Here it is:
We have seen the news that the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has resigned, having acknowledged personal and institutional responsibility in relation to “the long-maintained conspiracy of silence about the heinous abuses of John Smyth” that had been exposed by the Makin Review. Our hearts break for the children and young people who were abused by Smyth and further victimized by the lack of meaningful action on the part of the church.
In 2022, the Archbishop of Canterbury visited Canada to listen to residential school survivors and to issue apologies for the church’s role in the abuses at residential schools. We mourn that today’s news will add to the pain of survivors, and we hold them in our prayers.
The Anglican Church of Canada is committed to continuing the work needed to make the church a safe place for all, in keeping with our baptismal covenant to respect the dignity of every human being. We pray for the humility, courage and wisdom needed for this all-important work.
It’s difficult to miss the irony that Welby “visited Canada to listen to residential school survivors”, an alleged scandal that he was not tangled up in, yet failed to meet with victims of a scandal he was.
Note this tweet from the Anglican Survivors Group. Note in particular the word “lie”:
Just a few questions:
Are all residential school students assumed to be ‘survivors’? I personally know residential school attendees who speak positively of their experience there.
Do they really mean ‘…make the church a safe place for all…’. I guess that would be ‘all’ except the unborn and the terminally ill.
And to whom are they praying? Their ‘god’ seems to have very little in common with the God I know from the Bible.
This kind of communique is further evidence of a bankrupt Church, both financially and spiritually.
That is the fashionable view, but any professional social worker known to me with real background in the native communities has plenty to say about how much better off virtually all those children were in those schools. Incest was endemic in the native communities, starting in the cradle: Homosex No, incest yes.
One should add that parents commonly asked for their children to be admitted, for economic reasons.
And of course in the Arctic the Christian mission was explicitly asked for, and missionaries came. They are still saying, loud and clear, “Homosex No.”
I ought to add that TB was also endemic, and could not always be caught in time when the children got into residence.
And there was chronic alcoholism, not in origin the fault of the native culture. But the children were often being rescued from a rotten situation in which during the long, cold, dark winters there was nothing to do but drink and fornicate, no music, no literature, no art.
Has ‘survivorship’ now made the Canadian taxpayer an everlasting cash-cow?
It is really a rotten thing to do. Is the problem “residential school” or “school”? The fact is, lots of people are worse off in school. Everyone I know who liked school, it tends to be in proportion to how much they disliked their home environment.
Every industrial project, every system, has collateral damage. But it also has benefits. A one-sided analysis of any system is never going to be accurate. The real reckoning, in my view, is looking at intellectually gifted children and how school is miserable for them. Imagine you come from a family where the average IQ is 130 to a school where the average IQ in the teaching staff is maybe 105. You’re literally dealing with primitive people—not the Indigenous people, the teachers.
“Jesus wept”