Pope Francis’ trip to Canada to apologize for the horrors of church-run schools marks a radical rethink of the Catholic Church’s missionary legacy.
This comes about because the discovery of hundreds of graves at the school sites.
Francis has said his weeklong visit, which begins Sunday, is a “penitential pilgrimage” to beg forgiveness on Canadian soil for the “evil” done to Native peoples by Catholic missionaries.
This comes after his April 1 apology in the Vatican for the generations of trauma Indigenous peoples suffered as a result of a church-enforced policy to eliminate their culture and assimilate them into Canadian, Christian society.
Francis’ personal repentance is a remarkable shift for the papacy, which has long acknowledged abuses in the schools the rights and dignity of Indigenous peoples.
But past popes have also hailed the sacrifice and holiness of the European Catholic missionaries who brought Christianity to the Americas — something Francis, too, has done but isn’t talking much about that during this trip.
About the photo above of the graveyard…
"It is believed that the remains of these 182 souls are from the member Bands of the Ktunaxa Nation, neighboring First Nations communities and the community of Aq'am," the band said in the statement.
The finding is the discovery of the estimated remains of 215 people at the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia and an estimated 751 unmarked graves near a site of the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan.
About 150,000 indigenous children attended residential schools. The schools were known for overcrowding, poor sanitation, unhealthy food and menial labor.
Harsh punishment was given to students who spoke their native language or took part in traditional ceremonies.
For more than a century, beginning in 1831, indigenous children in Canada were separated from their families and forced by the government to attend residential institutions run by Christian churches.
Until the last one shut in 1998, roughly three quarters of those schools fell under the Catholic Church's administration.
In 2015, a report by Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission detailed decades of physical, sexual and emotional abuse suffered by children in government and church-run institutions.
More than 4,000 children died while at residential schools over a period of several decades, it estimated. In June 2021, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc community discovered the remains of 215 childrenwho attended the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, sending shockwaves across the country.
Children as young as three were buried on the grounds of the formerly Catholic Church-run school -- once one of the largest in Canada.
