“I humbly beg for­give­ness for the evil com­mit­ted by so many Chris­tians against the Indige­nous peoples.”
That sin­cere, if long-over­due apol­o­gy by Pope Fran­cis for the Catholic church’s role in the iniq­ui­ties of Canada’s res­i­den­tial schools, was wel­comed by many and con­sid­ered not suf­fi­cient by oth­ers. Be that as it may, his pen­i­tence car­ries a les­son for sec­u­lar zealots.

The sins against Indige­nous chil­dren were based on the eth­no-cen­tric con­ceit that it was bet­ter for them to be denied their cul­tur­al heritage.
It being part of his job descrip­tion, Fran­cis couched his ‘we are guilty’ plea in deeply reli­gious terms.
The sec­u­lar ver­sion and les­son are encap­su­lat­ed in a quote from the Eng­lish writer Aldous Hux­ley: “The deep­est sin against the human mind is to believe things with­out evidence.”
A num­ber of what are increas­ing­ly con­sid­ered unas­sail­able truths and norms fall into that category.
And there­in lies the sec­ond les­son from the papal apol­o­gy: “When the Euro­pean colonists first arrived here, there was a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to bring about a fruit­ful encounter between cul­tures, tra­di­tions and forms of spirituality.”

Instead, the Catholic mis­sion­ar­ies in par­tic­u­lar, reject­ed any­thing that did not fit with the way they believed the world ought to be ordered. (It should be not­ed that res­i­den­tial schools were also run by the Pres­by­ter­ian, Angli­can, and Unit­ed Church of Cana­da, all of which have also final­ly accept­ed their guilt and apologised.)
The tide of antipa­thy towards and fear of immi­grants and eco­nom­ic migrants is the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry equiv­a­lent of reject­ing a fruit­ful opportunity.

                           ANOTHER ILL-THOUGHT-OUT BELIEF?

The “woke” move­ment dances on the same dan­ger­ous ground. While I don’t doubt the sin­cer­i­ty of its adher­ents, it seems to me that for many of them, being “woke” is as much an imi­ta­tion of per­ceived belief sys­tems of oth­ers who seem admirable, as it is an expres­sion of a well-thought-out posi­tion. That it thrives may have less to do with its valid­i­ty, than with the social cost of debat­ing it. Actu­al­ly hold­ing an oppos­ing posi­tion can be too much to cope with, let alone defy.
In essence, woke is a form of Calvin­ism that believes some peo­ple are more moral­ly right­eous than oth­ers, and as such should be the ones to set the rules and norms — for the bet­ter­ment of oth­ers, of course. The pun­gent irony is that zero-sum think­ing is equiv­a­lent to the aims and out­look of racists.
Apartheid made its adher­ents com­fort­able because it pigeon-holed oth­ers in ways the rulers could define and allot. They invent­ed tests to nar­row the def­i­n­i­tions that were as absurd as they were vile. The “hair test” (I am not mak­ing this up) involved push­ing a pen­cil into someone’s hair. Depend­ing on how eas­i­ly it fell out, the sub­ject would be slot­ted into one of the “Non-White” categories.
A per­son could apply to change racial cat­e­go­ry, but the process was labo­ri­ous, and nev­er ele­vat­ed any­one to the exalt­ed sta­tus of “White’. The clos­est to that were the mixed-race des­ig­na­tions of “Coloured” and “Oth­er Coloured”.
I once heard Zulu Chief Gat­sha Buthelezi admon­ish an audi­ence in a so-called “Coloured” com­mu­ni­ty he was try­ing to woo to the anti-apartheid cause, that it was a mis­take for them to think of them­selves as “more loved” by the rul­ing Whites than those of oth­er racial cat­e­gories. They were, he said, mere­ly “slight­ly less hated”.

                                 DEFENDING THE ABSURD

Apartheid epit­o­mised one of the most famous quotes attrib­uted to the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry author and philoso­pher Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absur­di­ties; can make you com­mit atrocities.”
One won­ders what he would have made of those who white­wash atroc­i­ties out of greed. Exam­ple num­ber one is golfer Phil Mickelson’s defence of Sau­di Arabia’s lat­est effort to buy respectabil­i­ty, the LIV Golf tour. “I have seen the good that the game of golf has done through­out his­to­ry. And I real­ly believe that LIV can be good for the game of golf as well.”
That would be laugh­able were it not for Sau­di Arabia’s exe­crable human rights record, most notably the mur­der and dis­mem­ber­ment of Wash­ing­ton Post jour­nal­ist and Sau­di dis­si­dent Jamal Khashog­gi by Sau­di agents. Mick­el­son and oth­er big name golf fel­low trav­ellers were hand­ed sev­er­al hun­dred mil­lion dol­lars to join the quaint­ly named “LIV” (Roman numer­als for 54) tour.
Fran­cis billed his Cana­di­an tour as a “Pen­i­ten­tial Pil­grim­age”, rather than the more com­mon “Apos­tolic Journey”.
An arti­cle in the New Yorker summed it up this way: “Much of his papa­cy has involved redress­ing wrongs com­mit­ted by the Church, and he has done so by strik­ing a note of pen­i­tence that’s rel­a­tive­ly new to the papacy—but that he has now estab­lished as an essen­tial part of the office.”
Even if some deem it not enough, pen­i­tence, lard­ed with tol­er­ance and curios­i­ty is a com­mod­i­ty both rare and much-need­ed in this world.

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