O Pope Francis said Sunday that his trip to Canada next week will be a “pilgrimage of penance” that he hopes can help heal the wrongs committed against indigenous people by Roman Catholic priests and nuns who ran abusive local schools.
The July 24-30 trip will include at least five encounters with native peoples, as Francis fulfills a pledge to apologize in their territories for the Church’s role in state-sanctioned schools that sought to erase indigenous cultures.
“Unfortunately, in Canada, many Christians, including some members of religious orders, have contributed to policies of cultural assimilation that in the past have seriously harmed native populations in many ways,” Francis said in his weekly address to people in St.
About 150,000 children were evacuated from their homes. Many were subjected to abuse, rape and malnutrition in what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015 called “cultural genocide”.
The declared objective of the schools, which operated between 1831 and 1996, was to assimilate indigenous children. The institutions were run by Christian denominations on behalf of the government, mostly by the Catholic Church.
Schools were at the center of discussions between the pope and indigenous people at the Vatican in March and April. Recalling the meetings, Francis said Sunday that he expressed “my pain and solidarity for the harm they have suffered.”
“I am about to make a pilgrimage of penance, which I hope, with the grace of God, can contribute to the path of healing and reconciliation that has already begun,” he said.
The 85-year-old pontiff will visit Edmonton, Maskwacis, Lac Ste. Anne, Quebec and Iqaluit in the Arctic Territory of Canada. He must deliver nine homilies and speeches and say two masses.
The recurring schools scandal erupted again last year with the discovery of the remains of 215 children at the former Indian Residential School in Kamloops, in the western Canadian province of British Columbia. The school was closed in 1978.
The discovery brought new demands for responsibility. Hundreds of other unmarked burial sites have since been found.
Francis was elected pope nearly two decades after the last schools closed.
The pope had to cancel a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan in early July because of a knee problem that forced him to use first a wheelchair and then a cane.
In an interview with Reuters on July 2, he gave details of his illness for the first time publicly, saying he suffered “a minor fracture” in his knee when he took a misstep while a ligament was inflamed.
(Edited by Frances Kerry)
Source: CNN Brasil
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