Pope Francis issued a public apology for the role the Catholic Church plays in Canada’s residential school system during his visit to the former site of the Ermineskin Indian Residential School in Maskwacis, Alta.
“I am here because the first step of my penitential journey among you is to ask for forgiveness again, to tell you once again that I am deeply sorry. I deplore the ways in which, unfortunately, many Christians supported the colonialist mentality of the forces that oppressed indigenous peoples. I’m sorry,” the pope said in his official apology on Monday.
“I ask for forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the Church and religious communities collaborated, not least through their indifference, in the projects of cultural destruction and forcible assimilation promoted by the governments of the time, which ended with boarding school system,” he continued.
A wave of applause rose from the crowd of local community members and residential school survivors as the pope delivered his apology.
Among the ceremony’s symbolic gestures: the pope returned the child-sized moccasins given to him at the Vatican meeting with First Nations delegations in March. He said the moccasins have served him for the past four months as a reminder of his feelings of “sadness, outrage and shame.”
The Pope was also given a headdress for community members to wear after the ceremonial signing and drumming.
This apology comes more than seven years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission launched its calls for action. The commission’s 58th call to action called on the pope to apologize on Canadian soil for the Catholic Church’s role in the boarding school system.
Pressure on the pope to come to Canada and apologize intensified after the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at a former dormitory in Kamloops, British Columbia last year, which was followed by similar discoveries at numerous other former educational institutions across the country.
Pope Francis said his visit will not take him to all the communities he has been invited to, but acknowledged the pain felt in all indigenous communities across Canada.
“Know that I am aware of the suffering and trauma, hardship and challenges experienced by indigenous people in every region of this country. The words I speak on this penitential journey are intended for each local community and individual. I embrace you all with love,” he said.
Pope Francis quoted writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel when he spoke of the emotional burden felt by many community members and survivors; emphasizing the importance for non-Indigenous people to learn and remember Canada’s dark history so as not to become indifferent to it.
“Yet it is good to remember because forgetting leads to indifference and as it has been said, ‘the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference … and the opposite of life is not death but indifference,'” he said.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that approximately 150,000 Indigenous children attended the school system, mostly by force, from the late 1800s to 1996.
Of the 139 schools in the system, more than half were run by the Catholic Church. The commission estimates that approximately 4,100 to 6,000 children died as a result of abuse and neglect while in the residential school system.
Pope Francis has also called for official investigations into what happened at these schools, as the apology symbolizes only the first step in the reconciliation process.
“An important part of this process will be to conduct a serious investigation into the facts of what happened in the past and to help residential school survivors experience healing from the trauma they have suffered,” he said.
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If you are a former survivor of a school disaster or have been affected by the school system and need help, you can contact Indian Schools’ 24-hour crisis line: 1-866-925-4419
Additional mental health support and resources for Indigenous people are available here.
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