NOT JUST KANATA BUT ALL OF TURTLE ISLAND

Pope again apologises to indigenous people for abuse as tour ends in Canada's north

Pope Francis again asked for forgiveness after meeting on Friday with residential school survivors in the Arctic territory of Nunavut, the last stop in his six-day visit to Canada to apologize to indigenous people for abuse in government schools run by the Roman Catholic Church.


© Vincenzo Pinto, AFP

After a private meeting in a small elementary school, Francis said hearing survivors' stories had "only renewed in me the indignation and shame that I have felt for months" at the harm done to them. His plane departed Canada for Rome on Friday evening.

Earlier on Friday, the pontiff told indigenous leaders in Quebec City that he was pained that Catholics had supported "oppressive and unjust policies" against them.

Francis capped his week-long tour in Iqaluit, Nunavut's capital, a city of 7,700 that sits among rocky hills overlooking Frobisher Bay. Iqaluit, in the Arctic territory created in 1999 for the Inuit people, is reachable only by plane or ship.

"Today too, in this place, I want to tell you how very sorry I am and to ask for forgiveness for the evil perpetrated by not a few Catholics who contributed to the policies of cultural assimilation and enfranchisement in those schools," said Francis, atop a stage designed to look like a qammaq, an Inuit summer home.

A small crowd watched the pontiff's speech, which was preceded by performances of Inuit traditional throat singing and drum dancing.

Jack Anawak, one of a few Inuit leaders who started raising awareness of the abuses of northern children 32 years ago, said the Canadian government or Catholic church should provide more money for programs to support survivors.

"We have arrived today where the pope is addressing those very concerns," Anawak said. "Their load will lighten (after the apology), but the trauma they feel will still be there and they’ll need help."

Tanya Tungilik, whose late father Marius Tungilik said he was abused by Roman Catholic priests, hoped to ask Francis to help bring to justice clergy members who abused children, along with those who hid their crimes.

"I want to tell him the full effects of what his church has done to my father and to my family," Tungilik said.


More than 150,000 indigenous children were separated from their families and brought to residential schools, which operated between 1870 and 1996.

Catholic religious orders ran most of the schools under successive Canadian governments' policy of assimilation.

The children were beaten for speaking their native languages and many were sexually abused in a system Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission called "cultural genocide."

"His apology is accepted and from this point on we will start healing and take our life back," said Andre Tautu, 79, who said he was sexually abused in the church and elsewhere by Catholic clergy in Chesterfield Inlet, Nunavut. "Hopefully, our children will never, ever receive this kind of treatment like we did when we were little kids."

Tautu, part of a small group that greeted the pope at the Iqaluit airport, said he turned to alcohol to deal with his trauma and mistreated his children. He has asked them to forgive him.

"I don't have many more years to live, so I want to make sure my wife and children are happier in the future," Tautu said.

Call for priest's extradition

The pope on Monday traveled to the Alberta town of Maskwacis, the site of two former schools, and issued a historic apology that called the Church's role in the schools, and the forced cultural assimilation they attempted, a "deplorable evil" and "disastrous error."

His pleas for forgiveness evoked strong emotions for many but fell short of what some survivors and indigenous leaders hoped for.

Since then, the pope has built on the apology, referring to both institutional failures and sexual abuse in subsequent speeches -- addressing some of the grievances raised by survivors.

Tungilik and others specifically want the pope to pressure France to extradite retired priest Johannes Rivoire, who faces a Canadian charge of sexually assaulting a young girl in the 1970s, and allegedly others, including Marius Tungilik.

Canada's Justice Department confirmed this week that it has asked France to extradite Rivoire. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's office has said that he discussed the Rivoire case with the pope during his private meeting on Wednesday.

Natan Obed, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, a prominent Inuit organization, said the pleas did not appear to move the pope to action.

"The pope himself has not responded to any of the requests we have made, although he has looked sympathetic," Obed told Reuters. "We have asked multiple times and the request was made in the private event today. No resolution to date."

(REUTERS)

Origin of the name

The name Canada is most likely derived from the word kanata, which in the language of the St. Lawrence Iroquois meant "village" or better "settlement". In 1535, inhabitants of the region around today's city of Québec gave the

 ...

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Related video: Pope apologizes for 'evil' of Indigenous abuse in Canada

WHEELCHAIR ACROSS KANATA

Pope says he must slow down or think about ‘stepping aside’ after Canada trip

Pope says he must slow down or think about ‘stepping aside’ after Canada trip

© Guglielmo Mangiapane

NEWS WIRES - 

Pope Francis admitted Saturday he needs to slow down, telling reporters after a six-day trip to Canada that he cannot maintain his pace of international travel -- and may have to think about retiring.

VIDEO

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/video/news/pope-meets-inuit-in-arctic-for-last-leg-of-penitential-canada-trip/vi-AA107q5L

Pope says he must slow down or think about ‘stepping aside’ after Canada trip

"I don't think I can go at the same pace as I used to travel," said the 85-year-old pope, who suffers pain in his knee that has seen him increasingly reliant on a wheelchair.

"I think that at my age and with this limitation, I have to save myself a little bit to be able to serve the Church. Or, alternatively, to think about the possibility of stepping aside." 

It is not the first time Francis has raised the possibility of following the example set by his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who quit over his own failing health in 2013, and is now living quietly in Vatican City.

In 2014, a year into his papacy, Francis told reporters that if his health got in the way of his functions as pope, he would consider stepping down.

In May, as reported in the Italian media, Francis joked about his knee during a closed-door meeting with bishops, saying: "Rather than operate, I'll resign."

"The door is open, it's one of the normal options, but up until now I haven't knocked on this door," he said Saturday.

"But that doesn't mean the day after tomorrow I don't start thinking, right? But right now I honestly don't. 

"Also this trip was a little bit the test. It is true that you cannot make trips in this state, you have to maybe change the style a little bit, decrease, pay off the debts of the trips you still have to make, rearrange.

"But the Lord will tell. The door is open, that is true."

Intense speculation 

The comments come after intense speculation about Francis's future, after he was forced to cancel a string of events due to his knee pain including a trip to Africa planned for earlier this month.

Talk was also fuelled by his decision to call an extraordinary consistory for August 27, a slow summer month at the Vatican, to create 21 new cardinals -- 16 of whom will be under the age of 80, thereby eligible to elect his successor in a future conclave.

Benedict's decision to quit caused shockwaves through the Catholic Church. He was the first pope to resign since the Middle Ages, but the precedent has now been set.

"In all honesty, it is not a catastrophe, it is possible to change pope, it is possible to change, no problem! But I think I have to limit myself a bit with these efforts," Francis said on Saturday.

He mostly used a wheelchair during his trip to Canada, where he offered a historic apology for decades of abuse of Indigenous children at residential schools run by the Catholic Church.

But he did stand up in his "popemobile" to greet crowds.

Francis said surgery on his knee was not an option, adding that he was still feeling the effects of six hours spent under anaesthetic last summer, when he underwent an operation on his colon.

"You don't play, you don't mess around, with anaesthesia," he said. 

But he added: "I will try to continue to go on trips and be close to people, because I think it is a way of service, closeness."

Francis still hopes to reschedule his postponed trip to South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

"But it will be next year, because of the rainy season -- let's see: I have all the good will, but let's see what the leg says," he quipped.

The Argentine pontiff repeated that he would like to visit war-torn Ukraine, but offered no details on the state of his plans.

He has another overseas trip planned for a religious congress in Kazakhstan in September.

"For the moment, I would like to go: it's a quiet trip, without so much movement," the pope said.

(AFP)

Origin of the name

The name Canada is most likely derived from the word kanata, which in the language of the St. Lawrence Iroquois meant "village" or better "settlement". In 1535, inhabitants of the region around today's city of Québec gave the

 ...

 See more

Leaving Canada, Pope Francis said it might be time to slow down as health declines

(RNS) – 'On the other hand, I might need to think about the possibility of stepping aside. It wouldn’t be a catastrophe,' the pope told reporters after his six day 'penitential pilgrimage' to apologize to the Indigenous people of Canada.

Pope Francis speaks to journalists aboard the papal flight back from Canada Saturday, July 30, 2022, where he paid a six-day pastoral visit. Pope Francis wrapped up his Canadian pilgrimage by meeting with Indigenous delegations and visiting Inuit territory in northern Nunavut. In one of his addresses, he assailed the Catholic missionaries who "supported oppressive and unjust policies" against Native peoples in the country's notorious residential schools and vowed to pursue truth and healing. (Guglielmo Mangiapane/ Pool via AP)

July 30, 2022

By 

Claire Giangravé

ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (RNS) — On his return flight from a six-day “penitential pilgrimage” to apologize to the Indigenous people of Canada on Friday, Pope Francis spoke about his health struggles and what their implications might be for the future of his papacy.

“I don’t think I can continue going on trips with the same pace I had in the past. At my age and with my limitations, I need to save energy in order to serve the church,” the pope told reporters aboard the papal plane, while being seated for the first time during the traditional inflight press conference.

“On the other hand, I might need to think about the possibility of stepping aside. It wouldn’t be a catastrophe. The pope can change, that is not a problem,” he added.

Francis traveled throughout the vast country July 24-29, meeting with First Nations, Metis and Inuit communities in on their own lands. From Edmonton to Quebec City to the far-northern island city of Iqaluit, the pope embarked and disembarked the plane by using a lift and met with Indigenous people on his wheelchair.

Despite the obvious toll the trip had on the pontiff, he appeared lively and energetic during the press conference aboard the papal plane, addressing a wide range of issues. Speaking to journalists, the pope reflected on the pressing issues of his trip by condemning as “evil and unjust” the papal justification for colonialism in the past, enshrined through the Doctrine of Discovery. He described the forceful assimilation of Indigenous people and the attempted erasure of their culture as genocide.

“It’s a genocide,” Francis said, referring to the state and church led practice of “taking away children, changing the culture, the mentality and the conditions and a race” of Indigenous people. The pope said he apologized and condemned the role the church played in the administration of residential schools, which often forcibly removed children from their families and traditions.

The pope said the papal bulls that in the past provided a justification for the colonization and forceful conversion of Indigenous lands were “grievous” and suggested the Vatican is working to amend the Doctrine of Discovery. He encouraged “going back and fixing the wrong that was done” but underlined that colonization continues today in new forms of homogenization and extinction of local diversity.

As an example, Francis spoke about the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar who “don’t have citizenship rights and are considered inferior.”

The papal trip to Canada focused especially on St. Anne, the grandmother of Jesus and a beloved figure in Catholic Indigenous communities. The pope underlined the important “role of women in the transmission and development of the faith.”

“The church is a woman. The church is a wife. The Church is not a man,” he said, adding that the vision of the church as a mother must prevail above any “macho power.”

As many women in the world fight for reproductive rights, Pope Francis weighed in on contraceptives, which were deemed “intrinsically wrong” by the church following Paul VI’s controversial 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, On Human Life, because they deny an openness to life.

“When dogma or morality develop it’s a good thing,” the pope said, before signaling some possibility of developing a revised Catholic doctrine on contraceptives, while insisting this must be done within the church and respecting tradition. “A church that doesn’t develop its thinking in an ecclesial sense is a church that goes backward,” he added.

He pointed to recent changes in Catholic teaching concerning the death penalty and the possession of nuclear weapons, which were once widely accepted within the church and later deemed “immoral” by Pope Francis.

The Vatican think-tank on bioethics, the Pontifical Academy for Life, recently published a book where some theologians argued in favor of developing the church’s teaching on contraceptives. Archival recordings show that Pope John Paul I had reservations regarding a total ban on artificial birth control.

“One cannot do theology with a ‘no’ in front of them,” the pope said, adding that “theological development must be open, because that’s what it’s for, and the magisterium serves to understand the limitations.”

He described as a “sin” the tendency of some “backwardists” who, while claiming to follow tradition, end up sustaining a “dead faith.” While encouraging the development of Catholic docrine, Francis said it must be done in line with tradition and with the church as a whole as enshrined by the early Christian monk Vincent of Lérins.

The pope also addressed a recent Vatican letter that pulled the brakes on a summit of bishops and lay faithful in Germany, which among other things was advocating for changes in Catholic teaching to be more welcoming toward LGBTQ couples and women. Francis said the letter was an “office mistake” because it was meant to be signed by the Vatican Secretariat of State and that he already said all he meant to say about the German synodal assembly in a 2021 letter.

Francis described his trip to Canada “as a bit of a test” to understand what future papal visits might be like. He said the effects of the anesthesia he underwent for his intestinal operation in July of last year led to a slow recovery. But the pope said he still intends to visit the embattled city of Kyiv in Ukraine once the logistics are determined.

He also said he is willing to go to Kazakhstan for an interreligious conference where Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill is scheduled to attend, adding “it would be a tranquil trip with little movement.”

He said he wishes to visit the African states of South Sudan and the Central African Republic of Congo, since he had to cancel his scheduled trip in early July due to his knee pain.

The pope spoke about the papacy as a “work, a function and a service” and did not exclude that God might one day ask him to retire.

“As an hypothesis, if the Lord tells me something I must discern what the Lord wants and it might be that the Lord wants me to take a step back,” he said. The pope’s decision to host a gathering of cardinals, or concistory, at the Vatican in the unusual month of August has spurred rumors Francis might be paving the road for the next pope.

Asked about what he would like to see in his successor, Francis said it’s best to leave the decisi

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Australian PM Outlines Draft Indigenous Recognition Vote
July 30, 2022
Agence France-Presse

FILE - Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks in Sydney, Australia, July 8, 2022.

SYDNEY —

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Saturday outlined a draft referendum question in a bid to change the constitution to set up a representative Indigenous body in parliament.

Australia's constitution currently does not recognize Indigenous peoples, and the move to enshrine a so-called "voice" -- a consultative body to supply advice to the government on decisions that would impact the marginalized group -- in the document would require a nationwide referendum.

Speaking at an Indigenous festival in Arnhem Land -- home to a majority Indigenous population -- center-left leader Albanese proposed a draft referendum question to the Australian public: "Do you support an alteration to the Constitution that establishes an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice?"

Albanese -- elected in May -- had promised a referendum vote to be held before the end of his term in 2025.

It remains unclear how the referendum will take shape but proposing the draft question to Aboriginal Australian leaders and the public would be a first step.

He also on Saturday recommitted to the "Uluru Statement from the Heart", which called for improved rights and constitutional recognition for Australia's First Nations people.

The 2017 statement was rejected by then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's conservative government.

But Albanese said the Uluru statement is "about consulting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples on the decisions that affect you, nothing more, but nothing less".

"This is simple courtesy. It is common decency," he added.

"It recognizes the centuries of failure... the failure to ask the most basic human question: how would I feel if this were done to me?"

Australia has long failed to close the gap between the health and wellbeing of its First Nations people and the rest of the population, with soaring incarceration rates among Indigenous peoples and a life expectancy about eight years lower than the national average.

ANTI-ABOPRTION IS ANTI FAMILY PLANNING

As states ban abortion, a new spotlight on an old battle over sex education

Half of the states set to ban abortion have no mandate that schools teach sex education. Only four require curricula to address contraception.

A demonstrator holds a sign during an abortion-rights protest in Denton, Texas, June 28, 2022, following the U.S. Supreme Court overturning the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade. RNS photo by Riley Farrell

July 14, 2022

By 

Riley Farrell

(RNS) — In front of a room of middle schoolers, a youth minister in rural North Carolina scribbles “hand-holding” and “kissing” on the bottom of a whiteboard. He then writes “intercourse” on the top of the board. Between the gap, he draws a thick line, indicating that sex before marriage — anything more than kissing, actually — crosses a literal line of purity.

It’s a scene the Rev. Amelia Fulbright, now the transitional pastor of the Congregational Church of Austin, recalls from her childhood, when she attended a ministry-led sex-ed course.

Her sex education in public school was not much better, said Fulbright. She remembers the graphic photos of late-stage sexually transmitted infections but does not recall any mention of contraception. These dual initial exposures to sex, Fulbright said, shamed and stunted her well into adulthood.

“I had this giant fear of, if I got pregnant, what the consequences of that would be not just for my future, but for the stigma that would carry in the communities I grew up in,” said Fulbright.

The Rev. Amelia Fulbright. Photo via Congregational Church of Austin

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, and with it, the constitutional right to abortion, 26 states have or are likely to ban most abortions. Half of those states have no mandate that schools teach sex education, including Fulbright’s home state of Texas. Only four of the 26 require curricula to cover the topic of contraception. And in many of these Bible Belt states, the sex education that is available is centered on not having sex.

As abortion bans fall into place around the country, there is likely to be a renewed focus on teen pregnancies and, with it, fresh battle lines drawn in a decades-old debate over how best to teach young people about sex: an abstinence-only approach or what is often called “comprehensive sex ed.”

For her part, Fulbright is an advocate for comprehensive sex education, which covers a range of issues relating to the physical, biological, emotional and social aspects of sexuality, including gender identity, various sexual orientations and contraceptives.

“I don’t think it’s possible to make a sound biblical case against abortion or comprehensive sex ed,” said Fulbright. “Bodily autonomy, personal conscience and dignity are a big part of my Christian faith.”

She quickly ties abstinence-focused sex ed to religion for a reason. 

Many states have opted against comprehensive sex education due, at least in part, to the successful efforts of some religious lobbyists, who advocated for an abstinence-is-best approach to sex ed, encouraging students to avoid sex before marriage and forgoing education on contraception, consent and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. This grassroots concentration on sexual morality by many Christian groups wove abstinence education snugly into the anti-abortion movement.

And, encouraged by the Moral Majority’s reaction to the HIV/AIDS crisis, then-President Ronald Reagan in 1981 administered hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant funds to abstinence-only sex education programs, via the Adolescent Family Life Act. He did so in opposition to his own surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, an anti-abortion Christian, who spoke out against the efficacy of abstinence-only education and implored schools to teach comprehensive sex education.

In this Oct. 8, 2015, file photo, Justin Balido, peer health coordinator and senior health educator with Health Connected, speaks to a ninth-grade Teen Talk High School class at Carlmont High School in Belmont, California. Sex education in some American high schools is evolving beyond pregnancy and disease prevention to include lessons aimed at consent and curbing sexual assaults. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

In the ensuing years, abstinence-only sex education programs have continued receiving government support — between 1982 and 2017, Congress spent more than $2 billion on abstinence education. From 2000 to 2009 alone, faith-based, pro-abstinence sex education programs received approximately $200 million annually through the Title V program, the Adolescent Family Life Act and the Community-Based Abstinence Education program.

Advocates argue that education that emphasizes abstinence acknowledges the emotional and relational risks of sex more successfully than comprehensive sex education. Lori Kuykendall, CEO of Beacon Health Education Resources in the North Texas suburb of Irving, said she believes abstinence-focused education, sometimes called “optimal health” or “risk-avoidance” curriculum, has a positive, holistic effect on students.

“Abortion is a decision after several other decisions have been made,” said Kuykendall, who began her career in the early 1990s at Texas A&M University, conducting mentoring programs for the dormitories within “the emerging field of abstinence education.” Kuykendall said she chose to save sex until marriage as a personal commitment for religious and health-related reasons. 

Abstinence education, she argues, helps young people make choices far ahead of those they would face with an unintended pregnancy. 

“We’re farther upstream in a more proactive approach to help young people not get to that point.”

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RELATED: Even abortion foes will help friends who choose to end a pregnancy

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Brittany Broadduss-Smith. Photo via YouTube

Brittany Broadduss-Smith, a Christian sexologist and social worker in Philadelphia, said abstinence-only education doesn’t reduce sexual activity at all — it just makes sexual activity riskier. Minors who receive abstinence-only education, she noted, often associate shame with sex and avoid going to adults to get birth control.

The intersection of noncomprehensive sex education and abortion bans will increase unsafe abortions, said Broadduss-Smith. Students of color who live in this intersection will be disproportionately hurt, she said, based on existing social determinants of health care.

“White evangelicals in power have infused their beliefs into the education system, the public welfare system and our laws,” said Broadduss-Smith. “But Jesus would have been the primary social advocate.”

Fulbright has been advocating for reproductive justice since 2013. Before that she was involved with the Texas Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. The link between her two past jobs is clear to Fulbright — and, she notes, there is research to back her up.

Comprehensive sex education correlates with lower rates of STDs and unintended teen pregnancies, according to three decades of research. Comprehensive sex education has also proved to delay sexual initiation among students and decreases sexual violence, researchers have found. 

A range of contraceptive methods: contraceptive pills, emergency contraception, condom, IUD, vaginal ring, implant, etc. Photo by Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition/Unsplash/Creative Commons

States with abstinence-emphasized education have the highest rates of teen pregnancies, according to 2011 research from the Public Library of Science. And, of the 10 states with the highest teen pregnancy rates, nine will effectively ban abortion post-Roe.

If lawmakers were truly concerned about lowering abortion rates, they would enact comprehensive sex education, Fulbright said.

“It’s not about protecting babies or children,” she said. “It’s about power.”

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RELATED: As Roe falls, religious abortion-rights advocates prepare for next steps

The Webb telescope vs. young Earth creationism

The Webb telescope's images have elicited faith-based comments that Galileo might recognize.

The Carina Nebula is one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, located approximately 7,600 light-years away in the southern constellation Carina. Nebulae are stellar nurseries where stars form. The Carina Nebula is home to many massive stars, several times larger than the sun. Photo by NASA

July 21, 2022

By 

Mark Silk

(RNS) — These days, Christianity is pretty much down with the findings of astronomy, and nowhere more than in the Vatican, where the Rev. Guy Consolmagno, the Jesuit astrophysicist who directs its space observatory, waxed enthusiastic over the images received from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope last week.

“We’re really excited by the new images from the Webb telescope!” Consolmagno wrote. “The science behind this telescope is our attempt to use our God-given intelligence to understand the logic of the universe.

“But as these images show, the universe is not only logical, it is also beautiful. This is God’s creation being revealed to us, and in it we can see both his astonishing power and his love of beauty.”

Somewhere, Galileo is smiling.

Now, for the record, those awe-inspiring images are not photographs showing what you or I could see with our own eyes. The Webb collects light from the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum — a part that human beings can’t see at all. The Webb’s images are visualizations created by representing the range of infrared radiation collected by the telescope as if it took place in the small part of the spectrum we can see.

As for what Consolmagno calls the logic of the universe that the science behind those images reveals, there certainly are Christians who don’t accept it. Foremost among them are “young Earth” creationists such as those associated with Answers in Genesis, the fundamentalist Christian apologetics organization that was founded in 1980 as the Creation Science Foundation.

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RELATED: Vatican astronomer praises beauty and potential of Webb space photos

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Writing on the Answers website back in January, Rob Webb, a former NASA employee, assailed the telescope that happens to bear his own last name. It has, he wrote, “overall objectives … saturated in evolutionary (and really naturalistic) thinking.”

By this he means that the science behind the Webb is at odds with the young Earth view that, as he puts it: “God created everything in the heavens and the earth within six literal days approximately 6,000 years ago (per the biblical timeline), all for his glory.”

So much for the science that calculates the years it takes light to reach us from the farthest reaches of the universe in the billions, thus allowing the Webb to give us the best picture yet of the universe in the wake of the Big Bang. Of course, according to Answers, there was no Big Bang.

The better our science gets, it seems, the harder the creationists fight. As Ronald Numbers points out in his definitive history of creationism, at the beginning of the 20th century the first creationists did not contest geological time. Devising workarounds for the biblical six days, they concerned themselves with how life on Earth had come about. It is only in our own time that young Earth creationism has become a touchstone of fundamentalist belief.

How widely is this view held? According to the most recent Gallup survey on human origins, as of 2019, 40% of Americans said they believe that God created humans in their present form. Whatever one thinks of such a position, it’s a far cry from the belief that the universe is 6,000 years old.

Whether you accept the science behind the Webb or reject it outright, you’ve got to hand it to NASA. The images are awesome. Who cares if what you’re seeing is the evidence of things unseen?