Dear Editor:

I have heard on the APTN that, in response to the TRC request for the Pope to apologize within one year for the Cultural Genocide suffered by the Indigenous peoples in the Residential Schools “The Archbishop of Ottawa Terrence Prendergast says the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is “asking for too much” by demanding the Pope apologize to residential school survivors in Canada. He also stated; “…. the Church’s intent was never to inflict harm on the thousands of Indigenous children that cycled through its schools, but rather to give them the “faith.”

Archbishop Prendergast has some nerve to say that they “never meant to inflict harm”, but they did, and in many horrible ways. The Archbishop doesn’t appear to know the history of the Catholic Church in Canada, if he did he would have realized that the Mi’kmaq were Christian since 1610. They were very devout Roman Catholics. They had translated the prayer of the Church into Mi’kmaq, and held their own services each Sunday, because the Missionary only came once a year.

In the late 1800’s and until the 1970’s the Canadian Government set up a Cultural Genocide Program called the Indian Residential School System, wherein they stole Mi’kmaq and other Indigenous Children as young as 3 -4 years of age and up, and in compliance with Christian Churches of several denominations including the Roman Catholic Church, decided in their words “to tak ...