The Challenge of Recognizing and Acknowledging the Church's Complicity

Daniel O'Brien says the church needs to own what it has done and not just apologise for it. In Canada, where he lives, residential school system systematically took indigenous children away from their parents; many of these children died but were never reported. The Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury both visited Canada in an attempt to make some kind of acknowledgement of the church's complicitness in that. 'I think we've got to start by owning that and just saying, we've given lousy advice to people,' writes O'Brien.