VATICAN –
Pope Francis said Wednesday that he feels the pain of survivors of Canada’s residential school system “like a slap in the face” and that the Catholic Church must face up to its responsibility for institutions that abuse children and try to erase indigenous cultures.
The pope addressed his weekly general audience on his trip last week to Canada, where he offered a historic apology for the Church’s role in the government-sanctioned schools that operated between 1870 and 1996.
More than 150,000 indigenous children were separated from their families and taken to residential schools. Catholic religious orders led most of them under the assimilation policy of successive Canadian governments.
Children were beaten for speaking their native language, and many were sexually abused in a system the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission called “cultural genocide.”
The pope met local survivors during the trip, and on the final day, mostly adult survivors from a school in Iqaluit, the capital of the isolated Arctic territory of Nunavut, told him their stories in a private meeting.
“I assure you that in these meetings, especially the last one, I had to feel the pain of these people, like slaps, how they lost (so much), how adults lost their children and do not know where they ended up, because of this policy of assimilation Francis said in unsigned comments.
“It was a very painful moment, but we had to face it, we had to face our mistakes and our sins,” he said.
During the trip, the pope’s apology drew strong emotions and praise as a first step toward reconciliation, but some survivors said it fell short of expectations and that he did not apologize clearly enough for the Church as an institution.
In an apparent attempt to respond to critics, he said Wednesday that priests, nuns and lay Catholics had “participated in programs that we understand today to be unacceptable and contrary to the Gospel. That’s why I went to ask for forgiveness in the name of a church.”
Some were also encouraged when the pope, speaking to reporters on the plane returning him to Rome on Saturday, called what happened in the schools a “genocide.”
Francis, who suffers from a knee ailment, walked with a cane about 20 meters to his seat on the stage of the Vatican’s audience hall and finally stood up to greet some participants. He later used a wheelchair as aides moved him through the crowd.
He mostly used a wheelchair during the trip to Canada, including during his press conference on the return flight.
Reporting by Philip Pullella Editing by William McLean and Frank Jack Daniel
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