Pope Francis offered a sweeping apology directly to Indigenous people on their land in Canada. The pope’s six-day visit to Canada, which will include a visit Tuesday to Lac Ste. Anne, a pilgrimage site that is sacred to many Indigenous people, and meetings with Indigenous and church representatives in Quebec City and the Arctic city of Iqaluit, came after years of pleas from Indigenous leaders and leading politicians for a Vatican apology for the abusive schools.
Physical, sexual and mental abuse were common at the schools, which banned Indigenous languages and cultural practices, often through violence. The use of Christianity as a weapon to break Indigenous people was spread across generations. Christian churches ran most of the schools for the government, with Catholic orders responsible for 60 to 70 percent of the roughly 130 schools, which operated from the 1870s until 1996.
Until this year the Vatican had rebuffed repeated requests from Indigenous people for an apology. A National Truth and Reconciliation Commission established by the Canadian government declared the schools a form of “cultural genocide” and had called on the pope to make an apology in 2015.
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The New York Times also published a feature story that contextualizes historical abuse of indigenous peoples in Canada and the Catholic government’s role in it here.
