Apology not accepted

His Holiness reminded me of how much I have to apologise for.

As a human being, I apologise for Adam and Eve, who queered the pitch for all of us.

As a man, I apologise to all oppressed women, including, but not limited to, those I might have inadvertently oppressed myself.

As specifically a white man, I apologise for white racism, leaving it for chromatically different persons to apologise for any other kind.

As someone born in the Soviet Union, I apologise for the Gulag.

As a (lapsed) American, I apologise for slavery, Hiroshima and Joe Biden.

As a British subject, I apologise for colonialism.

And as a Catholic… Well, mercifully I don’t have to apologise for anything as a Catholic. The Pope is doing a good job of it without my help.

On his visit to Canada, he apologised to “the Indigenous peoples” (formerly known as Canadian Indians) for the abuse they had suffered in residential schools, created and funded by the government, but mostly run by Catholics.

The schools existed from the 19^th century until the 1970s. The government forcibly separated Indian children from their families and sent them out to be converted to Christianity, taught English and assimilated into Canadian society.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) published a report in 2015, which stated that children in those schools “were abused, physically and sexually, and they died in the schools in numbers that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country.”

Some 4,000 children died in those 139 schools, mostly from tuberculosis that was rampant at the time. That’s about 30 a year, and I assume that number is higher than the statistical average.

Any physical and sexual abuse that happened is undoubtedly criminal. If any perpetrators are still with us, they should be prosecuted. However, considering that the schools have been out of business for half a century, such longevity is unlikely. For all I know, those criminals are burning in hell.

However, I struggle with the full extent of the Pope’s apology. The impression I get is that he agreed with the full list of charges put forth in the TRC report. “The residential school system,” said that document, “was based on an assumption that European civilisation and Christian religions were superior to Aboriginal culture.”

Call me a racist and report me to the police, but that assumption seems justified to me. For the aboriginal culture in question is too primitive to prepare children for life in a modern Western society. And surely a practitioner of any religion has to believe it’s superior to others.

Had those children remained within their ‘indigenous’ culture, they would have spent their lives on reservations, drinking rotgut, smoking things that aren’t good for you and acting as ethnographic exhibits for gawking tourists.

As it is, many of them ended up with advanced degrees from McGill University, having acquired the means of accusing the white establishment in good English full of scholarly references to the critical theory.

The possibility of such a positive outcome doesn’t justify the use of force in removing children from their families. However, the TRC confirms it wasn’t the Catholic Church but the government that applied such force. To his credit, the Pope did refer to that fact, if only obliquely.

However, he made it sound as if what calls for an apology isn’t just various abuses of the assimilation system, but the system itself. That got me confused.

I thought integrating ethnic minorities into society was a Good Thing. Surely that’s better than consigning them to a life of cultural, political and economic exclusion?

Undeniably, the Catholic Church has supported the system of conversion and assimilation since at least the Middle Ages. Such is its institutional remit, laid down in numerous proselytising verses of the New Testament.

Thus, for example, Matthew 5:16: “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” Or Matthew 10:7: “And as you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand’.”

His Holiness didn’t separate the policy from its abuses clearly enough, although he did make a meek attempt to do so: “I am here because the first step of my penitential pilgrimage among you is that of again asking forgiveness, of telling you once more that I am deeply sorry. Sorry for the ways in which, regrettably, many Christians supported the colonising mentality of the powers that oppressed the indigenous peoples.”

“Many Christians”? What about the Church as a whole? Or the entire white civilisation? Such papal equivocations were wide of the mark, judged the TRC types.

To them and those they represent, that humble pie was too small to satisfy their hunger for humiliating the Church and, more generally, the West. To make things even worse, the Pope apologised for those children having suffered “physical, verbal, psychological and spiritual abuse.”

The outcry was thunderous: he left sexual abuse out! Doesn’t he realise that this is what the Church is all about?

The general reaction to the Pope’s effort can best be summed up by the cliché of too little, too late. Yes, ran the consensus, it was good that the Pope showed willing.

But he omitted to apologise for so many things (possibly including some I mentioned at the beginning) that his “penitential pilgrimage” has to be put down as a missed opportunity. Nor was his sincerity sufficiently persuasive. As one of his detractors put it, his song didn’t come from the heart.

All in all, the season of apologies is in full swing, and it’s not the best time in our cultural calendar. The victims, real or putative, are never satisfied. Rather than reducing their quest for divisive insularity, apologies make it more fervent. On balance, they do more harm than good.

Talking specifically about North American Indians, the white settlers treated them with savage brutality, which I can’t condone. Progress is often held up as justification but, to me, it doesn’t justify much of anything, and certainly not inhuman cruelty.

Closer to our own time, the abuses suffered by the pupils of those residential schools are unpardonable. But they won’t be undone by fulsome apologies. If anything, their aftermath will continue to fester longer as a result.

Let’s just make sure such things never happen again, shall we? Contrition is best kept for our penitential prayers. Their recipient will accept them with more grace than any woke warriors ever will.