by B. R. GOWANI
Many in the Catholic Church have committed all kinds of crimes, have ignored these crimes, and have delayed acceptance of these. Even worse, they could have stopped the wickedness in time, as it was in their power to do so, the many crimes being committed by others. The apologies or non apologies tendered by the Catholic Church for the wrongs it executed, or for overlooking the wrongs carried out by others, have always been delayed.
A few instances:
Conquest of Americas
Christopher Columbus, the first undocumented alien to the Americas, landed in what is today known as The Bahamas on October 1, 1492. Pope Alexander VI’s May 1493 papal bull Inter caetera gave green light to Spain’s Christian zealots, Isabelle and Ferdinand, to keep the land “discovered” by Columbus. The new lands to be “discovered” could be Spain’s, if they were not Christian ruled.
Indigenous Holocaust, swallowed almost 175 million natives between 1492 – 1900 throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Of course, the Catholic Church initiated this, but later other Christians, including Anglican and Protestants, joined in looting the land and killing the natives.
Even for such monstrous crimes, their beneficiaries have much trouble apologizing for these heinous acts.
In 2015 during a visit to Bolivia, Pope Francis apologized for the atrocities committed against the indigenous people of the Americas, North and South. Incidentally, South American country of Bolivia at that time had her first-ever indigenous president, Evo Morales, present there. The Pope remarked:
“I would also say, and here I wish to be quite clear, as was St. John Paul II: I humbly ask forgiveness, not only for the offenses of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.”
“I also want for us to remember the thousands and thousands of priests who strongly opposed the logic of the sword with the power of the cross. There was sin, and it was plentiful. But we never apologized, so I now ask for forgiveness. But where there was sin, and there was plenty of sin, there was also an abundant grace increased by the men who defended indigenous peoples.”
Pope Francis’ apology was appreciated compared to Pope John Paul’s weak apology and Pope Benedict XVI’s arrogant indifference.
Most of the apologies, have qualifiers and actions that negate the words, as we see:
Two months later, Junípero Serra (1713 – 1784), was made saint by Pope Francis. Serra had been beatified by Pope John Paul II back in 1988. Serra had treated the indigenous people like animals, used violence against them, and compelled them into forced labor. The Natives also contracted European diseases against which they had no immunity.
Native Americans protested the move but couldn’t do anything, to change the outcome.
Indigenous children
In Canada, from 1828 to 1997, various Christian churches were running boarding schools whose aim was to forcefully assimilate indigenous Native American children through religious conversion, coercing them to learn the English language, pressuring them to wear European clothes, etc. Conditions at those schools were horrific and children contracted TB frequently. As a result, many children died. Often they were buried in the school cemeteries to save money.
It was July 2022, the late Pope Francis tendered an apology on behalf of Christians to the Canadian Natives for the outrageous excesses it committed against the indigenous children in Canada:
“I am sorry. I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities co-operated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools.”
(Read the full text here.)
The first Native American US Secretary of Interior, Debra Haaland, ordered an inquiry into what happened to the indigenous children in the US at that time.
The Report stated what happened between 1819 and 1969 in more than 417 boarding schools. Gravesites were found at 65 of those schools.
“…deployed systematic militarized and identity-alteration methodologies to attempt to assimilate American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children through education, including but not limited to the following: (1) renaming Indian children from Indian to English names; (2) cutting hair of Indian children; (3) discouraging or preventing the use of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian languages, religions, and cultural practices; and (4) organizing Indian and Native Hawaiian children into units to perform military drills.”
In June 2024, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued an apology:
“Today, many North American Indigenous Catholics trace their faith to the decision of their ancestors to embrace Catholicism hundreds of years ago. Sadly, many Indigenous Catholics have felt a sense of abandonment in their relationship with Church leaders due to a lack of understanding of their unique cultural needs.”
“We apologize for the failure to nurture, strengthen, honor, recognize, and appreciate those entrusted to our pastoral care.”
It needs to be said that Protestant Christians were also involved in the above tragedies.
In 2001, Pope John Paul II had apologized for Church’s forceful separation of 30,000 Australian aboriginal children, the “stolen generation,” to turn them into brown and black European-like Christians:
“The Church expresses deep regret and asks forgiveness where her children have been or still are party to these wrongs.”
Galileo Galileo
Galileo Galileo (1564 CE – 1642 CE), a polymath, is one of the main personalities of the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Albert Einstein called him, “the father of modern science.” With the advanced telescope he built, he was able to observe stars of our Milky Way Galaxy, rings around planet Saturn, four moons of planet Jupiter, and so on. This was also an endorsement of Copernican heliocentrism <1>, as opposed to the widely held belief of geocentrism. That is, our Sun was the center of our universe rather than the Earth. The Sun didn’t revolve around the Earth but Earth and other planets orbit the Sun. Nicolas Copernicus (1473 – 1543) was not the first one to come up with that idea. More than seventeen centuries back, Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 BCE – c. 230 BCE) and others held the same belief but their models were abandoned against the geocentric hypotheses of Aristotle and Ptolemy.
Galileo’s book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was banned in 1633 on heresy charges. (The ban was lifted in 1835.) Galileo was commanded to appear in Rome before the Congregation of the Holy Office; i.e., the Inquisition. After four appearances, on June 22, 1633, Galileo was instructed to kneel in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and was reprimanded and was declared guilty of “vehement suspicion of heresy,” and made to recite and sign a formal abjuration:
I have been judged vehemently suspect of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the sun in the center of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not at the center of same, and that it does move. Wishing however, to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error, heresy, and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church.
Quoted in Shea and Artigas 2003, 194, from Galileo Galileo, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
“I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galileo of Florence, seventy years of age, arraigned personally for judgment, kneeling before you Most Eminent and Most Reverend Cardinals Inquisitors — General against heretical depravity in all Christendom, having before my eyes and touching with my hands the Holy Gospels, swear that I have always believed, I believe now, and with God’s help I will believe in the future all that the Holy and Apostolic Church holds, preaches, and teaches.“
Galileo was put under house arrest after he was thoroughly discredited by God’s nasty and powerful agents.
After 359 years, Pope Paul II didn’t apologize but laid the blame on “the error of the theologians of the time.”
“Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture….”
Error means mistake; this was not a mistake, it was an immoral, unjust, and criminal to extinguish scientific inquiry at the alter of human-made Biblical stories and beliefs.
Cardinal Paul Poupard:
“It is in that historical and cultural framework, far removed from our own times, that Galileo’s judges, incapable of dissociating faith from an age-old cosmology, believed, quite wrongly, that the adoption of the Copernican revolution, in fact not yet definitively proven, was such as to undermine Catholic tradition, and that it was their duty to forbid its being taught. This subjective error of judgment, so clear to us today, led them to a disciplinary measure from which Galileo had much to suffer.”
Quoted in George V. Coyne, “The Church’s Most Recent Attempts to Dispel the Galileo Myth”, Vatican Observatory, 28 January 2017, pp. 1-29, p. 5 in “Did the Pope Apologise to Galileo?”
Poupard lied when he said the Copernican revolution was “not yet definitively proven.” The only thing the Catholic Church needed to do in 1633 to prove that the Copernican revolution was a reality, was to check it for themselves by borrowing Galileo’s telescope. They would have discovered the truth: nothing revolves around the earth except its satellite, our moon.
Child sexual abuse
Worldwide, the priests, nuns, and other in the Catholic Church have been involved in the sexual abuse of children: mostly boys, but also girls. Nuns also violated girls with crucifixes. Nuns themselves have been victims, too. There is record of Sisters and nuns being turned into sexual slaves.
Some statistics of the widespread abuse:
- In France, between 1950 and 2021, more than 333,000 children were victims of sexual abuse, almost 80% of them were boys.
- In the US, $4 billion was paid out to 17,000 victims.
- In Germany, the number of victims totaled 3,677 children
- In Portugal, 4,815 children were victimized.
In 2001, Pope John Paul II offered an apology for the sexual abuses committed by some Catholic clergy:
“In certain parts of Oceania, sexual abuse by some clergy… has caused great suffering and spiritual harm to the victims.”
“Sexual abuse within the Church is a profound contradiction of the teaching and witness of Jesus Christ.
“The synod fathers wished to apologize unreservedly to the victims for the pain and disillusionment caused to them.”
Pope Francis was mad when on his 2018 visit to Chile he was asked by a TV reporter about Chilean bishop Juan Barros who was accused of sexual abuses: “not one shred of proof against him. It’s all slander. Is that clear?” Pope had defended that bishop for a long time.
However, the Pope realized that he was wrong. He apologized to the Chilean victims and asked the entire Chilean leadership to resign.
In 2018, apologizing to the Pennsylvania US victims Pope Francis said:
“With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realizing the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives.”
Pope Francis also said sorry to the French victims:
“I would like to express my sadness, my pain for the trauma that they have endured; and also, my shame for that for so long the Church has been incapable to put this at the centre of its concerns.”
But Pope Francis’ apologies didn’t address all the atrocities.
After Pope Francis’ death, Sarah Pearson of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) wants to carry on the fight for the victims with the new Pope.
“Abuse survivors do not want to see another conclave that elects a pope who has shielded and covered up for clergy offenders.”
That new Catholic Chief is Pope Leo XIV.
Israeli Genocide
On October 7, 2023, Hamas in occupied Gaza attacked the occupying power Israel killing over 1,139 people and took 251 Israeli hostages. It is, however, not clear how many of them were killed by Hamas and how many by the Israeli forces.
Right away Israel waged war on all Gazans. Israelis have invoked Yahweh regularly. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wrath knew no bounds. Three weeks later, he quoted extracts from the Jewish Bible 1 Samuel 15:1-35 to wage the war against the Palestinian people. Israel’s atrocious war lasted two years and killed over 500,000 Palestinians. Despite President Trump’s support for ceasefire, Israeli killings of Palestinians is still continuing.
Dehumanization of Palestinians was another weapon Israel deployed against the Palestinians.
Israeli heritage minister Amihay Eliyahu said nuclear option was one way to attack Gaza.
On August 3, 2025, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, at a real estate conference, boasted:
“The Gaza Strip is becoming a real estate bonanza.”
“We paid a lot of money for the war, so we need to decide how to divide the percentages of the land in Gaza. The demolition phase is always the first phase of urban renewal. We did that, now we need to start building,”
He also claimed that the plan is sitting on Trump’s table.
In early September 2025, International Association of Genocide Scholars or IAGS declared
“Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).”
A UN Special Committee report prepared by Mohan Pieris, covering the Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza from October 2023 to July 2024, declared Israeli war as genocide:
“This year’s report examines the mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palestinians in Gaza. Our findings conclude that Israel’s methods of war align with the characteristics of genocide.”
But Pope Leo XIV <2> sees no “genocide” in Israel’s atrocities. As in July 2025, Pope Leo XIV expressed doubts about genocide:
ELISE ANN ALLEN: How does that apply to the Middle East right now, and specifically to Gaza, where the situation seems to be escalating rather than deescalating? What hope can there be in that situation? What space is there for dialogue at this point?
POPE LEO XIV: That’s a very difficult question. Even with some pressure, I don’t know how great it’s been behind the scenes, but even from the United States, which is obviously the most significant third party that can place pressure on Israel, in this case. Even with some very clear statements being made by the United States government, recently by President Trump, there has not been a clear response in terms of finding effective ways to alleviate the suffering of the people, the innocent people in Gaza, and that is obviously of great concern.
It’s going to be very difficult because some of the people, especially children, when people go into not only deprivation but of actual starvation, just to receive food doesn’t immediately solve the problem. They’re going to need a lot of help, medical assistance as well as humanitarian aid, to really turn that situation around, and right now it still looks very, very grave. The word genocide is being thrown around more and more. Officially, the Holy See does not believe that we can make any declaration at this time about that. There’s a very technical definition about what genocide might be, but more and more people are raising the issue, including two human rights groups in Israel have made that statement.
It’s just so horrible to see the images that we see on television, hopefully something will turn this around. Hopefully we won’t grow numb. That’s sort of a human response because you can only stand so much pain, so the numbness is a way of just deadening the nerves and saying, ‘I can’t take anymore’, so it stops. I think certainly human beings, and as a Christian response, we can’t grow numb, and we can’t ignore this. Somehow, we have to continue to push, to try and make a change there.
It is probable that decades or centuries later, some Pope, if Christianity is still around, would apologize for not acknowledging the genocide when it was occurring.
Borrowing Marco Carnelos‘ <3> idea, Pope Leo XIV too needs to spent lots of hours in libraries to read materials and watch videos on the genocide and the abominable atrocities committed, and still being committed, against the innocent children and adult population in Palestine.
This is not the first time that the Catholic Church would be late in recognizing the reality; it has done so, many times in the past – even in the recent past.
To rephrase poet Munir Niazi’s famous line: The Catholic Church always is late, in its confession and the apologies it offers.
Notes:
<1> It is to be remembered, as Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out:
“In fact, it might be better to say the Copernican theory that Galileo was constructing was a physical realization of a simplified version of Copernicus’s theory.”
<2> Pope’s first exclusive interview in two 90-minute sessions to Senior Correspondent Elise Ann Allen of the online newspaper Crux, which concentrates on news related to the Catholic Church. (The interview is part of Allen’s biography of Pope titled “León XIV: ciudadano del mundo, misionero del siglo XXI” (Leo XIV: citizen of the world, missionary of the 21st century, in Spanish. The English edition will be coming out in 2026.)
<3> Former Italian diplomat Marco Carnelos writing in the Middle East Eye suggested that Kaja Kallas, should become a “library archivist obliged to dedicate at least three hours a day to 20th-century history books, with compulsory monthly exams” for her Russophobia and historical ignorance,
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com