The Breaking Point, At Home and Away.
When the ‘world stage’ comes to your own neighbourhood.
I’m going to start the week off with some good news - Taiwan, a free country, is still in good hands - and with this preamble about my working life and about some personal stuff before I get into the guts of things.
Work: By this time next week I’ll be. . . overseas. Leave it at that for now. Inshallah, this will mean more useful Real Story Content, but I’ve got a very busy itinerary and it’s already been a busy few days.
The personal, which is, in this case, political: I’m happy to report that a book the Sto:lo elders asked me to put together years ago about the residential school experience, Amongst God’s Own, has been expanded and republished by Longhouse Publishing with a new title, St. Mary's: The Legacy of an Indian Residential School, and it’s out now, right here.
In a coming newsletter I’ll be getting back to the ongoing hysterics and disinformation around Year of the Graves, which I’ve lately come to conclude was the most sinister act of vandalism against history and national cohesion committed by the flag-lowering, knee-taking Trudeau Liberals since they arrived on the since in 2015. And there’s a lot of that sort of thing to choose from.
The subtitle to that investigation: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves. Canada’s news media persists in doing a great disservice to the cause of journalism in this matter even now, I regret to say, as in this CBC “investigation,” which is no such thing, (sorry, I don’t like beating up on the CBC, but holy cow), just last week, here.
It’s more than two years late with the news about the disgraceful nation-wide convulsion of what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau judged to be “understandable” desecrations and church burnings, but that’s not even the half of it. Besides, strangely unmentioned: four more churches were burned down in Alberta in the weeks before Christmas.
There’s another relevant book just out. I was asked to contribute to it, but I declined: Grave Error: How The Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools). I’ll be reviewing it when time permits.
For now, let’s just say it’s a selected-essays compendium of original research and polemics of the “denialism” type that two Trudeau justice ministers are considering forbidding you to read on penalty of prosecution. Which is reason enough to recommend the book.
Right off the top I need to say something out loud.
In this just-published interview with the B.C. Catholic newspaper (see also the review of the new edition of the St. Mary’s book in the same link), I put it this way: “Catholics need to rediscover their spines . . .You have absolutely nothing to apologize for. This is important for people to get into their heads: the sins of the father should not be visited on the head of the son. Catholics should know this.”
It’s because I was raised up in an Irish Catholic household, I suppose, but I’ve become exceedingly impatient with what the Protastúnach (sorry, I mean non-Catholics) have to say about what the Vatican or the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops or the Oblates of Mary Immaculate or any particular archdiocese, diocese or parish should do with respect to “reconciliation” with Indigenous people.
Whatever duty of “reconciliation” the church owes, it owes to Indigenous Catholics. Period.
There’s a limit to how much any of us should tolerate from the anti-Catholic press (sorry, I meant the mainstream press) in its insistence on secret Vatican files of the Da Vinci Code variety or lunatic “doctrine of discovery” conspiracy theories no matter how much credence they’re given. I have reached my limit, thanks.
And when I think about it, I may have reached my breaking point when that little Church of St. Jude in East Vancouver was desecrated by a couple of stupid white people on Canada Day in 2021. The innocently devout congregants there are mostly working-class Filipinos. These are my people.
Besides, St. Jude is the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes and I’ve got him tattooed on my left shoulder.