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House Hansard - 54

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
April 6, 2022 02:00PM
Context: House Hansard - 54 - Apr/6/22
Mr. Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, CPC)
  • Apr/6/22 2:08:37 p.m.
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Mr. Speaker, last week, Pope Francis met an indigenous delegation and offered a clear, public apology for the role played by certain Catholic entities in the implementation of the federal government's residential school policy. The Pope also expressed his desire to come to Canada soon. This critical step happened because of sincere engagement between indigenous peoples and the church. Many indigenous peoples are active members of the Catholic church. Indigenous Catholics, such as Saint Kateri, lived out church teachings on love, forgiveness, universal human dignity and subsidiarity. These ideas provide the clear basis for rejecting any project of cultural assimilation or state domination of the family. Christianity is about following the teachings of Jesus regardless of the spirit of the age or the consequences. History is full of examples of Christians who failed to fully live out these teachings, and I am one of them. The call of Jesus to sacrificial love and to the affirmation of human dignity is always radical, and in an age when colonialism was widely accepted, many church organizations were simply not radical enough. Some here wish to use these failures to attack the church and further subvert it to state power, but that is the wrong direction and would enable other abuses. The failures of the residential school era should point to the need for the church to be an authentic moral witness for Christian teachings on truth and justice, regardless of government policy or the spirit of the age.
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