Church workers try to make Catholicism relevant to native Canadians

Published: 2008-02-01

TORONTO (CNS) -- As the number of Canadians claiming native ancestry increases and Canadian church institutions begin paying for abuses at aboriginal residential schools, some pastoral ministers are looking at ways to make Catholicism more relevant. "If you talk to young people today, even in their early 20s, they'll talk as if they were in the residential school. They're so vehement about it," said Oblate Father Daryold Winkler, one of fewer than a dozen native Catholic priests in Canada. "They think of the church as the ones who ran these schools. That has to be healed." Many young people have grown up with an image of the church as the adversary of native culture and identity, Father Winkler told The Catholic Register, a Toronto-based Canadian weekly, from his office in the Newman Theological College at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. "The residential school legacy is such a huge, symbolic issue for native people -- of the desire to assimilate them, to take away languages and cultures," said the priest, who teaches theology and native issues.

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