It was May of 2021. Reports of “unmarked graves” of indigenous Canadian children were spreading like monkeypox at a George Michael concert. We were just coming out of our third lockdown in Canada. And as people started to gather again, the scuttlebutt around the dinner table centered on the supposed discovery of one of the worst sins in the history of the Catholic Church.
Not only had the Church participated in the awful Residential School system (more on this in a bit), but those dastardly priests and nuns who ran those places were not only pedophiles and colonizers, they were also murderers who unceremoniously chucked dead native children into holes in the ground.
The narrative quickly went from “unmarked graves” on one former Residential School site—a site now owned and operated by a native group—to “mass graves,” you know, like at a death camp.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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The first “mass grave” that was discovered was supposedly home to about 215 children—there was no verification of whether they were children or not, but “dead children” makes for a better anti-Catholic headline. Then, another was discovered with about 700, which meant that the narrative was now “the Catholic Church killed a thousand indigenous children and threw them into mass graves to cover up their murders.”
Now, there have been evil men and women in the Church, this is to be sure, but the level of vitriol and fantastical imagination required to sell the story—and to buy it—was a new level of “fake news.”
You might be wondering what a Residential School even is.
Well, the Residential School system was a government program wherein native children from remote areas were taken—often against the will of their parents, which is wrong—to boarding schools. It was the national police who took the children, not the Church. Many of the schools were run by the Catholic Church, although many were run by Protestant groups.
Some will say that the Church should never have offered to use her schools for the school system, but the children would have gone somewhere regardless. Although perhaps misguided, the logic of the Catholic schools was: “It would be better if we could give them a Catholic education, rather than have them sent to Protestant or secular institutions.”
The official program ran for about 50 years, although many of the schools served native children before and after the program ended.
The experience of the children in these schools was mixed—some reported that they had the greatest time of their lives, while others sadly had the opposite experience. For some it was a chance at an education and an opportunity to learn the Catholic Faith. Many native children lived in the most remote locations, in abject poverty, and with no chance at a successful future; so for them it was enormously important. For others, they never adapted well to boarding school, and their families were strained as a result of the separation. Sadly, for some, they experienced sexual abuse at the hands of priests and nuns.
The scope of the time in history is too much to go into here.
At any rate, as Canada has declined in Christian sentiment, Marxist sentiment has risen. Thus, leftists have co-opted the legitimate grievances of real victims and turned the whole thing into an opportunity to have a Canadian “Black Lives Matter” situation. Claims of racism emanating from every white person abound, along with calls for social justice and demands that you use some cut-and-paste emoji or social media avatar.
Also, since there was legitimate abuse in some cases, it is basically impossible to dispute any of the claims or separate fact from fiction without being called a supporter of pedophilia or worse.
Taking all this into consideration, it is easy enough to see how Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his legion of leftists could take the legitimate history of some real victims and mix the story with a bunch of fake-news vitriol in order to kick-start a call for social justice.
You see, leftists often hate the Church and Jesus Christ, and they view traditional religion as oppressive and outdated. But they of course are irate when Christians are caught not acting Christ-like!
Eventually, the mainstream conservative news had the courage—a rare occurrence—to roundly debunk the narrative in the national media. In a masterful piece entitled “The year of the graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves,” Canadian journalist Terry Glavin obliterated the claims that any such graves were discovered.
It only took the legacy media about four months to catch up to a story I had already written at LifeSite. Not bad, all things considered.
All children who ever attended the schools were accounted for, and the supposed mass graves were in fact community cemeteries that existed long before the school program. Oh, and in some places, there were no bodies seen via ground penetrating radar; instead there were aberrations in the soil, which is a fancy term for tree roots and big rocks.
Dozens of churches were burned to the ground—many of them native parishes. Flags were flown at half mast for six months at all federal sites per Trudeau’s orders. Canada was going to swallow the mass grave hoax, and we were going to swallow it all the way!
Even Canada Day was “cancelled” in 2021, which of course was a national reminder that the Catholic Church had so stained the country that she not only ruined religion and native children, but of course she ruined patriotism.
As anti-Catholic hatred spread across the country, calls for “apologies” from the Vatican grew. Of course, Pope Benedict already apologized more than a decade before, but that was when Conservative Stephen Harper was in charge, and now it was time for the Liberals to have their fun shaming the Church!
This spring, native leaders met with the pope…and he apologized to them again. And, just to seal the deal, he has now come to Canada to—you guessed it!—apologize again.
He made his official apology on Monday, and as I predicted the same day, the leftists who have co-opted native Canadian culture would not accept the apology.
Lo and behold! The leftists have rejected the pope’s mea culpa, and will not be satisfied until the Church admits she is the Whore of Babylon. Hopefully that’s not something even Pope Francis would do.
[Photo Credit: Vatican Media]