From 24 to 29 July, Pope Francis visits Canada. During this “penitential” trip and in response to a request from the Canada Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Aboriginal boarding schools (2015), the Vatican’s official apology for the abuses that have occurred in these very specific residents, effects of ‘A partnership of more than a century between the Canadian government and Christian churches have been presented. The consequences of these abuses persist for tens of thousands of surviving people, in addition to intergenerational effects. From the 19th in the 1990s in the 1990s, some 150,000 children enlisted in more than 130 mainly Catholic residents were cut off from their culture and their spirituality. We can say that the Pope faces a very painful heritage, with persistent effects.
Psychological, physical, sexual abuses, attack on family ties, cultural deprogramming are not the prerogative of religion. However, in the list of abuses suffered in boarding schools, there is also the mention of spiritual abuse, a notion which may seem vague. Simple dressing of a fact that one could call otherwise? The pope actually visits a country where what is called “return to spirituality” is part of the Aboriginal decolonization process. Let us therefore stop to examine the properly spiritual dimensions of this decolonial enterprise.
forced conversion to “white Christianity”
At the time that occupied us, being a Christian meant, among other things, to adopt certain norms of behavior and a certain lifestyle, expressed today by certain theologians in the concept of “white Christianity”. The archives of boarding schools contain many texts exposing the link between being Christian and living in the European or the Canadian.
In 1879, Nicholas Flood Davin, a senior official mandated by the government to study the model of Aboriginal boarding schools in the United States, already explained that we would not be able to make Aboriginal people like the others if the We did not extract from their minds and hearts a vision of the world tinged with magic, fatalism and thus opposed to this spirit of initiative from which “civilizations” are born. However, we could not get there, he continued, just making a clean sweep: it should also be that something replaces “their simple Indian mythology”. The cosmology and morality of the Christian spirit would instill the meaning of the nuclear family, work, discipline and industry.
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