“I don’t think there is any issue facing Canadians more serious than this one,” Weisgerber said Oct. 28, the day Pope Francis announced he had accepted the Winnipeg archbishop’s resignation. “And I don’t think we’re taking it that seriously.”
The Canadian government is banking on oil production and building pipelines to transport it across the country and “all of it goes across aboriginal land,” he said. “Nobody’s talking about the need to negotiate on all of this. I’m not sure it’s on the agenda of ordinary Canadians or on the agenda of the Church.”
The recent violent demonstrations in New Brunswick over hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, also represent a clash over resources and land, said Weisgerber, who led the Winnipeg archdiocese for 13 years.
Aboriginal peoples have different understandings of the meaning of aboriginal rights, sovereignty and title “that lead to very different conclusions,” Weisgerber said. “I feel the Church has to be involved, and our people need to be sensitized to the parameters of this discussion.
“My concern has got to do with people we have dealt with badly, that we have mistreated, through lots of ignorance and good will, but we have not respected them.”
Weisgerber, a former president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, tendered his resignation upon reaching the retirement age of 75, as required by Canon Law. Pope Francis named Victoria, B.C., Bishop Richard Gagnon as the new archbishop of Winnipeg. Gagnon, 65, has been the bishop of Victoria since 2004.
Out of the country when the appointment was announced, Gagnon posted a statement on the Victoria diocesan web site. He said he accepted the appointment “with humility and a total reliance on the grace of God.” He also expressed his gratitude to the people of Victoria, clergy and faithful.
Gagnon will be installed in Winnipeg late this year or early next year; Weisgerber will remain as apostolic administrator.
Weisgerber played a key role in organizing a delegation representing the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian Church that received an audience with Pope Benedict XVI in 2009. At that historic occasion the Pope expressed his sorrow at what he called “the deplorable conduct of some members of the Church” in how they operated the former Indian residential schools, where thousands of native children were mistreated.
“I have tried very hard to bring this issue into the life of the Church,” Weisgerber said. The majority of Canada’s aboriginal peoples have been Christian and many of them Catholic, he said.
“How do we embrace the richness of each other’s culture?” he asked. “That is challenging to everybody, including the aboriginal people, to be open to others.
“It’s so clear to me that in Manitoba the future is the reconciliation with aboriginal people,” he said. “The stakes are very high. There can’t be winners and losers. Either we all win or we all lose.”
In 1990, he came to Ottawa to serve as secretary-general of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, and news of abuses at Indian residential schools broke. This put him on a “long, steep learning curve.”
He was named bishop of Saskatoon in 1996 and, four years later, he was named archbishop of Winnipeg. He served the CCCB in several capacities, including as president from 2007-2009.
Weisgerber will return to his native Regina where his younger sister still lives. He plans to walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela across Northern Spain, perhaps next year, and study Paul’s Letter to the Romans “and how that relates to who we are and what we’re trying to do today,” he said.