Transcribed by Max Wallace

More than 150,000 indigenous children in Canada were forced to attend government-funded Christian schools from the 19thC until
the 1970s where they were forced to assimilate. Many were sexually abused, and many died. In July 2022 Pope Francis visited Canada to apologise. In a debate concerning the Catholic Church in 2009 Christopher Hitchens outlined the history of the Vatican’s actions and abuses over centuries, and critiqued the Vatican’s self-serving, hollow apologies. He detailed many of them.

The History

• The Crusades;
• the sacking of Constantinople and the massacre of Byzantine Christianity in April 1204 as part of the fourth Crusade;
• the Inquisition;
• the antisemitic persecution of the Jewish people;
• injustice towards women, ‘that’s half the human race, right there’;
• the forced conversion of indigenous people;
• the Vatican’s participation in African slave trade;
• the admission that Galileo was right;
• legalised and institutionalised torture used during the Counter-Reformation;
• the burning alive in the main square of Prague of the Czech Protestant, Jan Hus;
• the anathema on all Eastern Orthodox Christians as heretics;
• the Treaty with Hitler prior to WWII;
• the celebration of Hitler’s birthday from the pulpit every year until he died;
• the Treaty with Mussolini;
• the murder and forced conversion of Serbian Orthodox Christians in the Balkans during WWII;
• the fact that Father Tiso, head of the Nazi puppet state in Slovakia, was a priest in Holy Orders, and the Croat fascist puppet state, the Ustase state of Ante Pavelic, was also operating under full clerical protection, as was the regime of General Franco of Spain and the dictator Antonio Salazar of Portugal;
• Rwanda, the most Catholic country in Africa, where priests, nuns, and Bishops, are on trial for inciting from their pulpits, the church’s radio stations and newspapers, the genocide of tribal people;
• the rape and the torture of orphans and other children in church run schools in almost every country on earth, from Ireland to Australia;
• the moving of Cardinal Bernard Law from Boston to the Vatican to avoid his arrest for the covering up of systematic rape of children in his jurisdiction;
• the open homophobia against gay and transgender citizens;
• the cruel doctrine of St Augustine’s Limbo, concerning the destination of the souls of unbaptised children.

The Apologies

The Mandate: The problem in the first place, is the belief, on the part of this church that it does possess a truth that we don’t have, and it does have a God-given right, a warrant, a Mandate of Heaven, to tell other people what to do — not just in their public — but in their private lives;

In The Service of The Truth: From the Encyclicals, it is said of the Crusades, of the complicity with the Holocaust, of the political and diplomatic alliance with fascism, it is said off all of these things, ‘well, violence was committed’ — but I’ll stress this and underline it, and I’ll quote directly — all these things were done …… ‘in the service of the truth’;

Silently Waiting: Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger concerning South American Indians who were massacred in the course of conversion in Brazil. After the apology had been made to them, he said: ‘nonetheless it must be remembered that before we came to convert them, they were silently awaiting the arrival of the church‘;

It’s All Relative: The rape and torture of children is not something to be relativised. Not something to be excused as a few bad priests. Certainly not to be excused by the hideously false claim made by some Catholic conservatives that this wouldn’t have happened if queers hadn’t been allowed into the church [which leads to the casuistry that] … ‘We Hate the Sin, But We Love the Sinner‘.

Hitchens Concludes

This is disgraceful. It’s inhuman. It’s obscene. And it comes from a clutch of hysterical, sinister virgins, who have already betrayed their charge in the children of their own church!