OAN host attacks Pope Francis' apology recognizing the Catholic Church's role in Canada's cultural genocide

Kara McKinney: “Apologizing at the feet of the lie only reinforces animosity some wrongfully feel towards Christ and his Church”

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the July 28, 2022, edition of OAN's Tipping Point with Kara McKinney

KARA MCKINNEY (HOST): Pope Francis is currently in Canada where he's been apologizing for the Catholic church's role in running Residential Schools under orders from Progressives within the Canadian government between the 1880s and the late 20th century. Progressives who wanted to give children the same schooling as white kids received. While humility is always a good thing, apologizing at the feet of a lie only reinforces the animosity some wrongfully feel towards Christ and his Church, and that's not a good thing, especially since so many people still falsely believe the Church to be some unique hot-bed for sexual predators.

In Canada right now, the main narrative that has led to dozens of Christian churches being severely vandalized and even burned down in some cases— and hey, where is our apology for that one — is that the Catholic Church participated in genocide, a mass murder against Indigenous people living in Canada. That is patently false.

Yes, it can be wrong to separate children from their parents and culture, as happened to many of those Indigenous students, but again, it was being done by progressive Canadians who thought they were helping Indigenous childrem. Mistakes in helping is a heck of a lot different than targeted genocide. Were there instances of child abuse or neglect? I'm sure there was, and only because any school run by any church or government will, unfortunately, have that. But, again, that's different than systematic and known brutalities being purposefully done.

We must remember that mortality rates from disease and malnutrition were much higher back in those days than they are today. If the alleged mass graves at the center of this firestorm have an estimated 200,000 to 700,000 bodies each, despite more than 150,000 children having attended that school system. And even still, not a single body has been exhumed or recovered, likely because the radar technology being applied to these graveyards are producing faulty readings, or are being read wrongly by biased researchers.

The Associated Press reported on the pope's trip:

Pope Francis issued a historic apology Monday for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s “catastrophic” policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations.

“I am deeply sorry,” Francis said to applause from school survivors and Indigenous community members gathered at a former residential school south of Edmonton, Alberta. He called the school policy a “disastrous error” that was incompatible with the Gospel and said further investigation and healing is needed.

“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” Francis said.

In the first event of his weeklong “penitential pilgrimage,” Francis traveled to the lands of four Cree nations to pray at a cemetery and then deliver the long-sought apology at nearby powwow ceremonial grounds. Four chiefs escorted the pontiff in a wheelchair to the site near the former Ermineskin Indian Residential School, and presented him with a feathered headdress after he spoke, making him an honorary leader of the community.

Francis’ words went beyond his earlier apology for the “deplorable” abuses committed by missionaries and instead took institutional responsibility for the church’s cooperation with Canada’s “catastrophic” assimilation policy, which the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission said amounted to a “cultural genocide.”

Last November, Media Matters reported on OAN's vehemently racist attempts to deny the genocidal policies used to assimilate Indigenous children, which were led by the Tipping Point host. Mckinney downplayed the cultural genocide with the help of Canadian alt-right troll Lauren Southern and “treated the discovery of more than a thousand Indigenous children’s graves as a lie meant to target churches, drawing a tenuous connection between the discoveries and a string of church vandalism and arson across Canada.”