Catholic Vancouver July 20, 2022
Mother Teresa’s Vancouver visit prompted a life of Indigenous healing and a startling discovery
By Terry O'Neill
Seeing Mother Teresa speak at the Pacific Coliseum in 1976 was a life-changing experience for Ruth de Weerdt, then a high school student at Vancouver’s Little Flower Academy.
Forty-six years later, de Weerdt, now 63 and an active member of Sacred Heart Parish in Delta, says her decision to travel with a friend to Alberta to attend the Papal Mass at Commonwealth Stadium (where her friend will be an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion) and then the Liturgy of the Word at Lac Ste Anne on July 26 is profoundly connected to that earlier event.
De Weerdt said in an interview that Mother Teresa’s speech sparked her desire to serve the poor. As a result she contacted the Missionaries of Charity in New York, saying she wanted to help Mother Teresa in India.
“They told me that they don’t usually send people from North America over to India, because they don’t have the immunity to fight off the diseases,” de Weerdt said. Instead, “The sisters said that I could serve poor in Canada – go to Canada’s North and work with your poor.
“And I’m like, ‘We have poor in Canada?’ and she says, ‘You have Indigenous people who are poor.’ And they [the sisters] knew – I’m going to cry now – they knew about the poor people, the poor Indigenous people, and none of us did,” de Weerdt said. “It was all kept secret. We never learned it in history. It was all kept hidden.”
Soon after, de Weerdt read an article in The B.C. Catholic about Father Pietro Bignami, an Oblate missionary from Italy working among the Indigenous at the community of Cross Lake in northern Manitoba. She contacted him, and he invited her to assist during the summer of 1977.
(Father Bignami famously learned to speak Cree before French and then English. He served in Canada for more than 60 years and died in 2010 at the age of 83.)
“It was an answer to my prayer,” she said. “It was like, ‘That’s it! That’s how I’m going to get to do what God’s calling me to do.’”
She spent four months in the Cross Lake area, visiting the sick, helping with summer activities and Bible study, and playing guitar and singing. During that time, she also travelled to Norway House to work with Catholic nuns on a program of music and activities for the Indigenous community.
De Weerdt said her time as a volunteer missionary led to her forming a lasting connection with the Indigenous people. But she wasn’t prepared for the surprise God had in store for her when Father Bignami told her he believed that she might actually be Indigenous herself. He took a photo of her, posing alongside two Indigenous girls, to show her the resemblance.
De Weerdt, who was adopted as a baby, said her parents never told her about her heritage, but she felt there might be some truth in Father Bignami’s observation. With the question unresolved, de Weerdt returned home and, within a year, travelled to Whitehorse, Yukon, to live in community with other Catholic volunteers from England, the United States, and Canada, helping serve the far-flung parish, which includes many remote First Nations communities.
She returned home after a year, became a secular Franciscan when she was 21, and eventually married and raised four children.
The mystery of her ancestry lingered until 2010, when she found out through an adoption registry that she was one-quarter Indigenous – her birth mother was a member of the N’Quatqua First Nation which is centred in D’Arcy, B.C.
“It was almost like I always knew,” she said. “It was like my body knew. It’s kind of a weird thing. I always felt a connection, but I didn’t know the extent of it.”
She embraced the news. “Personally, it was absolutely a positive experience, a feeling of coming home to myself,” she said. “Like, now I know who I am. It made sense.”
She now leads Sacred Heart Parish’s truth and reconciliation ministry and is attending the Papal Mass in order “to unite with the Holy Father in prayer, for truth and reconciliation,” she said, and “to bring the experience back to the parish.”
De Weerdt said her focus is on helping her fellow Catholics “have the courage to look at the truth full on.” Both Indigenous people and non-Indigenous Catholics need to heal, she said, and the non-Indigenous can achieve this only by “being able to really see the truth and acknowledge it.”
Pope Francis’s apology is important, she said, but all of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 calls to action, including restitution, should be fulfilled before healing can be completed.
“There needs to be complete acknowledgement of the truth,” she said, “before there is forgiveness.”