Many Catholics will be grieving the death of Pope Francis.
But not all.
Francis was the most political pope in memory. He was either a socialist, or a communist, depending on how you define those terms, and there wasn’t a leftist leader or cause he didn’t like. Or a conservative leader or cause that he did. Pope Francis stuck his big papal nose into every progressive issue — like climate change — that appeared on his papal radar, and he didn’t hesitate to offer political opinions on a multitude of issues, no matter how little he knew about them.
One of those issues was Canadian history. In rambling remarks, on an airplane over the ocean, late at night, the tired and ailing octogenarian was charmed by an attractive young reporter into saying that residential schools were genocide. This was odd, because his carefully prepared apology earlier in the day said nothing about genocide, and was only slightly more effusive than the apologies his predecessors had given — namely that they regretted the harm that had been done, but also acknowledged the good work that countless priests and nuns had done to educate Indian children.
But in that airplane the late pope chose to throw caution to the wind, and at the same time throw under the bus the thousands of priests, nuns, teachers, and other workers — indigenous and non-indigenous — who had ever worked at the hundreds of residential schools. He accused them of committing genocide on the very children they were teaching. The ailing pope — who clearly believed some version of the now debunked Kamloops story about sinister deaths and secret burials — in a few careless comments — changed Canadian history.
This is how casually he tossed off a few words on a subject that was of such profound importance t Canadians.
“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.
Indigenous activists realized quickly that those few careless words had given them exactly what they needed. Their genocide motion, based on the now debunked Kamloops claim, had failed to pass immediately after the Kamloops claim was made. But with the pope’s late night mutterings they had what they needed.
Their spokesperson was Leah Gazan, who had made her first attempt, based on the claim about the 215 secret burials. She headed back to Parliament the next year with the same motion, and it was the Pope’s late night casual words about genocide that clinched it.
It was a strange twist, because these same activists had aggressively promoted the deeply anti-Catholic conspiracy theory that evil Catholic priests and nuns had committed atrocities, including murder and secret burials of indigenous children — the very claims led to church burnings.
But now, these same anti-Catholic proponents were claiming that every word coming from the pope’s mouth, no matter how misinformed or thoughtless, must be regarded as the gospel truth. Simply put, non-believers appeared to be arguing in favour of some version of the doctrine of papal infallibility. But never mind.
Meanwhile our elected representatives, who had never taken the time to investigate the many holes in the bogus Kamloops claim, and consequently believed some version of it, were swayed by the pope’s casual remarks. Incredibly, they took exactly 47 seconds to pass a motion convicting their own nation of genocide.
This was not their finest hour — sorry, finest 47 seconds.
These were not our best Parliamentarians.
Much has been written about how the Kamloops claim was false from the outset, and I won’t needlessly repeat the details here. Suffice it to say that the “evidence” our gullible elected representatives used to convict their own country of genocide was not evidence at all, but the unproven assertions of the Kamloops band, affirmed — apparently with little consideration — by His Holiness Pope Francis.
Previous popes had taken more reserved and thoughtful approaches to the residential school question.
They had all acknowledged that many things had been done wrong, and there were certainly some bad priests and nuns in the mix. However they also acknowledged that the education of Indian children was a worthy and necessary cause. Mistakes were made, but many Indian children who would otherwise have been left unable to properly speak English or French and would otherwise have been illiterate had benefited from their residential school education. Those are the popes we should listen to and remember on the residential school issue.
Shakespeare has Mark Antony say about Julius Caesar: “The evil that men do lives after them, but the good is oft interred with their bones”.
Pope Francis did no evil, and I am sure there will be many admirers writing about the many good things he did. But he did no favour to Canada with his ill-informed and entirely too casual musings about genocide.
It is to be hoped that the next pope will be more careful with his late night musings.
Brian Giesbrecht is a retired judge, and a Senior Fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.