Bishops Apologize For Abuses At Indigenous Schools

June 14, 2024 Crime, Religion

Axios reports:

U.S. Catholic bishops apologized Friday for the Catholic Church’s part in fostering “a history of trauma” on Indigenous children at church-run boarding schools where priests sexually abused students. It’s an official acknowledgment of the church’s past abuse against Indigenous children as the extent of widespread abuses inflicted on Native children over many decades has come into sharper focus.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops approved by an 181-2 vote the document “Keeping Christ’s Sacred Promise: A Pastoral Framework for Indigenous Ministry” in Louisville, Kentucky, as part of the apology. Indigenous children at the U.S.’s 408 federal Indian boarding schools suffered whippings, sexual abuse, forced labor and severe malnourishment between 1819 and 1969, a 2022 Interior Department report found.

The New York Times reports:

Starting in the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of Native children were removed from their families and sent to the schools, where they often faced abuse, neglect and hard labor. Of the more than 500 Native boarding schools set up across the country, most with federal involvement or support, 87 were Catholic-run, according to a document from the research group Catholic Truth and Healing.

“The family systems of many Indigenous Peoples never fully recovered from these tragedies, which often led to broken homes harmed by addiction, domestic abuse, abandonment, and neglect,” the bishops wrote in a 56-page document issued on Friday called a pastoral framework. “The Church recognizes that it has played a part in traumas experienced by Native children.”

As you’ll see at the first link, the apology contains no reference to sexual abuse.

US Conference of Catholic Bishops head Timothy Broglio [photo], last appeared here when he declared that Catholic troops may refuse the COVID vaccine.

In 2010, we heard from him when he compared the “grave depravity” of homosexuality to alcoholism in a rant against the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”



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