Pope Francis’ Easter Hypocrisy
Refusing to apologize for Canada’s culturally genocidal, horrifying, Church-led, Residential School system is precisely what it means to “turn away from the cross.”
There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with Pope Francis tweet yesterday morning, at least not from the perspective of Christian theology:
But I’ve been trying to process exactly what that means, exactly, especially since I had just finished reading in the Toronto Star that the Holy See wouldn’t offer an official apology for the cultural genocide and violent abuse endured by Indigenous people in Canada’s residential school system. Despite a request for one from the Indigenous community in the Recommendations to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Pope Francis said he was “declining to offer an apology,” an obvious dismissal of past wrongs committed in the name of the Catholic Church. Indeed, it wasn’t that he wouldn’t acknowledge the harm caused by the Catholic church over the years, saying that he was aware of the findings of the Commission and was taking them “seriously,” but instead that he was choosing not to apologize for it.
I’m struck by the arrogance on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, to acknowledge that grievous harm was caused in the past to an entire set of Indigenous people groups, all while making the decision not to apologize for it. And while he did not rule out a visit to Canada in the future, I know that no visit to Canada would be complete without both an acknowledgment of the harm caused by the residential schools, and an official apology on behalf of the church for the pain and suffering handed on down through generations.
In thinking about the juxtaposition between Pope Francis’ tweet and his refusal to offer an apology for acknowledged wrongs, I was reminded that the Lord’s Prayer does not come without wisdom. In it, Jesus instructs us explicitly to ask God for forgiveness for our sins, just as we forgive those who have sinned against us. I’m struck by which one comes first — the acknowledgment of one’s own sins — before anyone has the right to say anything about someone else’s ability to forgive, the heart must be clean of one’s own sins. This jives with a familiar teaching in the following sections of the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus instructs his followers to be sure to pull the log out of their own eye before pointing out the speck in another’s eye — reconciliation is not about acknowledging the sins of other people, it is, primarily, about acknowledging your own sins first and doing what you can to make it right.
I should say that I’m deeply aware that I spend a lot of my own time pointing out the speck in other people’s eyes. While I am relatively confident in my ability to see where I might be going wrong and to course correct, it may not always look like that to others. I’m thankful for my friends and family who challenge me and shape me, asking me to examine and challenge myself with the same vigour I do for others. So, I want to be careful when I say that the Pope should offer unconditional apologies to Canada’s First Peoples — I’m not trying to sit here and throw stones at easy targets. Instead, I think that the Pope, as the prime representative of the Catholic Church, is the only one with the position and the authority to offer an apology to the Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island on behalf of the Church, and, as a result, has abdicated on one of the most important components of his office — assuming responsibility for the good and the bad that comes from the institution of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Cross and the Resurrection are central components of the Christian faith, as the Pope indicated in his tweet. It’s not there for decoration, or to even just make a great story. It’s the penultimate point to which Jesus’ teaching ministry was leading. As Diana Butler Bass points out, his journey to the cross was as political as it was spiritual.
Jesus came to provide freedom and justice for all people, and he continually found himself standing with the oppressed, frequently defending them to government figures, religious teachers and theologians, gathering to him a crowd of misfits and upstart failures. Jesus’ message of love stood in direct opposition to the levers of power that create marginalization, and when condemned to death by those very same levers of power, death on a cross, he did so willingly.
Let me be crystal clear: when the Pope, who claims the mantle of God’s Emissary to the Roman Catholic Church, says that he “felt that he could not personally respond” to the request for an apology, he is making a decision not to offer an apology:
The decision not to offer an apology is as much a sin against God as anything else is, given clear and consistent instructions in the Christian scriptures to active examination of one’s own actions towards others.
