Following more than a month of gut-wrenching developments, the winds of change are starting to blow across Canada, bringing with them fresh energy and commitment to reconciliation.

Some may take Michael Crummey’s brilliant 2019 novel The Innocents as a piece of nostalgia for a lost way of life in Newfoundland’s outports. But The Innocents offers insights much greater than the nostalgic pacifier Make Newfoundland Great Again. It depicts an unrelenting struggle for survival by two children left orphaned when their parents and baby sister die within a matter of months.

In 2018, American Catholics experienced their “summer of shame” — first the revelations about Theodore McCarrick and then the Pennsylvania grand jury report on priestly sexual abuse. Given the media reach of the United States, the shame spread around the world. Soon Pope Francis announced a global summit on sexual abuse for February 2019. From that emerged some key reforms for episcopal accountability.

Although I don’t feel qualified to speak to the ongoing revelations of life and death at Canada’s residential schools, I would still like to weigh in, and to express my sorrow.

There are some days it is harder than others to get up the energy, and indeed the courage to make the trip downtown to the Church on the Street, and this was one of them.

Forgive me for regarding with a somewhat dry eye my fellow Canadians’ umbrage gusting to apoplexy over the infamy of Indian Residential Schools, and Catholic blame for same.

I have thought a lot about euthanasia over the years. I have thought about it too much.

I was recently inspired by Venezuelan goalkeeper Wuilker Faríñez. My jaw dropped as he saved shot after shot in a 0-0 draw against heavily favoured Colombia in the COPA America football tournament, currently being played in Brazil.

Although the last Indian residential school in Canada closed 25 years ago, new revelations will continue coming to light for many years. The existence of the schools is a national scandal which cannot be wiped from our memories.

The shortest night of the year allows only a few hours of darkness in which to set churches on fire. It was time enough for two Catholic churches to be burned to the ground before dawn on June 21, 2021, National Indigenous Peoples Day.