Oblates face bankruptcy. (News in Brief).

Winnipeg -- Manitoba's Oblates of Mary Immaculate (LOMI in French) are approaching bankruptcy. The men's religious order has paid out over $1 million in legal fees since 1999, and foreseeable legal expenses alone are estimated at $600,000 per year.

If the expenses continue, LOMI will not be able to fulfil its obligation to sustain its existing members--58 men, 39 of whom are over 70 years old. Fr. James Fiori, the provincial superior, has stated that only three of the current members were ever involved in residential schools, and no member has ever been found guilty of any claim of physical or sexual abuse.

LOMI operated 12 Indian residential schools from around 1900 to the early 1970s, and expects to be named in two and a half thousand out of about nine thousand Canadian residential school lawsuits. These cases, both real and fabricated, are great for lawyers' wallets and another opportunity for the media to slander the Church well beyond any offenses committed.

The talks ended last October when the government announced that it was prepared to pay 70 percent of the costs, dumping the remaining 30% on the four denominations which operated the residential schools. These would have preferred a more comprehensive solution for dealing with the claims. Apart from litigation costs, the total compensation costs from the abuse claims could total $1.4 billion.

The Catholic Organizations' Task Group, representing the Manitoba Oblates among others, held talks with the government in 2001.

The federal government has argued that the whole Catholic Church in Canada should pay a share of the fees. However, there is no legal body called "the Catholic Church of Canada," and each separate diocese, order, and organization of the Church is its own legal entity. All Canadians who profess the same faith cannot be held liable for something they were not at all involved in. Of course, the government's approach seeks access to greater resources.

In February 2001, Father Fiori wrote to John Manley, the Deputy Prime Minister but there was no response. Fr. Fiori proposed that the order contribute $200,000 toward a healing fund for settling all the pending and forthcoming claims. Although this would risk the order's own financial survival, "it is a risk LOMI is prepared to take," he wrote. Otherwise, all the assets of LOMI, valued at about $7 million, would be gone entirely by 2006, mostly in legal fees.

On April 9 LOMI voted to apply for bankruptcy protection under the Companies Creditors Arrangement Act. LOMI is the second religious group to face bankruptcy resulting from the residential school lawsuits. The Anglican Diocese of Cariboo in B.C. went bankrupt in December 2001. Now the Alberta Oblates also say that they may be forced into bankruptcy as well. It is highly unlikely that all 2,500 claims against the Oblates are legitimate. (For additional information see C.I., June 2001, p. 25 and Nov. 2001, p. 25.)

Since their first arrival in Manitoba in 1845, the Oblates helped build the railway and opened the first schools in the West, where they taught the Natives. Over the years the Oblates have often stood up for Native interests (N. Post, Apr. 10). The Oblates mastered and documented twenty-seven aboriginal languages and wrote over two hundred dictionaries and grammars for them. Through these and other writings they helped preserve the Native languages and culture. However, today the Oblates are accused of having tried to assimilate the Natives into a Western culture, especially by "imposing" on them a "foreign religion."

In spite of all problems, the Oblates are determined to serve the Natives for whom they have laboured the past 157 years. The Prairie Messenger (April 10), for example, reported on the Forum on Ministry with Aboriginal Peoples, in which the three Catholic Archdioceses of Manitoba took part. The forum proposed dialogue with the Natives and a greater "openness to aboriginal culture, beliefs and spirituality." "For a true aboriginal Catholic church to flourish, culture, language and symbol must be incorporated into liturgy and sacraments to a greater degree than presently exists..." If such an aboriginal Church does not already exist, can it be created in the 21st century?