After I read the Canadian bishops’ statement in which they say they “developed protocols long before their American counterparts” and they “have been using national guidelines for the protections of minors that have been in place since 1992,” it reminded me of the saying that sometimes when people enter a race, they think they are so far out in front they are first, but in fact they are last.
We have not been reassured that clerical abuse has been eliminated in Canada, due to a lack of transparency on the part of the bishops themselves.
The Canadian Catholic Conference of Bishops, at a minimum, needs to write the Holy Father to support him in his commitment to change the clerical ways of the Church, particularly the ways in which bishops and cardinals are appointed.
With love of Christ and the Church,
Randy Castellarin
Vancouver
I too was devasted to hear about Catholic priests’ abuse of their parishioners, seminarians, and young helpless children under their care. I have lost confidence in the spiritual service of the Catholic Church.
The Pope is the leader of the Church. Unless these priests are brought forward and prosecuted to the full extent of the law I feel the Church is protecting these abusive priests as they always have and still are doing this today.
Why was Cardinal McCarrick able to resign and have an imposed life of seclusion, penance, and prayer? This is a great example of an accused cardinal who still has the Church’s protection. Why is he not treated like every other abuser and sent to jail?
Unless he and other priests are prosecuted properly, how can we trust the Pope or other Church personnel? The victims are being made victims again by the way the Church is handling these abusers who are so-called “priests.”
Rosemary Prodanuk
Langley
There has been much misinformation about residential schools. It’s very disheartening, and again the media is overpowering.
The term “genocide” has been bandied about more recently but a quick look at historical facts do not substantiate some of the statements in the April 23 B.C. Catholic. Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) created a vaccine for smallpox in 1870 but it was not totally accepted by the illustrious French Academie de Medicine at their meeting in 1873. Your article stated that a vaccine was used in British Columbia in 1862, but Pasteur’s “germ theory” was not popularized until the late 19th century.
Among the white people it was considered somewhat shameful if ancestors died with such diseases as cholera, tuberculosis, or smallpox, and the figures have not been published to any extent. My three grandaunts died in one summer from tuberculosis, ages 19, 17, and 15. My grandfather wrote in his diary: “The house is so quiet without the girls.” Another aunt and uncle and three neighbour girls also died with it.
With regard to the land question, two of my uncles had their land expropriated when they returned from the Second World War (to expand the local airport and to form a provincial park.) I remember the bitter agony that people in P.E.I. experienced when land they had owned for generations was expropriated to form a national park.
In 1950, when I was teaching in a small school on Babine Lake I had to refuse to admit a Native child who had just come from the Millar Bay tuberculosis hospital. She was coughing. I couldn’t expose the other children to the disease, but it was a heartbreaking experience.
A book by Dr. Olive Dickason of Metis descent, Canada’s First Nations, has a more balanced account of the diseases and other problems of the Indigenous people.
Pat Stanyer
Richmond
Thank you for your July 16 editorial on abortion. Unfortunately, it is preaching to the choir.
It’s too bad that mainstream media, including those supported by our tax money, treat us as loonies and refuse to even acknowledge the many thousands of people who have protested abortion for decades.
I suggest some of our many resources be used to show the very points made in the editorial as “commercials.” Start with the simple fact that Canada is the only country, along with North Korea and China, allowing girls to be selectively aborted.
Maybe the next commercial can show the videos in which fetus organs are sold. Follow it up with one on partial birth abortions. Then watch an aborted fetus who has survived the procedure, a living human, being allowed to die.
Next we can follow up on the other Canadian cult of death, killing old people. My 81-year-old mother, who has lost control of her life, is frightened to be in a non-Catholic hospital or institution.
Gerald Bawol
Vancouver
To compare the situation regarding abortion in Canada to North Korea and China is inaccurate. We have no forced abortions, no one- or two-child limit per family, and no financial penalties for having children. On the contrary, there are sizable child benefits for each child, no matter if it the first or the 20th child in a family.
The reason why we have no law allowing abortion in Canada is actually that in 1989 Archbishop James M. Hayes, president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, in unison with other faith leaders, intervened when Prime Minister Mulroney was proposing a gestational-based abortion law. In the absence of such a law, each province now has gestational regulation, in which the woman has free choice to abort.
With the moral climate in the country so declining, there is no hope of enacting a law better than what is in place already.
This is not the way to go for the Catholic Church in Canada. The better way is to proclaim our faith in the resurrection of the dead, the consequences of hell for unrepentant murder, and the bliss promised for those who conform to the Lord’s teachings!
Gerlinde Elsbett
Powell River
