Residential Schools Settlement
Sermon preached at the Special Synod Eucharist - Saturday, 11 January 2003
The Most Rev'd Andrew S. Hutchison,
Archbishop of Montreal
The first of many miracles has already been accomplished in that, on a Saturday morning in January, we indeed have managed to gather a quorum of both laity and clergy for a special meeting of the Synod. I thank you all for giving the time to this very important matter. When the date was set, it was set simply because it was important to do this business by the end of this month; there was no consultation of the liturgical calendar. Itís a wonderful gift of the Holy Spirit I think that as it turns out we gather on the Feast of the Holy Innocents, the first martyrs of Christianity. And as we do so, we consider the lot of other innocents in our own time and in our own land.
We meet in special synod today as members of the diocese but also as part of the Anglican Church of Canada. We are all grounded in the history of our country, and both as citizens and Anglicans, we have contributed to the shaping of that history. We inherit a legacy from the generations that came before us, for better and for worse. That we are here at all as a community of faith is a part of that legacy; the good news of God in Jesus Christ which we share has been passed on to us from those who went before. This splendid Cathedral and the glorious tradition of music and liturgy were not of our own devising. I could go on. We owe much to our history and to Anglicans who in other generations forged a lively and holy tradition which we are very pleased to inherit and to celebrate. But with that legacy come elements of our history which we would rather not admit.
With the best of intentions we agreed to invest in the education of Native Canadians, bringing them not only the light of the Gospel, but also a language and culture that was foreign to them. The best of us believed that that was their best hope for the future. So broad was the Canadian consensus on that, that it became government policy to offer that future not only to those who sought it, but to press it upon all Native children. Families were ripped apart as children were virtually kidnapped from their homes by government agents, and separated from their parents and communities, many of them for life. The residential schools to which they were taken, built by the government and funded on shoestring budgets, were staffed largely by dedicated church people. There were 26 Anglican schools across the country, and people of virtually every diocese and every corner of the Church sent teachers and support staff to join in this great work of faith. The late Audrey Iton, sometime member of this Cathedral congregation and former chair of our diocesan Primateís World Relief and Development Funds committee was one of those teacher. Much good came out of those many schools because of the excellence of the teachers, and many of those teachers can be very proud of their legacy, as was Audrey.
It is through the schools that many Native Anglicans came to faith, including many who are now among our clergy and our bishops. And there are Native leaders in many walks of life throughout Canada who voice nothing but gratitude for their experience in the schools and in the church. That is part of our legacy, and we are happy to embrace it. By grace a system that was ill conceived ñ as we now understand in retrospect ñ and was certainly mismanaged yielded some good harvest. But there was a dark side of that history as well which we must also own.
Vulnerable young children far from the protection of families were abused in our schools, both physically and sexually, and bear the painful marks of that experience through the rest of their lives. And because of that, we gather today. Our Primate, several years ago, took the lead in Canada by offering a profound apology to our own Native Anglicans and to other Native Canadians who were part of our school system, for our complicity in the abuses that took place in those schools and in the unfortunate system of which we did our best to bring something good.
It took the government much longer to accept its responsibility. And for the past several years, we have been in intense negotiation with the government as to where appropriate responsibility lies and how a settlement can be made. You will hear more about that proceeding as the Synod progresses. We have been asked, across Canada, as members of the Anglican Church, to recognize that, even though there are many parts of the church where there were no schools (including this diocese), we are part of one church. And the history we inherit is one history, for better or for worse. We take credit for and responsibility for all of it. And to that end, every diocese is being asked now to bring an end to this very painful and difficult negotiation with Native Anglicans and Native Canadians over their experience in our schools. A fund of 25 million dollars is being established nationally, and each diocese across the land is being asked to accept its share of responsibility for a portion of that fund, in our case half a million dollars.
Because the constitution of our diocese does not allow us to spend that kind of money, to authorize that kind of expense without a meeting of Synod, we gather here in Synod. To date, twelve other dioceses have already said yes and have ratified the agreement, some through their diocesan councils, some through their synods and one other synod meets on this day and others later in the month. A number of those dioceses have paid their share upfront from reserve funds, saying simply that these were sins of the past and therefore funds from the past are an appropriate way of accepting our responsibility. Others have undertaken a five-year commitment and dealt with it in other ways. We are here today to listen carefully to your ideas and your suggestions as to the most appropriate way for us to rise to our responsibility. It is, as you will hear, within our capacity to do what other dioceses have done, namely to make a single payment now and to dispatch that responsibility. I am not at all sure that that is the best route for us to go and you will hear more about that during the course of the synod. However, I do hope that without very lengthy debate, we will be able, as a synod, to say ìYes we are Anglicans, yes this is part of our history, yes we support what our negotiators have done on our behalf in dealing with the Government of Canada; we endorse the agreement and we accept our reasonable share of responsibility for that.î
These are the innocents of our time. The light, life, joy and peace of Jesus Christ was a great gift to the earth but very quickly thereafter, we recognize the dreadful evil that such beauty can call forth and that grows up with it. And later on in the life of that same Jesus, we find it in his own suffering and death upon the cross. The light of the gospel of Jesus Christ has come to Native Canadians and what a joy that has been for many of them. But alas, in that situation too, there have been innocents who have suffered terribly and as a result, we accept our share of history, for better and for worse. God give us the courage to do that with humility.
