.

My family history is another reason why Canada’s renewed residential school scandal, because of the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves near some of these schools, has hit me harder than most.

It’s an abomination and the Catholic Church has much to answer for. These unmarked graves were found near some of their schools and others are being probed.

The new revelations have sparked the burning of 10 Catholic churches thus far. Nearly three-quarters of Canada’s 130 residential schools were run by Roman Catholic missionary congregations. The rest were managed by Presbyterians, Anglicans and the United Church of Canada.

From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 Indigenous children were “orphaned” and incarcerated in state-funded Christian boarding schools in an effort to assimilate them into Canadian society.

For the rest of this article: https://financialpost.com/diane-francis/diane-francis-penance-is-required-for-the-churchs-residential-school-sins