As he lay in a Calgary hospital bed in late July, retired Bishop Fred Henry summoned the energy to publicly break the silence around what he considers the prevailing “lie” about missing Indian residential school children.
“Why is the Catholic Church not asking the federal government for proof that even one residential child is actually missing in the sense that his (or) her parents didn’t know what happened to their child at the time of the child’s death?” he demanded in an e-mail.
The query itself was posed to both The Catholic Register and a former Register columnist who has challenged political accounts of Indian residential school history. Bishop Emeritus Henry apparently went to Catholic media because he has not yet received a response to an initial group e-mail he sent to his brother bishops six weeks ago.
