Friends, "the residential schools were a magnet for pedophiles in the 1950s and 1960s." These are the words of Allen Retasket, a First Nations man from Wenatchee, Washington State in the U.S.

I personally doubt this is very far from the truth, having survived Grollier Hall at Inuvik in this same time period. The court cases associated with the supervisors at that school over the years proves it to be so, and then some.

It is also very sad for me as a Christian person and a recovering Roman Catholic, to have to bear witness to what is happening with that church today.

There are so many of our innocent Dene, Metis and Inuit peoples who are trying desperately to simply believe in something good and are being led astray by these men of the cloth.

They say that you can tell a drowning person by the way they will thrash about, even to the point of taking their saviour with them. This is what I see happening here.

The initial reaction of those in the Vatican to accusations of child molesters in their ranks was to have an official policy of total silence on the matter, dating back over 50 years now. This has even resulted in the present sitting pope being involved in the matter, from his earlier days in authority, elsewhere in Europe.

Having recently had to come up with something tangible this Pope's first official reaction was that this is the time to "repent," an old standby from religion if there ever was one. And one recent church official even went so far as to suggest that gays, not pedophiles, are responsible for molesting children.

I do believe that all of this has to do with the way the church has continually and firmly held to its stand of what amounts to denial.

There was a time in history when the Pope himself was held to be the personification of God. During times of financial problems this same church in all of its wisdom invented selling 'indulgences,' that is you could pay for your own and others' redemption in the afterlife. It resulted in the Reformation, which could very well be the Church's own salvation today. Meanwhile, our Dene people being the way we are, will just about believe anything in order to "do right" in life, except to question what this Church says.

But the facts sadly remain as they are. In the North, the Roman Catholic Church has largely failed in at least one of its missions, to produce priests and nuns. I can only conclude that its policy of celibacy, its clergy having to remain single, is just not a good starting point for its priesthood.

In this day and age, with so many temptations, the celibacy rule breeds dysfunctional human behaviour and combined with a directive for silence has resulted in our present situation of denial and the outright criminality the church now faces.

In the U.S. alone there have been thousands of court cases involving the faith and millions of dollars paid in compensation.

Finally, isn't there a fundamental biblical reference not to take the Lord's name in vain?

For now, again, Mahsi.