On his last day in Canada, Pope Francis told indigenous leaders he was sorry that Catholics had supported “oppressive and unjust policies” against indigenous people.
The 85-year-old pope met an indigenous delegation at the Archbishop of Quebec’s residence on Friday before leaving for a brief stopover in the Arctic territory of Nunavut, which Canada created in 1999 for the Inuit people.
“I came as a brother to experience firsthand the good and bad fruits that local Catholic family members have borne over the years,” Francis said. “I have come in a spirit of penance, to express my deep sadness for the harm inflicted on you by many Catholics who have supported oppressive and unjust policies against you.”
The pontiff was referring to boarding schools, where more than 150,000 indigenous children were separated from their families and brought between 1870 and 1996. Religious groups, mostly Catholic, ran the schools for the governments of the time to implement a policy of cultural assimilation.
Children have been starved or beaten for speaking their mother tongue, and many have been sexually assaulted in a system that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has called “cultural genocide.”
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