The exploration and discovery of the New World was a great opportunity. For many, the lands were a haven from the persecution of the Roman Catholic Church and to a lesser degree the Church of England. However, for the Roman Church, it was an opportunity to aggressively pursue power, influence, and wealth. Many European monarchies also seized on the opportunity themselves. With parallel aspirations, the Church and State frequently worked hand in hand, and with great success.
Upon arriving in what is known today as the Bahamas on his first voyage sponsored by Isabella and Ferdinand the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Christopher Columbus’ journal entry of October, 12 1492 states:
“They should be good and intelligent servants, for I see that they say very quickly everything that is said to them; and I believe they would become Christians very easily, for it seemed to me that they had no religion. Our Lord pleasing, at the time of my departure I will take six of them from here to Your Highnesses in order that they may learn to speak.”
The explorers and settlers desired to spread their faith to the indigenous populations. For the Puritan Pastor John Eliot that meant working diligently to learn Algonquin and developing a written language. By 1663 he had accomplished that monumental task as well as the printing of the Indian Bible. However, considering their tactics varied greatly, the Puritans never saw the success that the Roman Catholic Jesuit missionaries were able to realize. Alfred Cave describes the methods of the Jesuits in his book The French and Indian War:
“This shouldn’t have happened to us. They’re God’s workers, they were to look after us.”
Ontario Provincial Police Report, CBC News, March 29, 2019
“Jesuit missionaries learned Indian languages and accepted Indian ways to the point of conforming to them, especially when living among them. According to Jérôme Lalemant, a missionary must first have “penetrated their thoughts... adapted himself to their manner of living and, when necessary, been a Barbarian with them.” To gain the Indians’ confidence, the Jesuits drew parallels between Catholicism and Indian practices, making connections to the mystical dimension and symbolism of Catholicism (pictures, bells, incense, candlelight), giving out religious medals as amulets, and promoting the benefits of the cult of relics.”
The false church has a history of success in melding faiths together. This had been done to spread ‘Christianity’ through the Roman world. Pagan gods and holidays were given Christian names and their practices were absorbed. The casualty was of course the truth of God’s word. The apostle Paul warns of this in 1 Timothy 4:
“I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.”
In Latin America (Mexico, Central & South America, and the Caribbean), as the name suggests, the Roman Church was incredibly successful. According to a Pew Research Report (November 13, 2014) “Latin America is home to more than 425 million Catholics—nearly 40% of the world’s total Catholic population.” But, this success was achieved using methods that are far from those prescribed in Scripture.
The reign of terror that characterized the Spanish Inquisition was exported to the New World to ensure the Church both established control over the native population and drove out any Jews or Protestants that settled there.
To make it easier for the native population to accept the Roman religion it was again mingled with the local culture and beliefs. The most famous example of this is the merging of the Roman Church’s Virgin Mary and the Aztec mother goddess Tonantzin. Bennett Sherry writes the following as part of the World History Project:
“The Lady of Guadalupe is an example of the complicated negotiation between indigenous belief and colonial conversion. This place served as a pilgrimage destination for centuries before the Spanish arrived, and it remains so centuries later. The Spanish destroyed a shrine to an Aztec mother goddess and replaced it with a shrine to the mother of Jesus. In images, she is portrayed in a European style but with dark skin. She stands on a moon, wreathed by the sun—important elements in the Aztec religion. Indigenous converts adopted the Lady of Guadalupe as their protector, and some still call her Tonantzin. They might have been praying to a different figure, but they were praying for the same reasons and at the same site as their ancestors. And three centuries later, Guadalupe remained a symbol of Mexican unity.”
Another key to the success of the Roman Church’s takeover of Latin America was the opening of schools and universities. Universidad de Santo Tomás de Aquino was the first Catholic university established in the New World in 1538 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. From there it grew exponentially. Today the Church itself estimates that there are nine million children enrolled in Kindergarten to Grade 12 classes in Latin America. It was apparently the Spanish priest and founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius Loyola, that is quoted for famously saying “give us a child till he’s seven and we’ll have him for life.” There is certainly truth in this, for it is the book of Proverbs 22:6 that says: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
The power of the Roman Church is almost absolute in a society where from a tender age they are schooled by the priests, attend Mass, and confession, etc. This has resulted in Latin America being one of the greatest Catholic strongholds in the world, the home of Pope Francis the current pope.
Indian Schools
In North America the Church also understood the importance of schools. The first Indian school in Canada was established by the Roman Catholic Recollect Order of Franciscans in 1620. It did not prove successful and the Recollects were replaced by the Jesuits. Finding and keeping students never proved very easy as the parents were understandably reluctant to send their children off with strangers.
In the 1800s, this would change in Canada as the Roman, Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, and even in one case, Mennonite churches worked with the government of Canada to establish Indian Residential Schools that the children were forced to attend. Approximately 70% of all these schools were run by various orders of the Roman Church. When necessary, under this new endeavour, priests and nuns would show up with police officers to remove the children from their homes and bring them back to schools, often hundreds of miles away.
In the United States, there were over 350 Indian boarding schools, with approximately one-third run by religious organizations, at least 84 of which were run by Catholic institutions through contracts with the U.S. government. According to The Catholic Spirit, “a group of Catholic archivists researching the topic believe there were many more.”
In Australia too, the Roman Catholic Church worked alongside the government with the aim of “breaking the spiritual and cultural identity of Aborigines, by removing tens of thousands of black children from their parents”—Irish Times. They were the “Stolen Generation” and were forcibly separated from their families under the policy from the mid-1800s until the mid-1960s.
Almighty God designed the family. What place does man have to force children away from their parents? This is nothing short of forced conversion and has no basis in Scripture. The Roman Church is no stranger to forced conversions.
Surely there is a warning here for any who want to preach the Gospel. Yes, we have been called to be a light set on a hill. And yes, it is a beautiful thing when one leaves his people and his gods to grasp onto the Hope of Israel as Ruth did. But, what does the Lord require of those who are the light? In the context of this subject, God’s servants have not been called to provide secular education to those outside the household of faith in his name. Nowhere did Christ or the apostles work with Caesar in this way.
The Canadian Children’s Experience
The program was designed to civilize, assimilate and Catholicise the native population. In Canada, upon arrival at school, the children were given an English-style haircut (picture previous page). Boys received a great shock upon losing their long locks. Often a new English name was given. Children were punished for speaking their native language. Religious education began.
It all sounds eerily similar to Daniel the prophet being taken captive into Babylon. But this was just the beginning.
Then the abuse started.
The following is from an article entitled The Horrors of St. Anne’s published March 29, 2018, by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC News) upon gaining access to the records of an Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) investigation:
“The investigation began on Nov. 9, 1992, after Fort Albany First Nation Chief Edmund Metatawabin presented evidence to police following a healing conference attended by St. Anne’s survivors. Over the next six years, the OPP would interview 700 victims and witnesses and gather 900 statements about assaults, sexual assaults, suspicious deaths, and a multitude of abuses alleged to have occurred at the school between 1941 and 1972.
All of the survivors interviewed by the OPP during the investigation described suffering or witnessing multiple abuses — physical, sexual, and psychological.”
The information detailed in the transcripts of the abuse that occurred at St. Anne’s Residential School is incredibly disturbing. We do not feel it is appropriate to reprint it here in full, but briefly, the transcripts describe degrading humiliation, staff participating in or facilitating student-on-student physical and sexual abuse, extreme sexual abuse from staff members, including the nuns and priests, including the use of straight jackets during such abuse, and the use of an electrical chair. The following is from the CBC investigation into the OPP files describing the presence of the chair:
“The description of the electric chair varied but it appeared to have been used between the mid-to-late-1950s and the mid-1960s, according to OPP transcripts and reports. Some said it was metal while others said it was made of dark green wood, like a wheelchair without wheels. They all said it had straps on the armrests and wires attached to a battery.”
Memories of being taken at age nine:
“One day [my parents] were out picking berries, and I was playing with two other kids in the front yard of the house... when an RCMP [police officer], a priest and two nuns came and just grabbed me out of the yard and threw me in a wagon...
Gordon says he was sexually abused by a nun while at Lebret, and was left deaf in one ear and blind in his left eye because of the abuse he endured.
He added that the school was across the lake from a seminary and that it was “common practice” for the priests to come over and abuse the children. “During the day, we had normal classes, we had good playground, everything looked normal, but at night, these animals came out and abused us all the time” Gordon said.
Fred Gordon, Student at Lebret Indian Industrial Residential School, Saskatchewan from 1944 - 1951, CTV News, May 31, 2021.
Memories of the electric chair at St. Anne’s:
“It looked like an ordinary chair, except there were wires leading to a crank box. Then when the first few boys were given electric shock they winced and I could see them jerk as they cranked that handle. And then I saw what was happening to the kids, they seemed to be hurt here mostly. Through their body. And they kind of slumped after they let go, after they stopped doing it.”
Leo Ashamock, St. Anne’s Residential School student, CBC News, April 3, 2018.
There were also reports in the transcripts of disappearances and the deaths of students who tried to escape.
The results of the OPP investigation were the conviction of five individuals, of whom all but one received a jail sentence of less than a year. One had a sentence of 18 months.
Prosecuting the perpetrators of the Residential School crimes has been a difficult task as various arms of the Canadian government have tried to keep the information from the public. The following is again from the CBC article:
“In 1994, the Indian and Northern Affairs Department refused to hand over documentation to an RCMP task force investigating cases in British Columbia, forcing the Mounties to obtain multiple search warrants for the department’s head offices in Hull, Que., according to the Court of Appeal filings.
Even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) faced difficulty obtaining records of criminal convictions related to residential school abuse from Indian Affairs. The department told the commission it didn’t have them. The TRC concluded otherwise but was forced to complete its final report without them.”
However, there have been those in the Aboriginal communities that have not been willing to leave the horrors behind. The stories of abuse, and even more the missing children, not just at St Anne’s but at residential schools across the country, would not die.
The horrors were forced back into the public eye when in 2021 ground-penetrating radar was brought into one previous Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia. In an approximately 2-acre area, 215 suspected grave shafts were found. The fiery response was immediate. Canadians rose up in shock. Across the country, people put signs on their lawns saying, ‘Every Child Matters.’ Children’s shoes were made into memorials, and there was widespread anger. For the Aboriginal communities, the anger rose to a boiling point in a number of reservations where Roman Catholic Churches were burnt to the ground.
The government had to respond. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a Roman Catholic himself, pledged funds to assist Aboriginal communities in research. He then joined the many voices calling for the Pope to visit Canada and apologize. On behalf of Canada, he then pledged $40 billion dollars to be paid to survivors.
The Catholic Church itself had agreed to compensate the victims of its crimes. However it has refused and fought to get out of its responsibilities. The following was published by the CBC on Dec. 19, 2021:
“Catholic entities made three promises totaling $79 million under the landmark Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2005. A recent CBC News investigation has led many survivors, lawyers, and First Nations leaders to say the church reneged on all three.
The first pledge was to provide $29 million in cash, but this was not met after millions of dollars were spent on lawyers, administration and other unapproved expenses.
The second was to give “best efforts” to fundraise $25 million nationally. Less than $4 million was raised during a period when Catholic officials spent more than $300 million on church and cathedral building projects.
The third was to provide $25 million worth of “in-kind services” to survivors...
In July 2015, the Catholic Church asked for a buyout. The federal government refused, and the matter went to court. Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Neil Gabrielson approved the Catholic buyout proposal of less than $2 million.
The federal government appealed the decision, claiming Gabrielson had made “palpable and overriding errors in his assessment of the facts.” Ottawa then asked that the July decision be quashed.
But for some unknown reason, someone in the federal government decided to abandon the appeal. The case was then closed.”
CBC News followed the story up but was met with a wall. The following is an excerpt of what they encountered:
“CBC News recently reached out to more than a dozen current or former ministers and senior bureaucrats. Several admit they likely have relevant documents but refused to share them.
That includes both current Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller and Bernard Valcourt, who served as minister of aboriginal affairs and northern development in the Conservative government from February 2013 until his defeat in the October 2015 federal election, won by the Liberals.
Miller’s director of communications, Renelle Arsenault, wrote in an email Thursday that a document requested by CBC News would not be provided because “it’s secret.” When asked to elaborate, she did not respond.
Valcourt, reached this week by phone at his home in New Brunswick, was asked to provide his notes or emails from that period, but he declined.
“It’s filed far, far away,” he said.”
In an article in the Globe and Mail entitled, ‘How the Catholic Church was freed from obligation to residential school survivors,’ published October 4, 2021, an explanation is given:
“The now-public court files show that the church “out-maneuvered everyone,” Prof. Turpel-Lafond said. “They were discharged of their obligations through the sheer aggressiveness of their tactics. This was largely legal trickery and not a substantive consideration of the obligations and whether they were met.”
As if the crimes themselves were not horrific enough, what is unbelievable is the length the church has gone, to not fulfill its financial obligations to the victims. Claims that it could not fundraise enough etc., are completely baseless. As the Globe and Mail article goes on to show, the Church has the worth:
“The church’s assets in Canada, however, are substantial. In August, a Globe and Mail investigation used tax records to examine its holdings. The analysis revealed that the combined Catholic Church in Canada had net assets of $4.1-billion in 2019 and that it had received $886-million in donations, making it the largest charitable organization in the country.”
Anger Spills Over
As unmarked graves continued to be found in school grounds across the country, the anger grew. Signs and flags reading “Every Child Matters” were hung everywhere. Roman Catholic Churches were graffitied. Memorials were set up for the children. Some took it into their own hands to go further. Four churches on Indian Reservations were burnt to the ground.
But the Roman Catholic system is masterful at handling criticism and running damage control. The church offered to pay for First Nation, Inuit, and Métis delegations to travel to the Vatican and meet with the Pope. The CBC news announced in an article on March 27, 2022, that “The Pope is expected to spend most of his time listening during each meeting, and to make brief remarks in Italian or Spanish.” The delegations were to then ask for the Pope to travel to Canada and apologize. As if they needed to ask for an apology.
The Pope did listen, apologized, and was “deeply grieved.” The Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the B.C. Indian Chiefs told Global News that he was “absolutely surprised” and that “the sun is shining on the Vatican.” There were no large financial settlements announced; however, an apology tour has now been booked for this July.
And yet when the details of the Pope’s visit are announced the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) informed the public that the Pope suffers from sciatica giving him pain in his back and legs, and therefore to lower expectations:
“Given the Holy Father’s advanced age and desire for simple, modest visits, we can expect the Canadian visit to reflect this reality in both the length of the pilgrimage as well as the geography of such a visit, given the size of Canada. We can anticipate that the visit to Canada will be very different than those of the past.”
A Recurring Nightmare
What is shocking is that the terror that happened at the residential schools is the same terror that Roman Catholic priests and nuns have been found guilty of time and time again. It is a recurring nightmare.
It was the same terror that was occurring at an orphanage, Mount Cashel, in Canada’s eastern province Newfoundland. In that case, the police rewrote the investigative reports to remove any mention of sexual abuse. Only physical abuse was left in the report.
It was the same terror that was happening to children as young as eight in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, another of Canada’s eastern provinces. There the Roman Catholic Church settled a $15 million dollar lawsuit for the victims. Bishop Raymond Lahey of the diocese who had been working closely with families offered the following apology—“I want to formally apologize to every victim and to their families for the sexual abuse that was inflicted upon those who were instead entitled to the trust and protection of priests.” A few months later at the Ottawa airport, Bishop Lahey was stopped at security for a random search of his laptop where it was found to contain child pornography.
Apparently, it does not stop. Just last month, according to Global News, “a judge is authorizing a class-action lawsuit against the Catholic archdiocese of Quebec brought by victims of alleged sexual abuse. The class action was filed in 2020 and covers alleged sexual assaults committed from 1940 to the present day.”
Outside of Canada, it is the same story of terror from this system. Investigations into shocking abuse have been seen in numerous other countries, from the United States to Australia, Ireland, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Germany, the Netherlands, and more.
This behaviour is not new, however. Writing in the early 16th century, the Dutch scholar Erasmus was pained that the faithful “often fall into the hands of priests who, under the pretence of confession, commit acts which are not fit to be mentioned.”
In the words of Revelation 16—they have not repented.
The Great Whore
It must be asked—how could it be possible for a religious system with such a long history of abuse and cover-up to be the true bride of Christ? Especially with all the warnings in scripture of a great falling away from the faith.
For centuries Protestants identified the Roman Catholic Church with the system that is described in 2 Thessalonians 2—one that began with a lack of love for the truth (verse 10), but ends with blasphemously exalting the man—“he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God” (verse 4).
Protestants connected this system with Revelation 17 as one and the same where the system is seen in graphic symbolic language depicted as a great whore—“Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.” Again in verse 6 we see the woman, “drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus…” In chapter 18:24 it adds to this—“and of all that were slain upon the earth.”
I Sit a Queen
Regardless of the horrific history of this system, today few ‘Protestant’ churches actually protest against Rome. It is seen as offensive.
Here in Canada’s largest province, Ontario, the Roman Catholic Church is still the only religion to receive public funding for its 1,500 schools with a student population of over 575,000 children.
Revelation 18:7 describes her in the following state:
“How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.”
When the Pope arrives to apologize for horrendous abuse you can be sure he will be greeted as the highest royalty. Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau has already welcomed the coming of “His Holiness Pope Francis.”
In God’s Name
What makes this Roman system so terrible in God’s eyes is that all is done in His name. But he sees it. Revelation 18:5 makes this clear:
“And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.”
“Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”