Previously in the pages of this site, I have championed the cause of justice for the Quebec Orphans (Les Orphelins de Duplessis).
Institutionalized, mistreated, and abused by both state and church in the middle of the 20th century, these young children have endured their suffering into old age, and still lack official recognition or reparation for their plight from either provincial or federal authorities
It is little comfort to these now elderly victims to know that they have plenty of company around the globe for their suffering. For fate has just provided another tragic case to compare with their plight— that of Russian soldiers kidnapping and abducting Ukrainian children from war zones.
This latest episode of stolen children has provoked universal condemnation.
A good up-to-date history is provided by Wikipedia, including the UN’s condemnation of Russia’s forced deportation of Ukrainian children as a “war crime”.
The Ukrainian government officially estimates that about 19,500 Ukrainian children have been taken to Russia since the start of the war. Exact numbers are hard to track—in the midst of war, some parents have been killed, while other casualty victims lost touch with their kidnapped children because Russia keeps moving them around.
And earlier this year the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights for “the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation…….Under international law, the forcible transfer of children from one group to another constitutes genocide if conducted with the intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
Canadian crimes: Pope Francis to the rescue
There were similar complaints of rights abuses in accusations of ethnic cleansing and mistreatment of Indigenous children that were brought to Canada’s attention back in 2008 when prime minister Stephen Harper issued an official public apology for the state schools where Indigenous children were placed against their parents’ wishes.
Like the ICC, Harper decried the racist assumptions behind such forced separation:
“Two primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture. These objectives were based on the assumption aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal,” claimed Harper.
As a consequence, the Canadian government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which published its report in 2015, including testimony from residential school survivors. That report became the primary stimulus for the national calls for the Pope to visit Canada to make amends for the mistreatment and abuses of the Indigenous children held in these residential schools run by Catholic and other religious orders.
Pope Francis did in fact make his penitential pilgrimage to Canada in July 2022, criss-crossing the country to apologise in person to many Indigenous groups. But the big sin of omission committed during the papal trip was that Les Orphelins were ignored in an itinerary that was supposed to be all about repentance for institutional abuse of children.
This does not seem to be the fault of Francis who played the hand he was dealt by his hosts, which included both government leaders like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Governor General Mary Simon, and religious prelates, like his Quebec host Cardinal Gérald LaCroix.
For the Pope’s sincere confessions were a remarkable act of genuine contrition. Speaking in Quebec City’s Notre Dame Cathedral on July 28, 2022 to fellow pastors, Francis urged his whole Church to bear witness to the suffering it had contributed to, and to become advocates for healing, reconciliation, and justice for victims.
He offered three formative “challenges” to the pastors, which all have an essential bearing on how the Church responds to victims from now on: Francis now proposed a more inclusive response, effectively correcting and remedying the exclusive tactics of his predecessor Pope Benedict who prioritised the interests of the institution over those of children abused by Catholic clergy.
The Pope’s first challenge was to “make Jesus known”, via pastoral opportunities for listening, dialogue and encounter with people in situ.
The second challenge was “fraternity,” with Francis encouraging the pastors to build “relationships of fraternity with everyone” they met, not only with Indigenous brothers and sisters, but “with every sister and brother we meet, because the presence of God is reflected in each of their faces.”
‘Fraternity’ carries with it a notion of ‘encounter’, so it is perhaps not inconsequential that Francis’s third challenge was “witness:” the Pope practiced what he preached by offering his personal witness and apology to the abuses suffered by Indigenous students at the state residential schools in Canada run on behalf of the Canadian government by Catholic religious orders.
And then came the profound lesson that must be learned in Quebec and Canada when it comes to repairing the harm done to ALL victims of abuse, regardless of race, creed, class, or color:
“I think in particular of the sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable people, scandals that require firm action and an irreversible commitment. Together with you, I would like once more to ask forgiveness of all the victims. The pain and the shame we feel must become an occasion for conversion: Never again!”
“And thinking about the process of healing and reconciliation with our Indigenous brothers and sisters, never again can the Christian community allow itself to be infected by the idea that one culture is superior to others, or that it is legitimate to employ ways of coercing others”.
So, while the plight of the Quebec Orphans may never have been mentioned directly during the Pope’s visit, everything he said about remedies addresses their case directly!
For instance, Francis offers, ‘encounter,’ ‘fraternity,’ and ‘witness’ as guides for dealing with either healthy or damaged people in an honest, authentic, compassionate way. Thus, we can bear witness to those who have been damaged by institutional abuse (like the Quebec Orphans) and help them on their journey of healing after they were illegitimately “coerced” into orphanages so long ago, in violation of their basic rights.
Just like Archbishop Desmond Tutu did with his own 1994 TRC in South Africa by providing a ‘recipe’(p.14) for remedial justice, Pope Francis likewise provides the necessary ingredients that must go into cooking up a righteous repast of healing and reconciliation for victims of abusive institutionalisation.
Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Judith Herman, in her brilliant new book, Truth & Repair (2023), empathises with both Tutu and Francis, preferring restorative over more punitive retributive justice, in order to foster healing and recovery. Just as Francis encourages listening encounters with victims, so Herman encourages us to listen to survivors. And just as violence and abuse is social, so too must justice be served by public ministry to victims: “If trauma shames and isolates, then recovery must take place in community…….social support is a powerful predictor of good recovery, while social isolation is toxic. People cannot feel safe alone, and they cannot mourn and make meaning alone” (Herman, p.2).
Tutu, Francis, Herman, all lead us to one inescapable conclusion— the insitutional abuse of the Quebec Orphans was a public crime, not a private one. Justice demands that support for their recovery must be an act of public witness also. Herman again is the voice in our ear:
“……legal interventions that respect and empower survivors are a just and healing way to make amends for the harms they have suffered.”
What does justice demand?
As the Jewish theology of teshuvah claims (Rabbi DovBer Pinson, Reclaiming the Self: on the Pathway of Teshuva, 2011), one-on-one, perp-victim violence also damages the larger society. Herman likewise claims that abuse of ‘subordinated” or ‘marginalized’ people (like defenseless orphan children) contributes to a “social ecology of violence”; that is, trauma (like institutional abuse) is a social problem, one that won’t (or can’t) be solved in a private, individual way.
There is plenty of comparable, accumulated evidence that in three Catholic countries—Quebec, Ireland, Spain—- church and state were complicit in causing institutional abuse of mothers and babies throughout the 20th century. They contributed to the social ecology of violence, to both the individual and public wounds that need to heal.
For justice to be done, that initial, fundamental, institutional injustice (Herman insists) demands healing repair via justice from the larger community.
While individual perps may violate victims in a matter of minutes, institutional abuse (i.e. not ‘1 to 1’, but ‘many to many’) can be a long-term affair, and repair of its harms can also require time. Determining and delivering justice is not an easy task, for it makes demands on offenders, victims, and the larger society which do not always offer easy solutions.
Thus, determining that justice needs to be done is a necessary and vital first step, but is not by itself sufficient. We also need practical guidance about the optimal route to take for implementing that decision to deliver justice in the most comprehensive way that will benefit both victims and society.
So, just as Tutu offered his four-part recipe for restorative justice in South Africa (e.g., apology, compensation, punishment, reconciliation), Herman similarly offers us a pragmatic prescription that identifies the prerequisites we need to confront for successful delivery and permanent impact:
1. Can survivors dare to tell their stories in public? will they have a sympathetic audience?
2. Will the community recognise their truth?
3. Is the harm repairable—what would that require?
4. Can offenders and survivors continue to live in the same community?
4. How do we hold offenders accountable?
5. Is it possible to achieve reconciliation?
6. How can the community ensure public safety and avoid future harm?
7. How will we know that justice has been delivered? what would a metric of justice look like?
Our answers to Herman’s questions will provide the justice narrative sufficient to assure delivery.
Learning lessons
Canada can learn a lesson from Ireland, which has had more than its share of institutional abuse. After receiving his 2021 National Commission report on abuses inside the country’s Mother-Baby Homes, Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin made a public, national apology to the victims, including: “……we must learn the lesson that institutionalisation creates power structures and abuses of power and must never again be an option for our country.”
Those institutional power structures can create inequities and vulnerabilities among their captive audiences which, in turn, foster exploitation of innocent victims, as my own analyses have shown.
Martin provides us with a humanistic model of how governments should respond when their citizens are so mistreated.
Rights abuse in Ukraine and Quebec
Finally, with regard to the ICC’s indictment of Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes, it should also be noted that there are protections under international law for children separated from their families—whether those children were separated in Quebec or Ukraine.
If it is alleged that the Russian abduction of Ukrainian children violates UNICEF’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, then surely that should give us cause for concern when we ponder the abuse of human rights that occurred during the institutionalisation of Quebec children in the middle of last century—a practice condoned by both church and state!
The one bright spot in this whole tragedy is that Ukraine actually has an official, active Commissioner for Children’s Rights, Daria Herasymchuk, who has been speaking out loudly to condemn Russia’s war crimes against Ukrainian children. The contrast with Quebec and Canada is painfully obvious—-there is no official Children’s Commissioner in Quebec providing an active voice to promote the welfare of the Duplessis Orphans and voice concern about their criminal treatment by both church and state!
Canada similarly lacks a Minister for Children in its national government like Ireland has, so once again, the onus is on the Quebec Orphans and their grassroots supporters to continue to speak truth to power in order to arouse the same kind of official concern and consideration that seems more readily available in other nations for their abused citizens. In 2023, the elderly victims still await the “firm action and irreversible commitment” that Francis recommended for healing any country infected with the scandal of abuse.
I conclude the way I began, by urging all Canadians to champion the cause of justice, to make sure that human rights abuses of their children are not ignored. The latest look-alike story about the abduction of Ukrainian orphans invites odious comparisons of child abuse between a communist oligarchy like Russia and a Western democracy like Canada. Do we have an answer to this painful reminder of our guilty silences, our failure to speak up about atrocities and injustices in our own country? As Martin Luther King reminds us: “The silence of the good people is more dangerous than the brutality of the bad people.”
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