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Pope Francis left Rome on Sunday for Canada to offer a private apology to indigenous survivors of decades of abuse in residential schools run by the Catholic Church.
The leader of the world’s 1. 3 billion Catholics will be welcomed at Edmonton International Airport through Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The Pope’s plane took off from Rome shortly after 09:00 local time (07:00 GMT).
The 10-hour flight is the longest since 2019 for the 85-year-old pope, who suffers from knee pain that has forced him to use a cane or wheelchair on departures.
The pope was in a wheelchair on Sunday and used a lifting platform to board the plane, an AFP correspondent accompanying him said.
Francis to Canada is primarily aiming to apologize to survivors for the Church’s role in the scandal that a national reconciliation and fact commission called “cultural genocide. “
Before his departure, the pope said on Twitter that he was making a “penitential pilgrimage” that “could make a contribution to the path of reconciliation already undertaken. “
He will be accompanied by his head of diplomacy, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the top official at the time in the Vatican.
From the nineteenth century to the 1990s, the Government of Canada sent approximately 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit youth to 139 Church-run residential schools, where they were cut off from their families, languages and cultures.
Many have been physically and sexually abused by principals and teachers.
Thousands of young people are believed to have died from disease, malnutrition or neglect.
Since May 2021, more than 1,300 unmarked graves have been discovered at the sites of ancient schools.
A delegation of indigenous peoples visited the Vatican in April and met with the pope, a precursor to Francis’ six days, after which he officially apologized.
‘Too late’
In the Maskwacis network, about a hundred kilometers (62 miles) south of Edmonton, the pope will face an estimated crowd of 15,000 people, adding alumni from across the country.
“I would like a lot of people to come,” Charlotte Roan, 44, told AFP in June.
Others see the pope as too little too late, adding Linda McGilvery of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation near Saint Paul, about two hundred miles east of Edmonton.
“I do everything I can to see it,” the 68-year-old said.
“For me, it’s a bit late, because many other people have suffered, and the priests and nuns have now died. “
McGilvery spent 8 years of his formative years at one of the schools, from the age of six to thirteen.
“Being in boarding school, I have a lot of my culture, my ancestors. It’s many years of loss,” he told AFP.
After a Mass in front of tens of thousands of worshippers in Edmonton on Tuesday, Francis will head northwest to a pilgrimage site, Lake St. Anne.
After a stopover in Quebec City from July 27-29, he will finish his own in Iqaluit, home to Canada’s largest Inuit population, where he will meet with former residential school fellows before returning to Italy.
Francis is the pope of the moment in Canada, after John Paul II, who edited Canada 3 times (1984, 1987 and 2002).
Some 44% of Canadians are Catholic.
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