I want to write carefully here, because this is the part of the novel that broke something open in me, and I do not want to handle it carelessly.
Near the end of the book, Wagamese reveals what the reader has not been told: that Father Leboutilier, the priest who discovered Saul's talent and became his most significant adult advocate, sexually abused him. The abuse is never depicted directly. It is named, finally, in a passage of such restraint that the restraint itself is part of the meaning. Wagamese holds the revelation until Saul can hold it, and Saul cannot hold it for most of his life.
When I finished that passage, I sat with it for a long time. Then I went back through the entire novel in my mind, and everything reorganized. Every scene involving Leboutilier shifted. The encouragement, the private tutoring on the ice late at night, the special attention, all of it reread itself. The rage that drives Saul off every team he joins. The drinking that begins the moment his hockey career ends and his usefulness to the institution expires. The inability to stay anywhere, to trust anyone, to let a relationship develop past a certain depth. All of it was connected to something that had never been named.
Mills (2007) describes white ignorance as an active structural feature, the refusal built into social systems to know what would be uncomfortable to know. Collins (2021) writes that political domination becomes hegemonic when violence becomes naturalized to the point of invisibility, and that is precisely what the structure of St. Jerome's accomplished: the priest's authority was so complete, so wrapped in the legitimacy of religion and colonial power, that the harm he did had no language available to name it.
Crenshaw's (1991) framework of intersectionality is essential for understanding why Saul had no recourse. He is a child, powerless by age. He is Indigenous, which means colonial structures read his body and his word as less credible than the priest's. He is male, which in mid-twentieth-century Canada meant that sexual abuse of boys by male authority figures occupied a particularly complete silence. He is institutionalized, cut off from every adult who might have protected him. These oppressions do not simply add together. They compound each other in ways that make the harm both more likely and more completely sealed off from any possibility of help.
What I keep returning to is the silence of the institution. The silence of the other priests. The silence of the system that placed him there and monitored its own investment with bureaucratic thoroughness while a child was being destroyed in one of its rooms. Saul's path toward healing begins only when he enters the New Dawn Centre, an Indigenous-led space where he is surrounded by people who share his cultural context and understand his trauma from the inside, a space that does not require him to translate himself into terms acceptable to the dominant culture. Tagalik (2010) writes that personal health is directly shaped by a sense of self and place in the world. This is the silence I now hear when an Indigenous patient presents to emergency services and is dismissed, labeled, categorized, and moved through the system without anyone asking what brought them there.