Bury My Heart

Reports from Canada suggest that four mainstream churches may be forced to file for bankruptcy following lawsuits by thousands of former boarding school inmates claiming sexual, physical and cultural abuse.

This is stuff to give the Catholic Hierarchy of Ireland nightmares.
Last month, the Anglican Church in Canada publicly urged its followers to write to Prime Minister Jean Chritien to complain that, "Your Department of Justice is driving my church into bankruptcy."
More recently, Christian commentators have urged voters to reject Mr. Chritien's Liberal Party in the November 27th federal elections and to opt instead for the conservative Canadian Alliance in protest against the hounding of the churches.
The emergence of clerical child abuse as a factor in the Canadian general election may attract quiet interest in some quarters in Ireland, too.
However, a number of Canadian Christian leaders are urging repentance and remorse on the Church rather than aggressive defence.
"I simply see us going broke," confesses Duncan D. Wallace, Anglican bishop of Qu'Appelle in Saskatchewan. However, he consoled himself: "When you get down to it, all we need is a bottle of wine, a book and a table, and we are in business."
(Shades of Con Houlihan in the old days in the Harp).
The Department of Education in Ottawa estimates that 16,000 claims will have been lodged by the end of 2001 representing 17 per cent of the surviving residents of the boarding schools. Settlements could run into billions of dollars.
Native American plaintiffs have won five boarding school abuse trials in the last two years two in Saskatchewan and three in British Columbia. It was this development which has prompted many in the churches to urge out-of-court settlements rather than persistence in potentially ruinous litigation.
Auditors for the Anglicans warned last month that legal fees alone could push the church into bankruptcy if the Church opts to fight on.
"There is a lot of denial," says Bishop Wallace. "I told a priest recently, `When your rectory gets sold out from underneath you and you are living in the street, maybe then you will understand this is for real .
One United Church parish in Alberta has proposed selling the oldest church in the province to pay its legal costs.
In Manitoba, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate have offered to hand over virtually all the property they hold in the province in return for the federal government assuming liability for 2,000 claims.
The already-bankrupt Anglican diocese of Cariboo in British Columbia has been ordered to provide an inventory of all the church art in its custody for auction under the supervision of the courts.
Behind the lawsuits lies the story of how tens of thousands of children were taken from their families and held in about 100 aboriginal boarding schools to be incultured into the ways of white, Christian society.
Beginning about 100 years ago, children as young as five were rounded up, in many instances taken by force from their distraught parents' hands, and conveyed, usually in carts, to an archipelago of remote institutions where they were dressed in standard uniforms, had their heads shaved and were forbidden under pain of physical punishment to speak their own languages or discuss their traditional arts, religion and dances. These practices persisted in various forms until the 1970s. The last such school wasn't closed until 1990.
"How do you get six-year-olds who only speak Sioux, Lakota or Cree to speak English?" asks Anthony Merchant, head of a group representing 4,000 claimants. "You use Gestapo-type tactics. Punishment becomes increasingly barbaric, sadistic."
"You couldn't say one word or you would get slapped," Jerry Shepherd, of the White Bear Nation, told the Toronto Globe And Mail, recounting his days at Gordon School in northern Saskatchewan in the mid-1960s. And slapped didn t mean a cuff on the ear but all-out assault on six, seven, eight-year-olds.
Claimants say that paedophiles preyed freely on the children. "The sexual perverts went all over the West," says Merchant. "We have some that were in six or seven schools."
Some victims say that among the worst abusers were other aboriginals who had themselves been abused and who, institutionalised, were then taken on as employees in the schools where the abuse had taken place.
Last May, the official monthly, The Anglican Journal, reported that eight Native American men had committed suicide after being subpoenaed to testify about allegations of sexual abuse at the church boarding school in the Cariboo diocese.
"When they got handed a piece of paper, they knew their secret was out," Fred Sampson, a former student at St. George's Indian Residential School, told the Journal. "They thought, `Everybody's going to know that I let this guy do it to me for candy'."
The judge involved in the Cariboo case set the key precedent on compensation when she assigned 60 percent liability to the Anglican Church and 40 percent to the government.
A number of victims, as well as some clergy and others in the shamed churches, are lobbying for the establishment of an inquiry along the lines of South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission as the only viable means of putting all the facts, and all of the feeling, into the public arena.
Right-wing commentators, Catholic Irish columnists, Irish Catholic editorialists and so forth who complain that the Catholic Church here is being unfairly singled out in allegations of child sexual and physical abuse have a point. It wasn't just in Ireland that it happened. It was everywhere the Church had control over captive children.
And the Catholic Church shouldn't be singled out either. They were all at it.

About 10 years ago a woman called Eileen Flynn was sacked from her job as a teacher in Wexford because she'd become pregnant. Ms. Flynn wasn't married. The local parish priest, who acted as manager of the school, declared her pregnancy in conflict with the "ethos" of the school and dismissed her.
Ms. Flynn appealed to the courts but lost the case.
At the time, most people took the view that this was a throw-back, a dying spasm from a discredited system of morality. Surely we were moving into a civilised era in which such things couldn't happen any more?
Such optimism seems foolish in the wake of a meeting of the Council of Ministers of the European Community in Luxembourg last month at which Irish Justice Minister John O'Donoghue won amendments to an equality directive so as to allow the clerical managers of schools to sack teachers who, in the words of the Catholic zealot David Quinn, "openly defied the ethos of their employers".
The original draft of the directive would have allowed schools to sack teachers of religion whose life-styles were deemed contradictory of the school's ethos. O'Donoghue's amendment extends this threat to all teachers. O'Donoghue says he made it clear that Ireland would veto the entire edict if his fellow-ministers didn't agree to the amendment.
The Irish Catholic approvingly quotes Trinity College law lecturer Gerry White to the effect that "The directive can now be interpreted in such a way as to permit an employer to act against a teacher who choose (sic.) to make their private life public if their 'private' life was contrary to the ethos of the school".
Apart from the endorsement of the sacking of Eileen Flynn and the implication for the Eileen Flynns of the future, the directive, as amended, provides Catholic school managers with sanction to sack out gays from State-funded teaching positions.
That the Irish government strove so determinedly to secure such a provision testifies to the resilience and continuing influence at the highest levels of government of crude religious bigotry.
The fact that this has caused no big fuss is odd, and ominous.