The Church should apologize.

 

The Church should apologize.

If you are anything like me you probably feel like spreading your arms wide and shouting to the sky, “what’s going on?”

It was a short time ago when we were sharing the pain of so many seniors who were dying alone in their under-funded Care facilities. Canada, one of the richest nations in the world, found out that our parents and grandparents received a lower level of care than most industrial nations offer. When things got rough, the most vulnerable amongst us paid the price.

Our dilapidated health care system that has been robbed of resources for years by austerity cuts didn’t hold and needed surgeries were delayed for a long time. We pay but the service we should expect is no longer there.

When a vaccine was discovered, we found out that our research facilities, experts, and factories capable of manufacturing vaccines were long gone leaving us at the mercy of the “markets” far behind other countries.

As we were reeling, trying to absorb the fact that Canada is behind, a new news item hit us hard. We who feel comfortable telling other countries to observe human rights discovered a new historical reality. When countries like China tell us to straighten our own mess, they have a provable case. Canada jailed children for the crime of being Native and hired churches of white people to “take the Indian out of the child” in Residential schools.

Now using ground-penetrating x-ray technology, we are seeing how many of those children died and were buried without ever seeing their families. Like our seniors recently, they died alone with strangers around who didn’t have enough resources to comfort them or even give them proper human burial. Social media spread the news fast and the official news soon caught up. No hiding the facts.

The Prime Minister, eager to protect the government, jumped on the opportunity to blame the churches, particularly the Catholic church, demanding that the Pope will apologize and an apology could lead to demands of money that simply is not there. It could force me to pay for what a past government caused. Soon after, church buildings were burning on and around Indian Reserves.

 

I am all in favour of saying sorry when I am guilty or paying if I knowingly do wrong. I wasn’t even born when the Canadian government designed an evil way to rid itself of the past owners of the land. I would like the church to apologize for participating in what they were ill-equipped to handle but I don’t think it will bring the expected solution.

If the biggest church on earth is going to do some soul searching and initiate action to make amends there are issues bigger than the role it played in the Residential Schools fiasco. The church in one form or another existed now for two thousand years and other churches sprang from it. When it started it was a new religion but it was based on a much older religion.

Until Christianity religious faiths were competing on different grounds. It was a test between whose God is more powerful. The people who worshipped Gods didn’t think in theological or philosophical ways. They “feared” God not “believed” in God. Often religions won or lost by torturing people, starving them to submission, or chasing them out of their countries.

The Catholic church was one of the pioneers of bringing health and education as a tool for conversion but failed miserably to notice the biggest drawback. Based on the Jewish faith, it adopted a patriarchal system that set half of humanity against the other half. It failed to follow Christ in treating males and females equally, and all others followed suit. In the process gospels and teachings were destroyed or went missing, only to be rediscovered recently. That is the bigger problem that must be corrected ahead of all others and the hierarchy is not ready to reconsider.

The Israelites in biblical times treated women as property belonging to a father, husband, or another family. Women were looked after, not independent equals. Pope Gregory the Great declared Marie Magdalene a harlot and remained so with no proof until 1969 when the Church clarified that the theory lacked any basis.

In 1945 we discovered the Gnostic gospels revealing that early Christians believed that women, especially Marie Magdalene, were treated as equal by Christ. Magdalene started the Christian faith by being the first witness to the resurrection. Compare that to Paul, who only saw Christ in a dream.

There are people around the world claiming to be the lost tribes of Israel, most notable the people of Afghanistan today. It seems as if the Church adopted their view of women instead of the teachings of Christ. This historical mistake formed modern human social order and is still at play today.

We have formed woman's nature not as the half of humanity that is able to produce new humans but as humans who need special consideration from the males. We see it clearly in our fight for males to have the right to use women and control what they wear and do with their bodies. We see it evident in trials about sexual abuse and it affected First Nations women most severely.

The aboriginal nations in North America often had costumes that allowed women better consideration than Europeans had. The European migrants assumed that technological superiority was equal to moral and religious superiority which led us to today’s problems.

In my humble opinion, the biggest church in the world should consider updating its information and seriously entertaining sweeping changes. There is no shame in learning new things and changing behaviours accordingly. Each of us has done so many times.

If we are going to ask for apologies, I would go for the big one first. If a Pope is going to apologize, I would ask for an apology to the 52% of humans who are females.

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