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Pope should confess for the church’s sins

The Pope’s decision to push off accountability to the lower cast of the church  is an illustration of man’s weakness.
pope-francis-vatican-e1605887149258
Pope Francis in The Vatican in 2020.

I am an Indigenous person, raised a Catholic. 

When my grandmother passed, the Catholic Church Bishop requested to do my grandmother’s funeral. 

What history has taught us is the Church’s financed exploration but it didn’t stop there. The government and churches opened and operated these so-called schools. We have learned these were houses of horrors where government and church could kidnap and torture children. It took over 150 years to expose what these institutions were - concentration camps, where they experimented on children, beat and raped them, separated them from siblings, beat them for speaking the only language they knew and if a parent didn’t want them to be taken, they faced criminal charges for trying to protect their most precious gift from God.

Yet the real criminals were free to carry on for over a hundred years and not face any consequences or accountability for crimes against children?

I often angered my mother (now gone) when I would describe myself as a recovering Catholic. The Pope’s decision to push off accountability to the lower cast of the church  is an illustration of man’s weakness. I lost faith in attending church when I received my communion at the young age of eleven where I had to confess all my sins to a father before I could receive communion.  

What our people want is for the head of the church, a man of God, the human representative in the cloth, to confess for role the Catholic Church had by taking children they harmed under the name of the church. Until the Pope confesses to the church’s role, the church needs to do away with confession before communion.

Hypocrisy is what the Pope is communicating by his inaction. 

Jo-Anne Berezanski

Lheidli T’enneh Elder

Victoria