Pope Francis has apologized to the Indigenous community in Canada over the role Catholic church in the generational abuse they encountered at Indigenous residential schools for around 150 years.
While apologizing, Pope Francis said: “I am here because the first step of my penitential pilgrimage among you is that of again asking forgiveness, of telling you once more that I am deeply sorry. Sorry for the ways in which, regrettably, many Christians supported the colonizing mentality of the powers that oppressed the Indigenous peoples.
“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous people.”
In the 1800s, many Indigenous Canadian children were taken from their families and placed into residential schools with the aim of ridding the children from ties to their communities, language and culture. Some of the schools were managed by the Catholic church, where missionaries took part in the policies of forced assimilation and abuse.
Francis who is currently in Canada met with residential school survivors recently near the site of a former residential school in Maskwacis, central Alberta.
Francis said that an apology is just a “starting point” and remarked that some in the Indigenous community have requested further action to address the injustice of the boarding school legacy.
He said: “Dear brothers and sisters, many of you and your representatives have stated that begging pardon is not the end of the matter. I fully agree: that is only the first step, the starting point.
“An important part of this process will be to conduct a serious investigation into the facts of what took place in the past and to assist the survivors of the residential schools to experience healing from the traumas they suffered.”
While talking to ABC News, Chief Tony Alexis of Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation, who had demanded that Pope Francis deliver an in-person apology on behalf of the church said Francis’ visit is “a validation of what has happened with the church and how they’ve hurt and abused our people.”
In a July 17 speech delivered from the Apostolic Palace to the public in St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City, Pope also talked about the generational abuse.
He said: “Unfortunately, in Canada, many Christians, including some members of religious institutions, contributed to the policies of cultural assimilation, that, in the past, gravely damaged, in various ways, the Native communities.
“For this reason, recently, at the Vatican, I received several groups, representatives of Indigenous peoples, to whom I manifested by sorrow and my solidarity for the evil they have suffered.″
According to a 2015 report issued by Canada’s National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, Indigenous residential schools were an integral part of the “conscious policy of cultural genocide” of the Canadian government where children were separated from their families, punished for expressing themselves in their Native languages and some encountered physical and sexual abuse.
According to the report, “The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources. If every Aboriginal person had been ‘absorbed into the body politic,’ there would be no reserves, no Treaties, and no Aboriginal rights.”
The pope’s visit happened a year after around 1,000 sets of human remains were discovered at the cemetery of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan and at the former St. Eugene’s Mission School for Indigenous children in Aqam, British Colombia. It remains unclear the number of students that died at residential boarding schools and what caused their death.
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