This week Pope Francis travelled to Canada in order to “beg forgiveness” for the abuse of Indigenous children that took place at schools run and overseen by the Catholic Church. At Maskwacis, Alberta, he made a moving apology:
I am sorry. I ask for forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the Church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools.
Stories from Canadian residential schools are harrowing, and recall similar abuses perpetrated against Australia’s own Stolen Generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Some 150,000 Indigenous children living in Canadian territories were removed from their families over a hundred-year period so that they could be forcibly acculturated into the dominant settler-colonial society.
Yet the pope’s decision to travel in person to perform what he calls a “pilgrimage of penance” marks a potentially significant development in Catholicism.
The abuses perpetrated against innocent children in Canada’s residential schools, though extremely serious, did not have to be seen as the Vatican’s responsibility. Indeed, the history of the Catholic Church’s involvement in the British Empire is a complex tale — one in which a weird world-wide Faustian pact was struck between often Irish (though, in Canada, also often French-speaking) bishops and the British government. The Church would keep lower class, typically Irish, communities under control and provide them with basic welfare and education. In return, the British government would support the Catholic Church as a pillar of the establishment.
The pact can seem strange given that anti-Catholic prejudice remained rife in British public life for far longer than anyone nowadays would care to remember. Nevertheless, it suited both sides: the Church consolidated its position in nascent communities all around the globe, and the British government insured itself against outbreaks of sectarian violence.
The Canadian historian Colin Barr, now at the University of Aberdeen, has written of this official Catholic presence in places such as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia as the manifestation of “Ireland’s Empire” — a shadow imperial formation that existed within, and perhaps even evolved parasitically from, the British sphere.
There are certainly questions that need to be asked about the relative roles of English, Scottish, and Irish officials in the various categories of action now viewed as so controversial that were undertaken in the Empire’s name. But where was the Vatican in all this? For a long time, it was bemused and uninterested, cajoled into paying attention only on account of constant lobbying from Irish prelates, such as the future cardinal Paul Cullen (1803–78). And, in fairness, nineteenth-century popes had their own concerns closer to home — chief among them being how to hold onto the increasingly anachronistic Church State in Italy over which they presided. Vatican policy towards Britain was shaped by two overarching considerations: the desire to consolidate gains stemming from the abolition of the Test Act in 1829, and to re-establish a Catholic hierarchy in England and Scotland.
Later, popes from Leo XIII (1878–1903) to Pius XII (1939–58) sought to rebuild the papacy’s reputation following Pius IX’s loss of Rome in 1870 and to navigate the troubled political waters of the twentieth century’s turbulent first half without antagonising any party to the imperial arms race.
Want the best of Religion & Ethics delivered to your mailbox?
Sign up for our weekly newsletter.
A reasonable case can therefore be made for why the pope himself is not entirely responsible for what took place in a relatively autonomous part of the Catholic Church in an era before rigid papal control of the hierarchy had been (re-)established. So what does it tell us that Francis accepts the responsibility as his so readily? Perhaps least charitably, it could suggest that he is just as prone to symbolic virtue-signalling gestures as his Canadian hosts would seem to be. His apology, like those of Justin Trudeau and his government, is easy and eloquent but fails to provide specific remedy to any of the serious problems that currently afflict Indigenous communities in Canada or elsewhere.
On the other hand, in taking responsibility for the actions of earlier Catholic figures in the British Empire and its successor states, Francis asserts Vatican authority over those provinces with renewed vigour. He may feel justified in doing so, for the court of public opinion clearly does hold him responsible and he has become a lightning rod for the Church and Christianity worldwide.
Yet Pope Francis’s apologies for the actions of Church officials in schools in Canada or elsewhere will do more than just soak up opprobrium: they put all officials in other Catholic schools around the world on notice to consider how decisions and policies reflect on him. After all, he is now the one who ultimately must answer for them.
This approach may have complex and unintended ramifications, especially when it comes to social policy. Can a Catholic school or university pursue a different line from the Vatican’s on, say, abortion or LGBTIQA+ rights in such circumstances? Yet, when it comes to these issues, the gulf between the Vatican and teachers and administrators in some Catholic schools, especially those in the United States, is substantial and growing. Those teachers and administrators are unlikely just to accept papal diktat meekly — so, if Francis is not careful, his efforts could undermine him as surely as debacles over whether or not Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi should be allowed to take communion recently humiliated some American bishops.
Francis may feel that he has equipped himself with a new resource for trying to force others into accepting his orthodoxy. But a responsible pope, who believes in the spiritual autonomy of the individual Christian, might balk at the prospect holding present generations responsible for the sins of their fathers. And a truly visionary pope, invested in subsidiarity within the Church, also ought to foresee that owning local problems and making them about him risks transforming them into universal ones. After all, claiming authority can expose a lack of power in those without means to enforce it.
Miles Pattenden is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University, and a graduate of the University of Toronto.