EDMONTON, Alberta — The focal point of Pope Francis’ trip to Canada this week was his historic message of apology on Monday to the country’s indigenous people for the Catholic Church’s role in the infamous residential school system that sought to erase their culture. , and in which thousands of children were abused and died.
But as Francis continued his travels across the country — from Alberta, where he apologized, to Quebec and Nunavut in the Arctic — his stops also told the story of the Church’s unusually stable position in Canada.
Large numbers of immigrants from South Sudan, India, the Philippines, South Korea and elsewhere featured prominently in the crowd at the Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton, Alberta, on Tuesday, as well as in the country’s Catholic churches, a product of the country’s generous immigration policies. of Canada, which embraces immigrants and formally promotes multiculturalism.
Although the Roman Catholic Church is in serious decline in many Western countries, it remains the largest denomination in predominantly Christian Canada, accounting for approximately 38 percent of people who identify with a particular faith. And outside Quebec, a French-speaking province it once dominated, the decline of the Church has been modest. In 1951, 41 percent of Canadians said they were Catholic.
The reason for the church’s stability, most analysts agree, is Canada’s relatively open immigration policy, meaning immigrants make up a much larger proportion of Canada’s population than in the United States and other Western countries where Catholicism is on the wane. is.
A survey by the Canadian Census Bureau published late last year found that Catholicism represents the largest faith among newcomers to the country. More importantly, the survey also found that most of those immigrants are active churchgoers.
“Immigrants are now a big part of the most faithful participants in Sunday Mass,” said Gordon Davies, a former priest in the Archdiocese of Toronto who taught at the Toronto School of Theology for 20 years and served as dean of Canada’s largest seminary. Saint Augustine. “The question is whether the second generation will remain just as active in their faith.”
Mr. Davies and others say that the support immigrants have provided to the Catholic Church in much of Canada does not mean that the Church is not vulnerable to the decline that has dwindled the country’s long-established Protestant churches.
“There’s a certain disillusionment about the churches in general,” says Dr. Michel Andraos, Dean of the Faculty of Theology at Saint Paul University in Ottawa.
The Abuse of Indigenous Children in Canada and the US
But Canada’s immigrants have strengthened the church and given it vitality, Mr. Davies said, something he saw firsthand at his own church in Toronto. Today, he estimates that about 40 percent of his fellow parishioners are from the Philippines and a large number of others are Tamils from Sri Lanka.
“It’s like going to Manila every weekend,” he said. “It’s a cultural experience that’s actually very healthy for me.”
dr. Andraos himself is a Catholic immigrant to Canada, his family having fled the civil war in Lebanon in the 1990s.
For many immigrants, he said, churches are as much a settlement service and cultural community as they are a spiritual center. And once they settle in Canada, he said, they often drift away from the Church.
“My whole family emigrated and they were all very active churchgoers for the first 10 years or so,” said Dr. Andras. “Now no one in my family goes to church.”
Regardless of what the future holds, said Dr. Andraos said the arrival of Catholic immigrants has had a profound effect on the church in the largely French-speaking province of Quebec, where Pope Francis arrived on Wednesday.
For much of its history, the Roman Catholic Church dominated not only the spiritual life of the province, but also education and health care, and had a significant influence on business and politics. But in what came to be known as the Quiet Revolution, a Liberal government was formed in 1960 and began to take back those powers, starting with schools. Secularism became a guiding principle.
The effects of that persist today and include a recently passed law banning the wearing of religious symbols, including Christian ones, by public sector workers, including teachers. Over the decades, churches and ecclesiastical institutions have been closed and converted for other purposes.
Secularism has replaced Catholicism in Quebec more than in any other province, and Dr. Andraos said the Catholic Church is nearly extinct in rural parts of the province. But even in Quebec, there is a resurgence of large, vibrant Montreal congregations made up of immigrants, often from Africa.
When he meets parishioners in those churches, he says, he notices that there is sometimes a gap between them and long-established members of the Church in Canada.
That’s especially true of the issue Francis brought to Canada: reconciling indigenous peoples for the damage they’ve suffered in church-run residential schools. After failing to make much of a class action settlement with former students, the church is now trying to raise $30 million from its members.
“They have no idea why they should contribute to that,” said Dr. Andraos, referring to recent Catholic immigrants. “What have they done?”
But he has found that once the students’ suffering is explained, most of them understand the obligation.
Likewise said Mr. Davies that he has found that members of many immigrant congregations are much more conservative than many Canadian-born church members.
“They have nothing to do with uproar in the Canadian Catholic Church to accept same-sex marriage and bring in women,” he said. “That’s not part of their sense of Catholicism and they would be adamantly against it.”
Immigration has also met another need of the Church in Canada. dr. Andraos said few, if any, Canadians were willing to become priests and that the situation is unlikely to change unless priests were allowed to marry. None of the 110 theological students at his university currently intend to become a priest.
So most of the Canadian priests are coming aboard now. Father Susai Jesu, who received the Pope this week at his native parish in Edmonton, was born in India.
Vibrant immigrant-based congregations have so far allowed some archdioceses, including Toronto’s, not to close churches, though Mr Davies said closures are needed to consolidate financial and administrative resources, which are limited because many immigrants don’t have the wealth needed to make great Canadian churches.
The only place where the Church currently disposes of churches and other buildings on a large scale is Newfoundland and Labrador. The archdiocese there filed for bankruptcy after a court ruled it must compensate about 100 people who were sexually abused in an orphanage between the 1940s and 1960s.
The impulse immigrants provided, Davies said, helped prevent the church from disappearing. But it won’t prevent it from shrinking into a more durable version of itself in the long run.
“It may not be in my life,” he said. “But maybe I’m seeing the beginning of that restructuring and that healthy regrowth in my life.”
As the crowd poured out of the Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton on Tuesday, a sea of different faces appeared. Among the crowd of people looking for buses or queuing for trains was Israel Izzo Odongi, who moved to Canada from South Sudan 23 years ago and made the journey from Calgary, Alberta to see the Pope with other people. members of a South Sudanese congregation.
Nearby was Jesu Bala, who moved from Chennai, India, to Edmonton, Alberta, 13 years ago. Mr Bala, who was with four family members, said they were part of a South Asian congregation.
Even when the Pope went to Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta, a pilgrimage site founded in the 1800s for Native Catholics and located about an hour north of Edmonton, there were large numbers of immigrants there.
Reina Donaire, 36, of Edmonton, stood at the edge of the lake, just a few feet from where Francis would bless the water minutes later, with four other friends from the Philippines.
“Most churchgoers are Filipino,” she said, adding that she and other immigrants, including from Africa, provided a lift to the Canadian church. “We are strong Catholics and maybe we help them that way.”
Jason Horowitz contributed reporting from Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta.