A dying priest, the only witness to the murders at a Residential School, seeks forgiveness from the woman he loved as a student - as a renegade Vatican attorney threatens an early death.

SYNOPSIS:

Synopsis Absolution

In a world rife with alcoholism, drug use and mental illness imagine a teenage mother throwing herself off a cliff, than birth a child when she sees no hope for its future. This is Canada’s indigenous residential school legacy, and St. Anne’s in Ontario was the worst.

Father John Ambrose has lived forty years with the memory of seeing headmaster Williams rape and murder his young victims then dispose of them in a pit beneath St. Anne’s storm cellar. Now facing his own demise from cancer, he needs to unburden his soul and seek forgiveness from the Cree for not standing up for their children. Especially from Jody Youngblood, the woman he loved as a young novice priest.

Jody suffers from PTSD and alcoholism, unable to cope with her experience in St. Annes. The last thing she wants is to be reminded of her time there and the man who betrayed her trust. Forgiveness is the last thing on her mind. Yet her daughter and the Cree elders want her to put the past behind and embrace reconciliation.

Together she and Ambrose must find a way through their spiritual differences and pain to find common ground and perhaps rekindle the love they felt for each other. For the sake of their daughter, if nothing else.

The Vatican certainly doesn’t want to see another prominent legal case drag the Catholic church though the mud again. For them it would be better if Ambrose died…a little sooner…than expose the depths of Williams dark soul. They have the perfect man for the job: Cardinal Ignacio Angelino, who knows far too much about everyone in the Catholic church.

On the worst night of the year, in a blinding Ontario blizzard, Jody’s old truck breaks down on the way to Ambrose’s dialysis appointment. Jody has to save Ambrose’s life, using all her bushcraft skills to keep him alive so he can testify in court. She does her best, but it’s the beginning of the inevitable, and only then does she realize she’s waited for this apology for forty years as well.

As Ambrose recovers in the hospital, Angelino sends in his aides to finish the priest off, but hospital staff intervene just in time, and he lives to testify against the headmaster of St. Annes.

The story ends with Ambrose dying surrounded by his friends, in Jody’s arms having brought the children’s murderer to justice.

Absolution is based on my mother’s story of her time in St. Anne’s. Its high concept is: “One person’s truth can make all the difference in the lives of others.”