By Michael Swan, The Catholic Register
[Toronto – Canadian Catholic News] – Four letters and 26 promises from Canada’s bishops to Indigenous Canadians set an agenda for reconciliation that bishops like Calgary’s Bishop Bill McGrattan intend to act on before February turns into March.
McGrattan has scheduled meetings with members of the Indigenous Reconciliation Fund committee in his diocese. The committee — there are similar committees in dioceses across Canada — makes recommendations for local Calgary projects that could be funded by the national $30-million reconciliation fund Canada’s bishops have set up.
“This is an opportunity for me to again meet with them and to have a chance to discuss it and to listen to them as to how we can work and implement (the promises),” said McGrattan.
In the Roman Catholic Diocese of Saskatoon, a Discernment Circle Granting Committee is accepting applications for funding projects addressing Indigenous healing and reconciliation initiatives as part of the national $30-million commitment by the Catholic Bishops of Canada announced in September 2021.
Links to the four pastoral letters:
• Pastoral Letter to First Nations
• Pastoral Letter to the Inuit in Canada
The recent pastoral letters — addressed to First Nations, Inuit, Métis and Canadians in general and released by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) Feb. 8 — are an exercise in the Vatican II principle of subsidiarity, emphasizing local decision-making, Bishop McGratten said.
Deacon Harry Lafond, former Chief of the Muskeg Cree First Nation in northern Saskatchewan and St. Thomas More College Scholar in Indigenous Education, hopes the letters are also a step forward in building a more synodal Church in Canada. He wants the bishops to use the letters “to make this pre-amble into a meaningful exercise that leads to something in the generations to come,” he said.
“The synodal process that Pope Francis has introduced discussion on is part of the answer that can help us,” Lafond said. “Because it really emphasizes the local voice.”
There needs to be more urgency in advancing reconciliation between the Church and Indigenous Canada, said Lafond, a permanent deacon who served at the altar of Pope Francis’ Mass at Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton in July.
“My fear is that in two or three generations it will be like two completely separate entities. The Indigenous people will go in their own direction with their spiritual development, their spiritual institutions, their spiritual organizations.”
In parallel with the September 2021 apology, the pastoral letters are issued through the CCCB but are statements to which each bishop individually has committed. The broad, general promises made in the three letters to Indigenous Canadians will take different forms in different dioceses.
“Each of us, as leaders of our dioceses and eparchies, pledges to walk with you into a new era of reconciliation, particularly at the local level,” said the Pastoral Letter to the Métis.
The “Walking Together” theme, which headlined Pope Francis’ tour of Canada last summer, is heavily emphasized in all four pastoral letters, each bearing the logo of the Walking Together papal visit.
Walking together isn’t some kind of simple, universal formula for achieving reconciliation, said Churchill-Hudson Bay Bishop Anthony Krotki.
“We are preparing ourselves right now as a diocese to understand what it really means, walking together,” Krotki said. “We know from Inuit tradition and the history and the values and the culture what walking together means in different moments of life. It’s a different walking.”
Reconciliation won’t be accomplished by any one act or gesture, said the Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate.
“That moment of closure, the moment of unification of both sides, it may still be ahead of us,” Krotki said.
Reconciliation will only happen locally and only by sustained dialogue, said Winnipeg Archbishop Richard Gagnon.
“Where the specifics come in is in the dialogue between the bishops and the Indigenous leaders across the country. It’s not just coming from the bishops… What I do here in Winnipeg (will be) quite different than, let’s say, on Vancouver Island or some place in Ontario,” Gagnon said. “It’s not one-sided.”
The purpose of the letters is to “renew our profound sorrow for past harms and recommit ourselves to finding new ways to accompany Indigenous peoples in their pursuit of justice, healing and reconciliation,” said the Pastoral Letter to the First Nations.
That’s one promise Lafond hopes will be realized.
“The Catholic Church, in my experience, is kind of quiet when it comes to justice issues,” the deacon said.
In all three letters to the Indigenous, the bishops ask Indigenous Canadians to stick with them and stick with the Church.
“We ask you to continue to walk side by side with us along the path of hope,” said the Pastoral Letter to First Nations.
In a separate, four-page letter to the “People of God in Canada” the bishops make the case for a hard, honest look at Canada’s history “that increasingly marginalized Indigenous peoples and disrespected and denigrated Indigenous ways.”
“This is a dark and tragic part of the Canadian story. Insofar as members of the Church participated in it, it also remains a dark and tragic part of the Christian story in this land.”
Métis elder and Edmonton Catholic School Division cultural facilitator Gary Gagnon is willing to go along with the idea that the bishops’ commitments will take different forms in different parts of the country. He hopes the bishops follow Francis’ footsteps.
“It took an old man to say ‘I’m very sorry on behalf of the Catholic Church.’ He shouldered that for them,” he said, adding he wants his Church to be a listening Church.
The bishops also urge Canadian Catholics to listen.
“Listening and dialogue are keys to building upon the relationships developed in recent months,” the bishops write in their letter to the entire Canadian Church. “We have spoken clearly about our desire to listen and learn how to walk together with Indigenous communities in new ways.”
The Church in Canada is irrevocably on a new path, said Winnipeg’s Gagnon.
“The whole process leading up to the delegations to Rome — all of the consultation, all of the walking together, all of the sharing information between the Church and Indigenous people, leading up to those special encounters with the Holy Father — that whole process has fed into these commitments (in the pastoral letters) and given them new life in that respect,” he said.
The Winnipeg archbishop cites the Indigenous Reconciliation Fund as an example of the new way of doing things.
As Canada’s bishops issue the letters, the Indigenous Reconciliation Fund stands at $9,007,503.37. The commitment for $30 million runs another three and a half years.
“People are going to read those letters. Some will say, ‘Good.’ Some will say, ‘No good, not good enough.’ What do we do?” asked Krotki. “Are we going to put our heads down and hide? No, we can’t do that. We need to find a way to walk together. We need to find that way… This is a process that is not going to end today. We all know that this is going to last.”
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Indigenous Catholics seek more detail on bishops’ plan
By Michael Swan, The Catholic Register
[Toronto – Canadian Catholic News] – If Canada’s bishops are setting an agenda in their letters to Indigenous Canadians, that agenda needs more detail, Catholic Indigenous leaders recently told The Catholic Register.
Deacon Harry Lafond (Catholic Saskatoon News file photo by Teresa Bodnar-Hiebert)
Deacon Harry Lafond of the Muskeg Cree First Nation believes the language the bishops employ in the letters is too general.
“They’re skirting the language that Indigenous people find necessary in order to move forward,” said Lafond, who serves as Indigenous Education Scholar at St. Thomas More College in Saskatoon.
Lafond wants to see the Church tackle the 15th-century Doctrine of Discovery head-on. During Pope Francis’ visit in the summer, the CCCB promised a statement from the Vatican on the Doctrine of Discovery sometime in the fall.
“Yes, we are working on this with the Vatican,” said Calgary Bishop William McGrattan, vice president of the CCCB. “We’re sensitive to the fact that this is an important issue that needs to be addressed.”
It can’t come soon enough for Lafond.
“Today, we live the Doctrine of Discovery,” he said. “What is the Indian Act but an element of the Doctrine of Discovery?”
Like Lafond, lawyer and legal scholar Graydon Nicholas was also looking for mention of the Doctrine of Discovery and the legal concept of Terra Nullius as he read the Pastoral Letter to First Nations.
In particular, the Wolastoqey Indigenous elder and former New Brunswick Lieutenant Governor, who participates in the Guadalupe Circle of Indigenous elders and Catholic bishops, wishes the bishops had referenced Sublimus Dei — the 1537 bull from Pope Paul III which declared Indigenous peoples of the New World are “truly men.” From that statement in 1537 to Pope St. John Paul II’s speeches in Canada in 1984 and 1987 — where the Polish Pope insisted “Christ, in the members of His Body, is Himself Indian” — the Church in her teaching has rejected the Doctrine of Discovery over and over, even as members of the Church broke and ignored that teaching, Nicholas said.
The promises from Canada’s Catholic bishops to First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are a “good start” but won’t immediately win over Indigenous Canadians, said Nicholas.
Lafond believes the bishops need to find other interlocutors than the national Indigenous political organizations.
“We can’t hear from only the politicians — the established, political leaders of the Indigenous community — because they don’t necessarily speak for the spiritual people, the spiritual leaders of their communities,” Lafond said.
Identifying those spiritual leaders won’t be easy and the process might vary for different First Nations and for different Indigenous cultures, he said.
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