By Philippe Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis said on Wednesday he felt the pain of survivors of Canada’s boarding system “like slaps” and that the Catholic Church must take responsibility for institutions that abused children and attempted to erase indigenous cultures.

The pope dedicated his address at the weekly general audience to his trip last week to Canada, where he issued a historic apology for the church’s role in boarding schools, which operated from 1870 to 1996.

More than 150,000 indigenous children were separated from their families and taken to school boarding schools. Catholic religious orders administered most of them under the assimilation policy of successive Canadian governments.

Children have been beaten for speaking their mother tongue and many have been sexually abused in a system that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has called “cultural genocide”.

The Pope met with Indigenous survivors along the way, and on the final day, elderly survivors of residential schools in Iqaluit, capital of the remote arctic territory of Nunavut, told their stories in a private meeting.

“I guarantee you that in these meetings, especially in the last one, I must have felt the pain of these people, like slaps, how they lost (so much), how the old people lost their children and did not know where they found each other, because of this policy of assimilation,” Francis said in offhand comments.

“It was a very painful moment, but we had to face it, we have to face our mistakes and our sins,” he said.