Pope Francis to Canada to apologize for the horrors of Church-run residential schools marks a radical overhaul of the Catholic Church’s missionary legacy, driven by the first pope of the Americas and the discovery of many probable graves at school sites.
Francis said his week-long visit, which begins Sunday, is a “penitential pilgrimage” to ask for forgiveness on Canadian soil for the “harm” done to indigenous peoples through Catholic missionaries. This follows his April 1 apology to the Vatican for generations of trauma. suffered by indigenous peoples as a result of a policy imposed by the Church on their culture and assimilating them into Canadian Christian society.
Francis’ tone of private repentance marked a remarkable replacement for the papacy, which has long identified abuses in residential schools and firmly affirmed the rights and dignity of indigenous peoples. But the ancient popes also praised the sacrifice and holiness of European Catholic missionaries. Who brought Christianity to the Americas, everything Francis also did deserves not to emphasize this trip.
Cardinal Michael Czerny, a Canadian Jesuit who is one of the top papal advisers, recalled that at the beginning of his papacy, Francis claimed that no culture can claim dominion over Christianity and that the church calls on other people from other continents to imitate the European Way to explicit faith.
“If this trust had been accepted by everyone in the centuries following the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, much suffering would have been avoided, wonderful advances would have occurred, and the Americas would be more wonderful overall,” he told The Associated Press. an email.
The adventure won’t be easy for Francis, 85, or the survivors of the residential school and their families. Francis can no longer walk without it and will use a wheelchair and cane due to pain in the knee ligaments. Trauma experts are deployed at every occasion to provide intellectual fitness assistance to school survivors, given the likelihood of triggering memories.
“It’s an understatement to say there are emotions combined,” said Chief Desmond Bull of the Louis Bull Tribe, one of the First Nations that are part of the Maskwacis territory, where Francis will make his first general apology Monday near a former residential school. .
The Canadian government has admitted that physical and sexual abuse is endemic in state-funded Christian schools that operated from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. Some 150,000 indigenous youth were separated from their families and forced to attend to isolate them from the rest. influence of their indigenous homes, languages and cultures.
The legacy of this abuse and isolation from the family circle has been cited by Indigenous leaders as one of the leading causes of epidemic rates of alcohol and drug dependence on Canadian reserves.
“For survivors from coast to coast, this is an opportunity, first and last, to find a solution for themselves and their families,” said Chief Randy Ermineskin of Ermineskin Cree Nation.
“It will still be a complicated process,” he said.
Unlike most papal trips, diplomatic protocols take precedence over private encounters with First Nations, Métis and Inuit survivors. Francis even officially met with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau halfway through Quebec City.
Francis also ends the fight in unusual ways, preventing in Iqaluit, Nunavut — the farthest north he has ever traveled — from apologizing to the Inuit network before flying to Rome.
Recently, in 2018, Francis refused to personally apologize for abuses in residential schools, even after Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 documented institutional guilt and, in particular, a papal apology on Canadian soil.
Trudeau went to the Vatican in 2017 to ask Francis to apologize, but the pontiff felt he “may not respond” to the call, the Canadian bishops said at the time.
What has changed? The first pope of the Americas, who has long defended the rights of indigenous peoples, had already apologized in Bolivia in 2015 for the crimes of colonial-era indigenous peoples.
In 2019, Francis, an Argentine Jesuit, hosted a primary Vatican convention on the Amazon that highlighted that injustices suffered by indigenous peoples in colonial times continued, with their lands and resources being exploited through interests.
Then, in 2021, the remains of some two hundred young people were discovered at the site of what was once Canada’s largest residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. More likely, the tombs followed the exterior of other former residential schools.
“It wasn’t until our young people began to be discovered in mass graves, that attracted the attention of foreigners, that gentle shed in this painful era of our history,” said Bull, leader of the Louis Bull tribe.
After the discovery, Francis nevertheless agreed to meet with indigenous delegations last spring and promised to come to their lands to apologize in person.
“Obviously, there are wounds that have been left open and they want an answer,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said when asked about the evolution of the papal response.
One such wound considers papal influences on the doctrine of discovery, the nineteenth-century foreign legal concept understood to legitimize the European colonial takeover of indigenous peoples’ lands and resources.
For decades, indigenous peoples have asked the Holy See to officially annul fifteenth-century papal bulls or decrees that gave devout European kingdoms to claim lands that their explorers had “discovered” to spread the Christian faith.
Church leaders have long rejected those concepts, insisting that the decrees were only intended to make European expansion peaceful and saying they had been superseded by later Church teachings firmly affirming the dignity and rights of indigenous peoples.
But the case remains unsolved for Michelle Schenandoah, a member of the Oneida Nation’s wolf clan, who was the last user to confront the pope when the First Nations delegation met with him on March 31.
Carrying a cradle on his back to constitute the young people whose lives were lost in residential schools, he told her that the doctrine of discovery had “led to our babies being taken away. “
“It stripped us of our dignity, our freedom and led to the exploitation of Mother Earth,” he said. He begged Francis to “free the world from its position of slavery” through the decrees.
Asked about the calls, Bruni said there was an articulated “reflection” underway at the Holy See, but he did not believe anything would be announced about the trip.