Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent
March 31th, 2023
Call to Action: 82
82. We call upon provincial and territorial governments, in collaboration with Survivors and their organizations, and other parties to the Settlement Agreement, to commission and install a publicly accessible, highly visible, Residential Schools Monument in each capital city to honour Survivors and all the children who were lost to their families and communities.
Suggestions for Almsgiving
The 2023 Lenten Calendar is a project of CTA's Indigenous Solidarity Collective, a working group that addresses the Catholic Church's historical and current role in colonialization. To support more projects from working groups like this one, please consider making a contribution!
Friday, Mar. 31, 2023
Commemoration
Call To Action's 2023 Lenten Calendar is a collaboration between the Indigenous Solidarity Collective and Anti-Racism Team (ART). This calendar provides more than 40 days of prayer and study to lead members into action and solidarity with Indigenous communities. For holy days and Sundays during Lent, we'll publish a reflection from an ART or Indigenous Solidarity Collective member on why we're committed to undoing racism and Indigenous oppression in our own communities and biases and what it means to do this work as Catholics. Following each meditation or reflection, we will feature a call to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
Our calls to action this week are focused on commemoration, and today's call to action requests for monuments to be erected in every Canadian city where a residential school once stood. These monuments serve as a way to collectively preserve, remember, and honor a history that for too long has been ignored.
When I think of commemoration today, I'm drawn to the words of Jewish scholar Laura Levitt, whose work engages in Holocaust memory, intergenerational trauma, and sexual violence. In her recent work, Levitt turns her attention to everyday objects—clothes and accessories, books and knick-knacks—brushed with violence; objects that once belonged to the survivor. These objects hold meaning because they "testify to the fact that these events are not a figment of the imagination."
Whether in the form of a large monument or a personal item, material commemoration serves as a testimony. Today, let us ask: How do we engage, hold, and listen to the testimonies found within such objects? What objects are your testimony?
—Meditation by Indigenous Solidarity Collective member Lauren Barbato
As part of your Lenten practice, please consider donating to one or more of the
following organizations: