Twenty years ago, soon after my ordination as a clergyman in the United Church of Canada, I first began to hear stories of what my church had done to innocent children in its Indian residential schools. Like most people, I didn’t believe the accounts of murder and torture I was hearing. And if I had have kept my ears and heart closed to these tales, I would have been spared an enormous personal loss and liberation.
But the ones you won’t hear from are the more than 50,000 children who died from beatings, starvation, rape and torture, or being deliberately exposed to tuberculosis and left to cough their lives away in squalor and terror: all at the hands of Christian men and women who have never been prosecuted for their crimes.
The truth is that the same culture of religious conquest that caused the residential school inferno in Canada swept across Europe centuries before Columbus ever set foot in the Americas – and only now is the world tearing the mask off the lie that murdered so many millions of people in the name of Jesus Christ.
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