Tag Archives: Pope Francis

Papal Verbal Flatulence

Posted on May 24, 2024 by CFIRC

Papal Verbal Flatulence

Throne, Altar, Liberty

The Canadian Red Ensign

Thursday, May 23, 2024

Jorge Bergoglio, who under the name Francis became the current pretender to St. Peter’s throne when its last occupant, a much sounder theologian than himself, the late Benedict XVI, resigned, gave an interview to 60 Minutes earlier this week. I didn’t see the episode. The last time I watched an episode of 60 Minutes Andy Rooney’s commentary was still the final segment. Rooney was about the only thing that made the show watchable. I have, however, since read transcripts of the interview as it has generated some controversy. This is not surprising. Bergoglio seems to suffer from a gastro-intestinal disorder that manifests itself in emissions from his mouth of gas that ought to be coming out the other end.

Bergoglio was asked about a number of current issues. He gave abominable answers when it came to some matters such as the immigration invasion of the United States, passable if vague answers on certain other matters of international import, a surprisingly good answer on the ecclesiastical matter of the ordination of women, and a very strange have-it-both-ways answer on the Roman Church’s recent ill-advised foray into the world of same-sex blessings.

The interviewer, Norah O’Donnell, concluded her questioning by asking the Western Patriarch who mistakenly thinks he has universal jurisdiction what gives him hope. His answer began with the single word “Everything” and ended with the following:

And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.

This is what has caused all the fuss because the words in bold have been taken to be in conflict with the doctrine of Original Sin. Original Sin is the doctrine that in the sin of our first parents the entire human race fell and became sinful a condition from which we are unable to extract ourselves making us wholly dependent for our salvation on the grace of God and the redemption provided by Jesus Christ. Unlike doctrines proclaimed by papal decree or even by any of the post-Schism councils falsely regarded as ecumenical by the Roman Communion, Original Sin is a truly Catholic doctrine. Its affirmation is implicit in the condemnation of the heresy of Pelagius by the regional Council of Carthage in 418 AD, later ratified by the General Council of Ephesus in 431 AD, that was received as the third ecumenical council by the pre-Schism Catholic Church. It is essential to both Lutheranism and Calvinism and accordingly is emphasized in the confessions of those traditions. In the Anglican formularies it is affirmed in the ninth of the Articles of Religion. While contemporary online Eastern Orthodox apologists sometimes claim that their Church rejects it this is not the case. What the Eastern Orthodox Church rejects is Original Guilt, the idea that human beings inherit not just a fallen nature corrupted by sin from their first parents but also personal culpability for the sinful act that produced the Fall. Original Guilt and Original Sin are related but different concepts that are often confused with each other in both the East and the West. In the East it has often been assumed that Original Guilt is an essential part of the Western idea of Original Sin, for which reason the Eastern Orthodox usually refer to Original Sin sans Original Guilt as ancestral sin. Since, however, what they affirm as ancestral sin is Original Sin as distinguished from Original Guilt, regardless of whether the latter is affirmed or denied, Original Sin is actually affirmed by both East and West. (1)

So, was what Bergoglio said heretical in the Pelagian way and in conflict with Original Sin?

If you take the offending words – the ones I highlighted in bold, which are repeated in his next sentence – alone, the answer is “not necessarily.” If, by saying that people are fundamentally good, Bergoglio meant that sin and evil do not exist in themselves as things or substances in their own right, but only parasitically in things that are good, then he was right. Indeed, if that is what he meant, he was not only right but expressing the essence of the classical Christian theist version of that to which Gottfried Leibniz gave the name theodicy, the vindication of God in the face of the problem of evil. This is not what Bergoglio meant, but let us pursue this thought a little further before considering the banality that he actually intended.

God is good. Indeed, not only is God good, He is Goodness itself at its purest and most perfect. God created everything other than God that exists and everything that He created He created good. Another way of putting it would be to say that in His grace He gave to all that He had made participation in created goodness which is a finite reflection of His own infinite goodness. Every gift that He gave His creatures was a good gift. To rational creatures, such as ourselves, He gave the gift of free choice. As a gift from God, free choice was both good in itself, and the means to a greater good, the good of rational creatures freely choosing to trust, love, and obey God. It is through our misuse of that good gift that evil entered into the world. Evil, not having been created by God, has no substance of its own, no essence. It does not exist in the most proper sense of the word. It has neither form, that which makes a thing the thing that it is rather than some other sort of thing, nor matter, that which makes a thing an actual thing rather than merely the idea of a thing. It is present in things which do exist, in the proper sense of the word, which do have form and matter, in the way a hole exists in a wall, not a hole that is put there by an architect so that a window may be placed in it, but a hole that somebody makes by taking a sledgehammer to it in a fit of anger. It is a hole, in other words, where there is not supposed to be a hole. It is an absence or deficiency. What is absent, in the hole that is evil, is a kind of good. It is not, however, the entirety of the goodness that was bestowed upon the created thing in which evil parasitically resides that is absent, because if the entirety of that goodness were absent, the thing itself would no longer exist, existence being the most basic gift of goodness that God bestows upon His creatures.

Peter Lombard explored this at length in the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth distinctions of the second book of his Sentences. The sixth paragraph of the second chapter of the distinction reads “From the aforesaid, it is gathered and inferred that, if there is an evil will and an evil action, insofar as it is, it is good. But does anyone deny that an evil will and an evil action exist? And so an evil will or action, insofar as it is, is a good. And insofar as it is a will or an action, it is similarly a good; but it is evil from this vice; this vice is not from God, nor is it anything.”(2) Lombard is a particularly important authority on this matter as his Sentences are a bridge of sorts between Patristic and Medieval theology. The Scriptures and the Church Fathers, especially St. Augustine were his source material, his Sentences provided the structure for Systematic Theology for centuries to come, being the textbook from which St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus, and basically every Western theologian of note from the thirteenth century until the Reformation studied. (3) Also worthy of note in this context are the third paragraph in the fourth chapter of the thirty-fourth distinction:

From this it is gathered that, when man is called evil, nothing else is meant than an evil good. Hence Augustine adds, in the same place: “What is an evil man, if not an evil nature, because man is a nature? Now, if man is a good thing because he is a nature, what else is an evil man, if not an evil good? Yet, when we distinguish between these two things, we find that he is not evil because he is a man, nor is he good because he is iniquitous; but he is called good because he is a man, evil because iniquitous. And so each nature, even if it is defective, insofar as it is a nature, is good; insofar as it is defective, it is evil.” (4)

And the second paragraph of the fifth chapter of the same distinction which paragraph consists entirely of quotes from St. Augustine’s Enchiridion:

“And these two opposites exist at the same time in such a way that, if the good did not exist in which evil might exist, evil could not exist at all, because not only would corruption not have a place to stay, but it would have no source from which to arise, unless there were something that could be corrupted, because corruption is nothing other than the extermination of the good. And so evils have arisen from goods, and cannot exist in anything other than good things.” “Therefore, there was no source at all from which an evil nature could arise, except from the good nature of angel and man, from which the evil will first arose.” (5)

Note that Lombard here is quoting the Church Father who led the battle for orthodoxy regarding Original Sin and the need for grace against the Pelagian heresy. It is also worth noting that these distinctions follow immediately after the section (distinctions thirty to thirty-three) of this book that covers Original Sin and are the segue into the discussion of actual sin, i.e., sinful acts, that closes the book.

Of course, none of this is what Jorge Bergoglio had in mind. He probably doesn’t know the difference between Peter Lombard, Vince Lombardi and Guy Lombardo. I could imagine him, in the unlikely event that somebody were to read this essay to him, asking “Peter Lombard? Wasn’t he an American football coach? Or the guy who used to sing Auld Lang Syne on the radio every New Year’s Eve?” except that I seriously doubt he knows who any of these men were.

No, Bergoglio was just being a liberal, a progressive, a leftist. The third sentence in the quotation confirms that. Here it is again “Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.” That’s that heart about which the prophet Jeremiah said that it “is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9) Or about which Jesus said “proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man.” (Matt. 15:19) So no, he was not simply affirming that human nature, as created by God, is a good thing, in which sin/evil is present as a parasitical defect, as orthodox theologians have always taught. He was affirming the liberal/progressive/leftist’s basic idea that the evils from which we suffer are not due to a moral defect in us but from defects in the structure of society. If we could just get rid of economic/social/political disparity, if we could just eliminate poverty, illiteracy, or this-or-that other social ill, then everybody would finally be perfectly happy. This never works because the ultimate cause of human suffering is not to be found in the organization of society, the distribution of its resources, or any of these other things, but in the human heart, in that very defect, Original Sin, which the Church affirms but which liberalism denies. The Church is right and liberalism, including the liberal that the Cardinals of the Roman Communion have placed at the top of their hierarchy in the seat they wrongly claim to be vested with universal jurisdiction, is wrong. The tragic consequence of liberalism’s error is that by denying that the ultimate cause of suffering is a defect in the human heart liberalism treats suffering as being treatable by political, social, and economic engineering, but since the ultimate cause of suffering is that defect in the human heart it is not so treatable and furthermore liberalism’s attempts to treat it by these means inevitably become, despite their denial that the problem is a defect in human nature, attempts to engineer better human beings, which attempts are doomed to fail and to fail in such a way as to increase rather than decrease human suffering.

St Peter in his first epistle advised his readers to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” (1 Pet. 3:15) This is precisely what O’Donnell asked Bergoglio. While Bergoglio may have succeeded to St. Peter’s local jurisdiction over the Church in Rome he has sadly not inherited the reason for the Apostle’s hope. St. Peter went on to write:

Having a good conscience; that, whereas they speak evil of you, as of evildoers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ. For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing. For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water. The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ: Who is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God; angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him. (1 Pet. 3:16-22)

Bergoglio, in his answer said “everything” and mentioned human goodness. He did not mention Jesus Christ. That tells us everything we need to know about Bergoglio.– Gerry T. Neal

(1) See the section on “Original Sin” in the fifth chapter of Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, first published in Russian in 1963, first published in English in 1983 by the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. The section in question can be found on pages 162 to 169 of the current (third) edition of the English translation, and the footnotes by the translator, Fr. Seraphim Rose, on the first and last pages of the section are particularly helpful and to the point, as is the final sentence in the proper text of the section “Thus original sin is understood by Orthodox theology as a sinful inclination which has entered into mankind and become its spiritual disease.”

(2) Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 2, On Creation, translated by Giulio Silano, (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2008, 2013), 176-177.

(3) A commentary on the Sentences was the thesis required for a Masters degree in Western Medieval universities. St. Thomas Aquinas’ became his first published work. Most of the extent writings of John Duns Scotus are his lectures at the universities of Oxford and Paris on the Sentences.

(4) Lombard, op cit., 172-173, his quotation from St. Augustine is from the Enchiridion (Handbook).

(5) Ibid., 173.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: 60 Minutes, Andy Rooney, Fr. Seraphim Rose, Gerry T Neal, Guy Lombardo, Michael Pomazansky, Norah O'Donnell, Original Sin, Pelagius, Peter Lombard, Pope Francis, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Vince Lombardi

Refuting Parliament’s Goofy Guiltmongering Resolution Calling the Residential Schools a “Genocide”

Posted on November 1, 2022 by CFIRC

RUBENSTEIN: Is Canada really a genocidal country?

Leah Gazan, NDP Member of Parliament for Winnipeg-Centre.

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With no prior notice or debate, members of Parliament gave unanimous consent October 27, to a motion calling on the federal government to recognize Canada’s residential schools as genocide.

Leah Gazan, the NDP member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre whose father is a Holocaust survivor from the Netherlands, introduced the motion following Question Period. Gazan brought forward a similar motion in June last year which failed to receive unanimous consent.

Gazan’s motion reads as follows: “That, in the opinion of the House that the government must recognize what happened in Canada’s Indian residential schools as genocide, as acknowledged by Pope Francis and in accordance with article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”

Pope Francis

“It was historic,” said Gazan: “We moved the pendulum in quite an extreme way.”

Much of the moral authority for the motion’s unanimous consent seems to have come from the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, who described the schools as genocidal following a trip to Canada this summer, though he didn’t use the word during the visit.

“Yes, it’s a technical word, genocide. I didn’t use it because it didn’t come to mind. But yes, I described it. Yes, it’s a genocide,” Francis said in July on his trip home in describing what he earlier condemned as the forced assimilation of indigenous children.

Neither unanimous decisions nor moral authority prove genocide has occurred. Only the existence of certain facts can do so. Is Gazan’s accusation demonstrably true or has the pendulum moved so far “in quite an extreme way” that the definition of genocide has been rendered meaningless?

Is there any relationship, for example, between the government-funded and supported Indian Residential School attendance of some 150,000 students over the 113-year period — most of it voluntary as shown here and here — and generally acknowledged genocides?

As of June 2021, the government of Canada officially recognized eight genocides: the Holocaust (Second World War), the Armenian genocide (1915–1917), the Holodomor (1932–1933), the Rwandan genocide (1994), the Srebrenica massacre (1995), the genocide of Yazidis by ISIL (2014), the Uyghur genocide (2014–present), and the Rohingya genocide (2016–present).

Article II of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as an intention to destroy “In whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” by “Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;” “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

No mass-murder of indigenous children or adults has ever taken place in Canada; not a single authenticated murder of a child by staff members has occurred at any Indian Residential School; though discipline and punishment were as harsh as at any other school, whether residential or not, any serious bodily or mental harm was haphazard at most and no different from its occurrence in the general population; most indigenous leaders and parents wanted their children to receive a Western-style education; there has never been an effort to physically eliminate the aboriginal population of Canada — in fact, saving indigenous lives has always been the norm; sterilization and forced adoption were standard practices for various ethnic and religious groups for identical reasons in earlier times; girls who became pregnant were expelled from their school; and forced attendance at a residential school, when it occurred, was mainly for social welfare reasons and not a permanent transfer of children from one group to another.

Conversely, no objective application of the UN criteria could deny what occurred in Rwanda in 1994 was genocide. Goaded by months of propaganda that denounced their enemies as cockroaches, the country’s Hutu army units, militias and packs of machete-armed civilians hunted, herded and swept through their country’s Tutsi minority. In less than four months, an estimated 500,000 to 1,000,000 Rwandans were killed, including about 70 percent of the Tutsi population, and 250,000 to 500,000 women were raped.

Fast forward to Canada in 2015 when the Final Summary Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission said the schools constituted “cultural genocide,” a phenomenon deliberately excluded from Article II of the genocide convention. A politically loaded term, cultural genocide can easily describe the ordinary enculturation of millions of Canadian residents, both aboriginal and immigrant, whose Western education resulted in the internalization of British — and French — based lifeways and beliefs, resulting in the loss of pre-existing ethnic languages and traditions over the generations.

But since 2015, many indigenous leaders and experts said “cultural genocide” was not a sufficient label rather than an erroneous one. Instead, they insisted boarding school attendance should just be called unqualified genocide, an assertion also supported by the Trudeau government, most clearly shown by its immediate acceptance of the conclusion of the 2019 inquiry into missing and murdered and Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) the residential school system and its ongoing legacy constitute genocide.

“I have acknowledged that I accept the findings of the report, and the issue that we have is that people are getting wrapped up in debates over a very important and powerful term. As I’ve said, we accept the finding that this was genocide.”

But is there any legal, moral, or factual basis for this assertion?

No there is not. None of the UN Convention’s features seem to readily apply to the IRS legacy of the disappearance or murder of 1,200 or so indigenous women and girls since 1980. The independent murders of indigenous females by numerous unconnected and mainly indigenous men, acting on their own, were certainly not “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part” a particular racial or ethnic group through the coordinated efforts of some other racial or ethnic group. Nor do the organization, causes, and consequences of these murders have anything in common with the genocides officially recognized by the civilized world.

The MMIWG Report rightly stressed not all genocides are the same. This is correct but for the wrong reasons.

The Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust, for example, could hardly be more different in key respects. The latter took place in numerous Nazi-occupied European countries as well as in Germany. It stretched over at least four long years from 1941 to 1945. It was held in secret to avoid outraging the rest of the world and perhaps, to limit opposition within Germany. It was minutely organized by the Nazi government, the SS, Gestapo, and other Nazi units. It employed multiple killing methods, ranging from mass shootings to medical experiments to the use of gas chambers. It murdered far more victims, including more than six million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other “undesirables.” And it was part of a larger extermination project that would take 14 million lives.

Despite the many differences and the varying definitions of genocide, there is one necessary and sufficient feature that distinguishes a genuine genocide: the murder of members of another group be deliberate, systematic and organized, as opposed to coincidental, unconnected and uncoordinated. This is why the United Nations General Assembly resolved in 1946 that, “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings.” Translation: A lot of random murders, however heart-breaking and outrageous they may be, do not add up to a genocide.

Irwin Cotler, head of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, a former attorney-general of Canada and arguably the country’s most prominent international human rights lawyer said it best when he argued: “Perhaps they had to use a term like genocide in order to sound the alarm and people will take notice and finally action will result… But I think we have to guard against using that term in too many ways because then it will cease to have the singular importance and horror that it warrants. If we say everything is a genocide, then nothing is a genocide.”

Like all other nations, Canada has never been a perfect country. But it has never been a genocidal one. By almost any measure, no country has done more for its indigenous people.

Yet if this genocide is still ongoing, as the MMIWG report strongly asserts when it uses this word no fewer than 72 times in its first volume alone, and given the prime minister’s acceptance of this assertion, should not he and his government be charged minimally with a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court in the Hague?

Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology, The University of Manitoba, and editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues Newsletter.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: Armenian Genocide, Holodomor, Leah Gazen, Pope Francis, Residential School "genocide"

His Holiness Grovels– Anti-White Debauchery

Posted on July 30, 2022 by CFIRC

His Holiness Grovels– Anti-White Debauchery

The big news from Canada is that Pope Francis is finishing up what he calls a “pilgrimage of repentance,” and what I call the white-man crawl, and I’m not talking about swimming. The Pope has put on one of the sorriest spectacles of voluntary public humiliation the world has ever seen.

It all has to do with the alleged horrors perpetrated against Canadian Indians by the Catholic church. As we see from this article from last Thursday called “Pope Francis Issues Apology,”

“More than 150,000 native children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s . . . . The aim was to Christianize and assimilate them into mainstream society, which previous Canadian governments considered superior.”

Forced to attend schools? Well, so were white children. It’s called compulsory education. A lot of Indian Children went to boarding schools because there were no schools in the wilds.

And yes, they were taught Christianity and yes, the Canadian government thought Western Civilization was better than illiteracy and shamanism. The government was right.

However, as Scientific American kindly explains, “Canada’s Residential Schools Were a Horror. Founded to carry out the genocide of Indigenous people, they created conditions that killed thousands of children.”

It’s hard to find images of what went on in those schools, but I found these: 10:43 – 12:02. Yep, looks like a serious Catholic education, but that’s what white Catholic children got, too.

If they taught girls how to sew, I guess it was out of pure spite.

But today, we are supposed to believe that after soccer practice and “Silent Night,” the nuns and priests were beating, buggering, raping, and even murdering these children.

What got the hysteria going was a report from over a year ago. The New York Times put it on the front page: “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.”

Two hundred fifteen bodies were supposed to have been found in the Kamloops residential school in British Columbia.

The strong implications was that nuns and priests killed these children –through violence or neglect – and dumped them in a secret mass grave.

Canada covered itself in sackcloth and ashes. Government flags went to half-mast for seven months – longer than ever in Canadian history.

Canada declared a new holiday in honor of the 215 children: National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

A mob tore down a statue of Queen Victoria in Winnipeg.

Another mob tore down the statue of the current queen, Elizabeth II.

Catholic haters burned dozens of churches and vandalized many more. [[0:08 – 0:13]] The one you just saw burning was more than a century old and looked like this on the inside.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said burning churches was “unacceptable and wrong,” but also that it was “understandable.”

As I noted in January in this video – and I don’t want to cover too much old ground – the whole thing was a fraud.

A bright young anti-racist college instructor named Sarah Beaulieu said she used ground-penetrating radar to find these children.

Except she didn’t. Not one body has been found. What her radar may have found were tree roots or other soil disturbances, but no one has exhumed a single bone. At first, there was talk about digging up the children for DNA identification so bodies could be returned to grieving relatives, but now the plan is to leave the alleged graves undisturbed – a much wiser move. And now there’s a new horror. Some of the buried children were as young as three! Three-year-olds didn’t go to boarding schools – but who cares about that?

Only a few newspapers – the New York Post for one – saw through the hoax. “’Biggest fake news story in Canada’: Kamloops mass grave debunked by academics.”

But most media swallow any story about bad, white people, and Indians know a good thing when they see one. With the dazzling example of Kamloops before them, Indians suddenly found 160 alleged graves on Penelakut Island, in British Columbia, 182 in Cranbrook,– also in BC – and a whopping 751 in Marieval, Saskatchewan.

All these findings are dubious, but Mr. Trudeau, pictured here, has been busy apologizing.

He must have got lonely, because he decided the Pope should apologize, too, which he did in Rome, to a delegation of Indian chiefs. But Mr. Trudeau decided that wasn’t enough and insisted the Pope come to Canada to apologize all over again.

Pope Francis is 85 years old. He had serious intestinal surgery last year, he has bad sciatica, torn knee ligaments, and is in a wheelchair, but you can do the white-man crawl from any position, so he has just hobbled through a week of what must have been pure hell.

With Justin Trudeau and countless Indian chiefs keeping an eye on him, he, in his words, “begged forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against indigenous peoples.” He said it was awful that “many Christians supported the colonizing mentality of the powers that oppressed Indigenous peoples.” He was “deeply sorry” for the “deplorable evil” and “disastrous error” of “cultural destruction and forced assimilation.” He kissed the hands of Indian chiefs in an appeal for forgiveness.

Was it enough? Of course not! It’s never enough. As CNN reported, “The Pope went to Canada to apologize. For some indigenous school survivors, he triggered more pain.”

These schools don’t have graduates, you see. They have only survivors. There’s a 24-hours-a-day crisis line for “survivors” “experiencing pain or distress,” even though all but a handful of the schools closed 45 years ago!

CNN happily found an 80-year-old “survivor” “experiencing distress.” He said any apology is useless. He blames the Catholics for his alcoholism and terrible marriage. Some chiefs refused even to show up to have their hands kissed, saying there was no chance the pope would grovel enough.

The harshest cut was from Justin Trudeau. “The Pope’s apology to Indigenous people doesn’t go far enough, Canada says.”

It’s not enough to apologize for physical, verbal, psychological and spiritual abuse. The pope has to apologize explicitly for rape. Also, he didn’t talk about the evil of the church as an institution, only about the evil of individual Christians. Mr. Trudeau seems to have forgotten that Catholic orders operated only 66 of the 139 residential schools and that the church has already spent $50 million on restitution and promises $30 million more.

Needless to say, we have heard nothing from Indians who liked the schools. You have to dig, but you can find: “Rescued from the memory hole: Some First Nations people loved their residential schools.”

It quotes a Canadian Indian named Tomson Highway, a pianist and playwright that Macleans magazine calls “one of the 100 most important people in Canadian history.”

He was in a school from ages six to 15 and says, “All we hear is the negative stuff, nobody’s interested in the positive, the joy in that school. Nine of the happiest years of my life I spent it at that school.”

Cece Hodgson-McCauley was the first woman to become a chief in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

She called her years at the school the best of her life. “My family says the same thing, my sister swears by it. We were treated wonderfully.”

The chief, who died in 2018 at age 95, said people lie about how bad things were to get money. She said older Indians who graduated are afraid to talk about what the schools were really like.

Now, of course, everything an unhappy Indian says is the “lived experience” of a person of color and must never be doubted. Back to this article.

One “survivor” says when she got to school, she was issued clothes with a number on them, and everyone thereafter called her by number, not her name. Really? I have read a lot about these schools, and I never heard that. I think a lot of these stories are false, but no one dares challenge them.

And guess what: Americans might get their own papal roadshow.

I bet you didn’t realize we had boarding schools for Indians, too.

I’m sure it will be no trouble to find people who claim they were beaten and buggered.

Or even better – that their parents were beaten and buggered.

And we have already taken the first step. “US to Investigate Government-run Native American Boarding Schools.

That was inspired by Kamloops, of course. And here’s Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, who will run the investigation, and who is an American Indian. She says, “We must uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences of these schools.”

Brace yourselves.

But what I find most grotesque is that the pope seems to have swallowed every tall tale, every insult against people long dead who can’t defend themselves.

I don’t doubt there was some tough discipline, even some cruelty, but I suspect the vast majority of teachers did their very best for those children.

And by apologizing for “spiritual abuse,” isn’t the pope repudiating the whole missionary effort? Doesn’t he believe Catholics saved the souls of many converts? No. As this article from 2018 notes, if you ask “Do Atheists Go to Heaven? Pope Francis Says Yes.”

So I guess all that Catholicism was spiritual abuse.

So far as I can tell, Pope Francis is not just a miserable white man; he’s a miserable Catholic, who doesn’t even believe in the church’s mission. It must be grievous for Catholics to have such a head of their church – the Vicar of Christ himself.

Like nations that don’t defend themselves, institutions that don’t defend themselves die. Pope Francis is old and frail. The church will be under new management soon.