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The Roots of Misery
Ms Hill added her story to innumerable accounts of kidnapping, torture, and sexual and physical abuse in the residential schools. Children died of starvation, infectious disease, fire and, when they tried to escape, exposure. One of three possible punishments awaited children who spoke their Native tongues, Ms Hill told the Toronto Star — a beating with a leather strap, a needle through their tongues, or a kerosene-soaked rag in their mouths.
In his recent penitential pilgrimage to Canada, Pope Francis begged forgiveness for the “catastrophic” and “deplorable” wrongs the Church had committed against these Indigenous children. The cultural genocide and cruelty inflicted on the children seem unthinkable now. But as shocking as the acts themselves is the fact that, at the time, large numbers of people took them to be right and good, even morally necessary. The atrocities were justified by ideas embedded in the worldview of western European civilization and, by extension, in Catholic doctrine.
The dreadful lesson is that ideas have powerful consequences. When worldviews go wrong, so do the acts that grow from them.
We believe that much of western European philosophy, from ancient Greece to the present, has gone catastrophically wrong, pushing a worldview that justifies practices that will be seen in the future as unthinkably evil. Primary among these are the…
