IT MIGHT NOT be a violation of professional legal ethics to participate in the Roman Catholic Church’s campaign to escape financial responsibility for the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Canada and the United States. But it is a violation of Christian ethics. And for Christian attorneys, the latter should take priority.
The Catholic Church is not the only Christian denomination from which survivors of abuse in church-run residential schools are demanding justice. Episcopalian and Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and other churches also ran residential schools in North America. However, the Catholic Church ran nearly three-quarters of the residential schools in Canada and more than 20 percent of the 367 Indian boarding schools in the United States. Since May, more than 1,300 suspected graves have been identified near five former Indian residential schools in British Columbia, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Four of those were run by Catholic institutions.But thanks to the Catholic Church’s lawyers, it has largely succeeded at avoiding financial accountability for its legacy of violence.
In 2006, nearly 50 Canadian Catholic institutions signed a settlement agreement with residential school survivors that committed the institutions to raising 25 million Canadian dollars ($20.05 million) in reparation payments. By leveraging the impending collapse of then-Prime Minister Paul Martin’s government, the church’s attorneys forced the government to accept a clause that made the deal unenforceable. In the end, the Canadian Catholic Church paid out only CA$3.9 million.
The courts also required the Catholic Church to pay CA$29 million in cash to programs that directly benefit residential school survivors. A CBC News investigative report released this summer revealed that the church spent nearly 10 percent of that money on its attorneys and millions more on “administration, a private fundraising company, and unapproved loans.” None of the other churches involved in these landmark settlements—Anglican, United Church of Canada, or Presbyterian—engaged in these practices.
If the Catholic Church’s recent history is any guide, then there’s little doubt its leaders will use every legal mechanism available to resist calls for review of the Canadian settlement cases and to fight the investigation into the legacy of the U.S. boarding school program launched in June by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. But if the church succeeds, it shouldn’t be because of Christian lawyers.Using the same tactics as multinational corporations, the church’s lawyers will “protect” its institutional interests at the expense of survivors. Professional legal ethics offers few tools for moral discernment in this area. Attorneys have a duty to act for their client’s benefit with integrity. But whether to accept a client in the first place is generally at their discretion.
Faithful Christian ethics, however, are more stringent. In Jeremiah 5, God indicts those among God’s people who ensnare others while becoming “rich and powerful” themselves. Such people “do not seek justice,” for “they do not promote the cause of the fatherless; they do not defend the just cause of the poor.” In other words, it matters to the “Judge of all the earth” (Genesis 18:25) whose side an advocate takes. In the ongoing legal battles over the legacy of residential schools in North America, it is clear who are the poor and the orphaned: those torn from their families and stripped of their cultures to be boarded at colonial institutions. The Catholic Church is well within its secular rights to keep fighting them, but it puts the church at odds with God. And Christian attorneys—especially Catholic ones—have an ethical duty to push back against that crusade, not profit from it.
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