pope visits canada to apologize

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Pope Francis visits Canada to apologize to Indigenous peoples for abuses

EDMONTON, Alberta (AP) — Pope Francis began a fraught visit to Canada on Sunday to apologize to Indigenous peoples for abuses by missionaries at residential schools, a key step in the Catholic Church’s efforts to reconcile with Native communities and help them heal from generations of trauma.

Francis flew from Rome to Edmonton, Alberta, where his welcoming party included Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mary May Simon, an Inuk who is Canada’s first Indigenous governor general. Francis had no official events scheduled Sunday, giving him time to rest before his meeting Monday with survivors near the site of a former residential school in Maskwacis, where he is expected to deliver an apology.

Francis, in a wheelchair, exited the back of his plane with the help of an ambulift before being driven in a compact white Fiat to an airport hangar where he was greeted by Trudeau, Simon and other dignitaries.

Indigenous drums and chanting broke the silence as the welcome ceremony began. A succession of Indigenous leaders and elders greeted the pope and exchanged gifts.

READ MORE: Researchers unearth the painful history of a Native boarding school in Missouri

Ater the airport welcome, Francis was slated to travel by motorcade to St. Joseph Seminary in Edmonton, where he will be staying.

Aboard the papal plane, Francis told reporters this was a “penitential voyage” and he urged prayers in particular for elderly people and grandparents.

Indigenous groups are seeking more than just words, though, as they press for access to church archives to learn the fate of children who never returned home from the residential schools. They also want justice for the abusers, financial reparations and the return of Indigenous artifacts held by the Vatican Museums.

“This apology validates our experiences and creates an opportunity for the church to repair relationships with Indigenous peoples across the world,” said Grand Chief George Arcand Jr., of the Confederacy of Treaty Six. But he stressed: “It doesn’t end here – there is a lot to be done. It is a beginning.”

Francis’ week-long trip — which will take him to Edmonton; Quebec City and finally Iqaluit, Nunavut, in the far north — follows meetings he held in the spring at the Vatican with delegations from the First Nations, Metis and Inuit. Those meetings culminated with a historic April 1 apology for the “deplorable” abuses committed by some Catholic missionaries in residential schools.

The Canadian government has admitted that physical and sexual abuse were rampant in the state-funded Christian schools that operated from the 19th century to the 1970s. Some 150,000 Indigenous children were taken from their families and forced to attend in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their homes, Native languages and cultures and assimilate them into Canada’s Christian society.

Then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology over the residential schools in 2008. As part of a lawsuit settlement involving the government, churches and approximately 90,000 surviving students, Canada paid reparations that amounted to billions of dollars being transferred to Indigenous communities. Canada’s Catholic Church says its dioceses and religious orders have provided more than $50 million in cash and in-kind contributions, and hope to add $30 million more over the next five years.

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 had called for a papal apology to be delivered on Canadian soil, but it was only after the 2021 discovery of the possible remains of around 200 children at the former Kamloops residential school in British Columbia that the Vatican mobilized to comply with the request.

“I honestly believe that if it wasn’t for the discovery … and all the spotlight that was placed on the Oblates or the Catholic Church as well, I don’t think any of this would have happened,” said Raymond Frogner, head archivist at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

READ MORE: Legal group backs U.S. review of Indigenous boarding schools

Frogner just returned from Rome where he spent five days at the headquarters of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, which operated 48 of the 139 Christian-run residential schools, the most of any Catholic order. After the graves were discovered, the Oblates finally offered “complete transparency and accountability” and allowed him into its headquarters to research the names of alleged sex abusers from a single school in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan, he said.

While there, he found 1,000 black-and-white photos of schools and their students, with inscriptions on the back, that he said would be valuabe to survivors and their families hoping to find traces of their loved ones. He said the Oblates agreed on a joint project to digitize the photographs and make them available online.

The Inuit community, for its part, is seeking Vatican assistance to extradite a single Oblate priest, the Rev. Joannes Rivoire, who ministered to Inuit communities until he left in the 1990s and returned to France. Canadian authorities issued an arrest warrant for him in 1998 on accusations of several counts of sexual abuse, but it has never been served.

Inuit leader Natan Obed personally asked Francis for the Vatican’s help in extraditing Rivoire, telling The Associated Press in March that it was one specific thing the Vatican could do to bring healing to his many victims.

Asked about the request, Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said last week that he had no information on the case.

At a news conference Saturday in Edmonton, organizers said they will do all they can to enable school survivors to attend the papal events, particularly for the Maskwacis apology and the Tuesday gathering at Lac Ste. Anne, long a popular pilgrimage site for Indigenous Catholics.

Both are in rural areas, and organizers are arranging shuttle transport from various park-and-ride lots. They noted that many survivors are now elderly and frail and may need accessible vehicle transport, diabetic-friendly snacks and other services.

The Rev. Cristino Bouvette, national liturgical coordinator for the papal visit, who is partly of Indigenous heritage, said he hopes the visit is healing for those who “have borne a wound, a cross that they have suffered with, in some cases for generations.”

Bouvette, a priest in the Diocese of Calgary, said the papal liturgical events will have strong Indigenous representation — including prominent roles for Indigenous clergy and the use of Native languages, music and motifs on liturgical vestments.

Bouvette said he’s doing this work in honor of his “kokum,” the Cree word for grandmother, who spent 12 years at a residential school in Edmonton. She “could have probably never imagined those many years later that her grandson would be involved in this work.”

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Papal visit to Canada Francis Begs Forgiveness for ‘Evil’ Christians Inflicted on Indigenous People

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‘I humbly beg forgiveness,’ Francis tells Canada’s Indigenous people.

MASKWACIS, Alberta — Pope Francis offered a sweeping apology to Indigenous people on their native land in Canada on Monday, fulfilling a critical demand of many of the survivors of church-run residential schools that became gruesome centers of abuse, forced assimilation, cultural devastation and death for over a century.

“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” Francis said to a large crowd of Indigenous people, some wearing traditional clothing and headdresses, in Maskwacis, Alberta, the site of a former residential school.

The pope made his apology in a pow wow circle, a covered ring surrounding an open space used for traditional dancing and drumming circles. Around it were teepees, campfires, and booths labeled “Mental Health and Cultural Support.”

Francis, who arrived at the event being pushed in a wheelchair, added that his remarks were intended for “every Native community and person” and said that a feeling of “shame” had lingered since he apologized to representatives of Indigenous people in April at the Vatican.

He said he was “deeply sorry” — a remark that triggered applause and approving shouts — for the ways in which “many Christians supported the colonizing mentality of the powers that oppressed the Indigenous peoples.”

“I am sorry,” he continued. “I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools.”

Those schools separated children from parents; inflicted physical, sexual and mental abuse; erased languages; and used Christianity as a weapon to break the cultures, and communities, of Indigenous people. Christian churches operated most of the schools for the government with Catholic orders responsible for running 60 to 70 percent of the roughly 130 schools, where thousands of children died.

Francis said it was “right to remember” on the site of such traumas, even at the risk of opening old wounds.

“It is necessary to remember how the policies of assimilation and enfranchisement, which also included the residential school system, were devastating for the people of these lands,” he said, adding, “I thank you for making me appreciate this.”

He called the abuses often carried out with missionary zeal, a “disastrous error” that eroded the people, their culture and values.

Francis also said that “begging pardon is not the end of the matter,” adding that he “fully” agreed with skeptics who wanted actions. And he said that he hoped for further investigations and that “concrete ways” could be found to help survivors begin a path toward healing and reconciliation.

After delivering his speech, which he offered in Spanish and which was translated into English, Chief Wilton Littlechild of the Ermineskin Cree Nation, who had introduced the pope, fitted him with a headdress, its white feathers standing over his white robes. The crowd erupted in applause.

When Francis had finished his remarks, many who had listened said they were satisfied with his apology.

“It was genuine and it was good,” said Cam Bird, 42, a residential school survivor from Little Red River reserve in Saskatchewan. “He believes us.”

But others were still taking stock of what had just happened after so many generations of devastation and trauma.

“I haven’t really digested it yet,” said Barb Morin, 64, from Île-à-la-Crosse, Saskatchewan, whose parents suffered in residential schools and who wore a shirt reading “Residential School Survivors Never Forgotten.” “I’m having a really hard time internalizing this right now.”

— Jason Horowitz

After delivering an apology to Indigenous people, Francis pursues reconciliation.

EDMONTON, Alberta — Hours after delivering a sweeping apology on the land of Indigenous people for his church’s role in causing generations of abuse and trauma at church-run residential schools, Pope Francis met with more survivors on church grounds.

Calling himself “a friend and pilgrim in your land,” Francis laid out his vision at the Sacred Heart Church of the First Peoples in Edmonton, Alberta for how an open and tolerant church could spiritually, and practically, achieve reconciliation with representatives of the First Nations, the Métis and the Inuit.

“That is what the church is, and should always be — the place where reality is always superior to ideas,’’ the pontiff said. “Not a set of ideas and precepts to drill into people, but a welcoming home for everyone.”

Francis expanded on his appeal for forgiveness that he had made earlier in the day.

“It pains me to think that Catholics contributed to policies of assimilation and enfranchisement that inculcated a sense of inferiority,” Francis said, “robbing communities and individuals of their cultural and spiritual identity, severing their roots and fostering prejudicial and discriminatory attitudes.’’

He noted that “this was also done in the name of an educational system that was supposedly Christian.”

Francis then tried to meld the theology of the church with the spirituality of Indigenous people, but noted, “I can only imagine the effort it must take, for those who have suffered so greatly because of men and women who should have set an example of Christian living, even to think about reconciliation.”

He said it was all the worse because so many priests and nuns contributed to “lasting pain.”

Francis, a critic of proselytizing and colonialism, said it happened “because believers became worldly, and rather than fostering reconciliation, they imposed their own cultural models. This attitude dies hard, also from the religious standpoint.”

He talked about the “shame, as believers” for what had transpired, and used Indigenous symbols, including the tepee, to draw more connections with the Catholic faith. He argued that the example of Christ on the cross, “crucified in the many students of the residential schools,” was the transformative power that would turn sorrow into love and result into true reconciliation.

“In the name of Jesus,” he said, “may this never happen again in the Church.”

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An Indigenous community prepares for pilgrims flocking to see the pope.

ALEXIS NAKOTA SIOUX NATION, Alberta — Since 1887, Catholics, most of them Indigenous, have made an annual pilgrimage to the reed-lined shore of Lac Ste. Anne. And for much of that period, the closest Indigenous community to the site, what is today known as the Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation, has been hosting pilgrims.

With Pope Francis planning to attend on Tuesday, the people of Alexis have expanded their usual welcome. At the grounds running down to the lake shore, space has been cleared for upward of 3,000 campers, and adjacent fields nearby have been cleared for more for if that proves insufficient. Portable toilets dot the community, which is about three miles from the shrine, and a long row of portable buildings has been fitted with showers.

On Sunday afternoon, a steady stream of campers were arriving, some hauling large trailers, others bringing one-person tents or making shelters from logs and tarps.

“There are a lot of feelings about Pope Francis coming here,” said Chief Tony Alexis. “There’s the people who are very happy and celebrating that Pope Francis is here because they’ve always been faithful to the church. And there’s the ones who have been struggling with the pain that has been caused because of residential schools. So they’re a little bit apprehensive.”

Thousands of Indigenous children died and countless others were sexually and physically abused at the schools.

Not everyone arrived in a car or a pickup. Adam McDonald had walked from Fort McMurray, Alberta, a distance he measured precisely at 477.5 kilometers (296.7 miles). He pulled a wagon, which, he said, weighed up to 300 pounds when fully loaded during the two-and-a-half-week walk. Fastened at front end was a flag commemorating missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, while a commemorative flag for children who had died at residential schools was unfurled at the back.

“After the pope blesses the water, I’m going to release a lot of weight,” he said on Sunday. “All of that weight that I’ve been carrying for a number of years, I will let it go.”

Nearby, outside a large trailer, Marie Trottier was selling traditional beaded crucifixes hanging on deerskin necklaces. For more than two decades, Ms. Trottier, who is Métis and lives in the northern Saskatchewan community of Buffalo Narrows, has assisted priests in conducting the Dene language service at the Mass.

Ms. Trottier said she had cried when she watched video of the pope land on Sunday in Edmonton, Alberta. She said that the abuse at residential schools had never shaken her faith.

“My mum and dad raised me with this faith, the Catholic Church, and I’m going to live with it; I’m going to die with it,” Ms. Trottier, 74, said. “It’s not God or Jesus that made a mistake. It’s the human beings that made that mistake.”

— Ian Austen

Indigenous communities seek healing and consider the impact of the pope’s apology.

MASKWACIS, Alberta — Survivors of the abuses in Canada’s church-run residential schools and advocates for Indigenous people listened to Pope Francis beg for forgiveness on Monday in a damp field that resonated with generations of pain and trauma.

Before his speech, the pope prayed at the nearby Ermineskin cemetery. He was pushed in a wheelchair by aides and lowered his head as he visited graves. Survivors gathered to hear his remarks weighed what the apology meant.

“Today means hope and healing,” said Leanne Louis, 52, who wore a traditional ribbon skirt and held an Eagle Staff representing the Montana First Nation in Maskwacis. “Hope for a better future for all of our residential school survivors.”

Ms. Louis said she herself was a survivor of the Maskwacis school, which she attended as a day student, and where she was beaten by teachers and sexually abused by other students as a third grader.

She said she had a mental block of the time, forgetting the names of teachers and their faces. Her mother, she said, also suffered physical and sexual abuse at the school and was broken by it. “She became an alcoholic,” said Ms. Louis, who has four children. “She drank 24/7. I was raised by my grandparents and made the choice to never touch alcohol.”

But the grandparents who raised her were also survivors of the same school, though they never spoke a word about it. Her grandfather went deaf as a boy studying there and developed a lifelong animosity for education. “He hated education,” she said, adding that it was an insidious result of his abuse there. “He hated school.”

“It’s a first good step,” Chief Leeketchemonia, 50, of the Keseekoose First Nation, said of the pontiff’s apology, “but a lot more work needs to be done.”

He said he hoped it would “get the healing started” and said there needed to be “more involvement on the church’s behalf to support First Nations and to regain trust. A lot of our elders say that can be given will ever make up for what was taken away from them.”

Leah Omeasoo Gillette, 40, of the Samson Cree Nation, which also lived on the Maskwacis reservation, performed for Francis as a dancer, wearing a Jingle Dress, also known as a healing dress, which jangled with tin cones.

While she was herself not a survivor of the schools, she said she considered herself “an intergenerational survivor.”

“I have experience trauma in my life,” she said, “and I believe it all stemmed from the residential schools.”

Before the pope arrived, Elder Ted Quewezance, a residential school survivor from Keeseekoose First Nation, who has played a leading role in the search for children’s graves around the schools, said, “You will have to decide if you will accept or reject the apology.”

“Most of my life I was a very angry man and a very hurt man,” he said, his voice breaking as friends and family rubbed his back. “All that’s happened to me, I know that accepting the apology will help me let go of my pain. When you are abused, that is all you think about it. You relive the experience over and over again.”

Canada’s residential schools were a system of ‘cultural genocide,’ a commission found.

The investigation into Canada’s scandalous system of mandatory residential schools for Indigenous children was among the most comprehensive reviews in the country’s history, taking testimony from more than 6,000 witnesses and reviewing thousands of documents over six years.

And, in the end, the conclusion of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission was unambiguous: “Children were abused, physically and sexually, and they died in the schools in numbers that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country, or in the world.”

From the 1880s through the 1990s, the Canadian government forcibly removed at least 150,000 ​Indigenous children from their homes and sent ​them t​o residential schools to assimilate them. ​Their languages and religious and cultural practices were banned, sometimes using violence. It was, the ​commission ​reported in 2015, a system of “cultural genocide.”

Because of the schools, generations of Indigenous children were raised by adults, including priests and nuns, who had little understanding of their roles, and many students developed mental health and substance abuse problems from the trauma they suffered at the schools.

The number of students who died at the schools is still a matter of historical research. But Murray Sinclair, a former judge, senator and head of the commission, said he estimates that the figure exceeds 10,000 children .

Searching for the Unmarked Graves of Indigenous Children

For more than a century, indigenous children in canada were forced to attend residential schools, where many endured abuse. thousands were never seen again and survivors were long ignored. we followed a team of archaeologists who came to the muskowekwan first nation to search for the graves of these lost children..

“What residential school was, and still is, is a nightmare.” For more than a century, Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their homes and sent to residential schools to forcibly assimilate them into white society. And thousands were never seen again. Now, more than 20 years after the last school shut down, searches for the remains of these lost children are happening across the country. “There’s nothing on the surface, but once we interpret the data, we can see if we can find these children.” We followed a team of archaeologists who came to the Muskowekwan First Nation to investigate what lies beneath the ground. “There is unmarked graves there. They’re all over the place. But nothing has been done.” Here, some residential school survivors hope that scientific evidence will reveal to the rest of the world a truth they’ve long known. “These stories are real. I saw something in here. And people have never listened.” Harvey Desjarlais was taken to residential school when he was 6 1/2 years old. “And I remember being locked in the dorm. I cried so much because of the harshness. Small boys’ dorm — this is where we were kept. They shave your head, cut off your braids. Right here, a boy hung himself. I found him hanging. He wasn’ t hanging. He was laying there. He was already —” Generations of Indigenous children suffered physical and sexual abuse inside the boarding schools. They were established by the Canadian government and initially run by the Catholic Church. “This used to be the chapel over here. This is where we used to pray 10 times a day. They used to call us little savages. ‘You little savage. Your ceremonies, that’s paganism.’ That’s how they spoke to us.” After his years as a student, Harvey worked as the school’s caretaker for 22 years. Today, he still visits the grounds of the former school, even though it shut down in 1997. “I come here just about every day. I have a dream of elders. You know, like calling. And I know what they’re calling about. They’re our children.” “You look at your map. And you could just draw a circle so we could find out exactly where these graves are.” The First Nation has invited archaeologists to search for unmarked graves, and survivor testimony will be crucial. Elders have long shared stories of what happened at these schools but were rarely believed outside their community. “We lived on top of the graves for many, many years. But we couldn’t do nothing. There’s a big hill over here — all graves, all graves.” “About the researchers coming here, it’s been a long time coming.” Laura Oochoo is Harvey’s longtime partner. She also went to the Muskowekwan Residential School. “I’m at a place where I’m trying to understand, what’s this all mean for — for all of us right now? People are angry with the finding of our kids. This horror, it’s living with that. They deserve to be honored and respected, you know? That’s all I think that they would want.” “I’m very confident that there is something there.” The archaeologists Terence Clark and Kisha Supernant are leading the search effort. They’re using ground-penetrating radar to locate burial sites. The rest of the team is made up of graduate students, including Micaela Champagne, who, along with Kisha, is Indigenous. “So I’ve been an archaeologist now for about 20 years. And with Indigenous communities, they would prefer, often, to have less destructive methods, so ways to not disturb a lot of earth. So there’s a bunch of them. And that’s a 3-year-old.” “And it’s all in the same year.” “The work that we’re doing with the ground-penetrating radar is to locate children’s graves. And before we really get into that, we need to understand how many children we’re looking for.” Many of the records from this era are incomplete or have been destroyed, but the documents that remain contain clues to some deaths and abuses. “There’s a couple sort of suspicious-y ones that are, like, 14 years old.” “Babies, it’s babies.” Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission investigated residential schools, and in a 2015 report, concluded that many children died from malnourishment, disease and suicide. “This was a deliberate act to colonize, ‘to extinguish the Indian in the child.’ That’s a direct quote.” “The mastery of words.” “This was planned, it was callous, and abuse and death were known about.” “I was gang-raped by a gang in the school, you know? And after I went through all the turmoil of sexual assault, I became suicidal in school. I was 12 years old when I tried to commit suicide. A lot of us that came out of that school had a hard time.” Harvey’s come to the school to show researchers where to look in person. “My name’s Harvey.” “I’m Terry.” “I was here since 1949.” “Wow.” “I went to school here 17 years, and I worked here another 22 years. From here, all the way this way, it has to be looked at. There was bodies all along, up to about the bottom, where the line is about there, just maybe past there.” “OK.” “All right, let’s maybe put it all down, and we’ll smudge before I put anything in the ground here.” “Sounds good.” “Archaeology has a very dark past about stealing Indigenous remains. And there was something in me that was telling me that this is something that I have to be a part of. The equipment’s actually quite heavy. It’s kind of representative of helping to shoulder some of that weight from those communities.” “So the ground-penetrating radar basically takes a electromagnetic wave and sends it down to the ground from a sensor at a particular frequency. So the higher the frequency, the tighter the wave. And it sends that down. And it’s basically measuring what’s reflected back.” After scanning the ground for four days, the team processes the data and stitches it together in 3D to see if the resulting images show any signs of children’s remains. “From four and a half to seven and a half, there’s just a lot of stuff something going on.” “Something going on there, yeah.” “This is the type of shape that we have found. The color pattern, you can almost imagine a child lying on its side in that pit. We’ve had survivors tell us to look in this spot. There’s no other sort of natural phenomenon to explain why you’d have this oval pit underneath the surface. And then the fact that there are eight to 10 or 12, all of those things together, um, yeah.” “It’s about as certain as we can get. “Yeah.” “That’s heartbreaking.” “This is why we do it. It’s just — it shows the value of what we’re doing.” “And there’s thousands of these across the country. Thousands. People deserve answers, and they deserve justice.” This time, they’ve discovered two unmarked graves. But researchers say they expect to find over 80 more at Muskowekwan. They still have large swaths of land around the school left to scan. “It’s in our traditional belief that our ancestors are constantly walking beside us and with us to give us strength. We turned a corner, and there was the boiler room. The boiler room was used as a way to get rid of some of the remains and children. It was difficult, but I also needed to understand, as a granddaughter of a survivor, what she went through.” “We’re supposed to be these objective scientists, but there are these moments of emotion. Sometimes they’re joy, sometimes they’re sorrow, and everything in between.” “Underneath that grief and everything, you can sometimes feel relief.” After the ground sonar identifies where bodies might be buried, the First Nation hopes to have a traditional feast and ceremony to honor the children who died at the school. The next step is for the community to decide whether they want to unearth the remains. “Do you think that all this is giving closure to the era of residential school? I think so.” “I think so, yeah.” “It’s making the choice to heal away from the trauma, the abuse. We know who we are. We come from this Creator-given land. That’s who we are.”

Death came in many forms . Diseases like the Spanish flu and tuberculosis raced through the overcrowded schools. Many had farms tended by students where accidents, sometimes fatal, occurred. Malnutrition, a result of underfunding, was rife at many schools. And fires destroyed several of the remote schools, often with students trapped inside.

While the federal government funded and established the system, it turned to churches to operate most of them, which in most cases used the schools as missionary outposts. Depending on the period of time, the Roman Catholic Church operated between 60 and 70 percent of the schools, with Protestant denominations running the balance.

The nation’s attention refocused on the legacy of the schools last year after analyses of ground-penetrating radar revealed evidence of more than 1,000 remains buried in unmarked graves around several schools. For most of the time that the system operated, the government refused to reimburse the churches for burials or to pay to return students’ bodies to their communities.

The ground-penetrating radar searches continue at many school sites, and many communities are expected to hold difficult discussions about whether to exhume the remains.

The place where the pope delivered his apology is notorious among survivors.

Pope Francis’s first apology in Canada to Indigenous people for the abuse they suffered at residential schools was made in an intimate setting, at the Ermineskin Cree Nation, the site of one of the 130 schools that were once spread across most of Canada.

The former Indian Residential School that stood at Ermineskin , a town of just over 3,000 people that is 60 miles south of Edmonton, Alberta, was not among the most notorious or the largest schools in the system. But like all of them, it was a place of horrors for the children forced to attend it between 1894 and 1976.

“As a survivor, I know what is to come will be painful,” Chief Randy Ermineskin of the Ermineskin First Nation said in a statement. “Just seeing pictures of the schools, remembering the hallways, the classrooms, how we were treated — it is triggering. It’s emotional.”

Established by Roman Catholic missionaries, the Ermineskin school became overcrowded early on, a product of the federal government’s chronic underfunding of its system, which a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission found was set up to eradicate Indigenous languages and cultures.

That overcrowding caused the spread of disease through Ermineskin’s dorms. The federal government estimated that in the 1920s half its students had tuberculosis.

And there was worse, according to testimony from former Ermineskin students. Many described suffering physical, sexual and emotional abuse at the school.

Last year, the Ermineskin Cree Nation brought in technicians from a Montreal-based engineering firm to search the former school grounds and nearby cemeteries for the remains of former students in unmarked graves, a process still underway. It followed the announcement that there was evidence of 215 grave sites at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, a revelation that shocked the nation.

The government took control of the school from the church in 1969. The dorms were closed shortly afterward and it continued as a day school until 1976.

Francis did not see any of the school buildings that continue to haunt the memories of former students. They were long ago demolished and replaced by a black stone monument bearing a drawing of the school, its name and dates of operation, along with the inscription “Honoring Our Survivors” in English and Cree.

Records to fill gaps about residential schools are sought from Catholic groups.

ROME — Much remains unknown about the specific operations of Canada’s church-run residential schools, in part, some critics say, because Catholic orders that ran them have only recently begun to open their archives.

Kimberly Murray, a Mohawk lawyer who was executive director of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which investigated the residential school system until 2015, said that at that time, “Catholic entities” had been “the most difficult’’ to get records from.

Sometimes, she said, that was because there were so many different entities — orders, congregations, dioceses — that had to be dealt with individually.

The residential schools were run by various Christian denominations, but most were run by the Catholic Church. Each Catholic order, though, kept its own records, which would not have been shared with the Holy See, an archivist at the Vatican said.

But Stephanie Scott, executive director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, a Canadian archive and research body, said last year’s discovery of signs of unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in British Columbia had “changed the landscape across the country, not only with the church, but also the federal government.”

Earlier this year, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, which managed the most schools, 48 in all, gave Raymond Frogner, the center’s archivist, access to the congregation’s historical records . Mr. Frogner found administrative records, as well as photographs of life at residential schools that “could give some indication of children who perhaps might have been known to be lost,” he told the CBC .

“It has changed, we are on the right path, the right road,” said Ms. Scott. “It is not an ideal, perfect situation yet.”

Access to the archive in Rome was “the result of ongoing dialogue and communication” with the Oblate religious community in Canada, which last year pledged to make all its archives available after unmarked graves were found in June 2021 at the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, which the Oblates had operated.

The Oblates said at the time that they were committed “to establish the truth of what happened in residential schools,” and the order’s involvement in running them.

Ms. Scott said that since the discovery of the unmarked graves last year there had been a groundswell of support from the Oblates but also provincial and community archives and two other Catholic congregations.

“From where I am sit and seven years later, following the close of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, we are in a position where we are now able to gather further information that the TRC did not previously hold and some of the challenges that they faced,” she said.

“The landscape has changed, and it’s only through the spirit of the children guiding that process, because I can tell you that until this point we were struggling,” she said. “People would not reach out to us, and all of a sudden they are, asking how they can help. So I am hopeful,” she said.

— Elisabetta Povoledo

A chief marvels on a 32-year effort to expose wrongdoing and get redress.

OTTAWA — The events that led to Pope Francis’ coming to Canada to offer an apology to Indigenous people for the harm they suffered in church-run schools can be traced to a Canadian television program that aired 32 years ago .

During it, Phil Fontaine, then a regional chief in Manitoba, told an interviewer in often harrowing detail about being abused as a student at residential schools run by the Roman Catholic Church. His story was a revelation to non-Indigenous Canadians.

“Then, there was very little known about the residential school experience; it just wasn’t a factor in the lives of ordinary Canadians,” Mr. Fontaine said last week in an interview as he prepared to travel to meet the pope at the site of a former residential school. “I thought that the best way to come to grips with this issue was to go public and, in effect, call out the church.”

But Mr. Fontaine did not just retell what had happened to him. He also presented a list of demands: that school records be opened to allow researchers to determine what happened, that there be a public inquiry and, finally, that former students get a formal apology.

With the pope’s apology on Monday, Mr. Fontaine will finally have achieved all those goals after decades of resistance.

Along the way, Mr. Fontaine became the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations and a leading plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit. That suit was eventually settled, with apologies and billions of dollars in reparations from the federal government, which established the system, and the Protestant churches that ran some of them.

Perhaps just as important, the settlement established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission , which heard from more than 6,000 witnesses and combed through documents to tell the grim story of the schools, where thousands of children died and sexual and physical abuse was widespread.

Mr. Fontaine also continued to push the Vatican, meeting privately as chief with Pope Benedict XVI. No apology came from a pope until this year, though, and the Catholic church has paid only a sliver of the 25 million Canadian dollars (about $19.3 million) it agreed to raise in reparations as part of the lawsuit settlement.

Like most Indigenous people, Mr. Fontaine does not believe that the process of reconciliation is even close to being finished. But he does marvel at the progress he and many others achieved over three decades.

“This speaks to the incredible persistence and resiliency of our community to stay focused on getting things done right,” Mr. Fontaine said. “We didn’t anticipate that we would be as successful as we were.”

The United States also ran an abusive school system for Native American children.

As Pope Francis traveled to Canada this week to apologize for the church’s role in residential schools for Indigenous children, the United States also continued to wrestle with the legacy of its government-run schools for Native American children.

An initial investigation commissioned by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and released this year cataloged some of the brutal conditions that Native American children endured at more than 400 boarding schools that the U.S. federal government forced them to attend between 1819 and 1969. The inquiry was an initial step, Ms. Haaland said, toward addressing the “intergenerational trauma” that the policy left behind.

An Interior Department report released on Wednesday highlighted the abuse of many of the children at the U.S.-government-run schools, with instances of beatings, withholding of food and solitary confinement. It also identified burial sites at more than 50 of the former schools, and said that “approximately 19 federal Indian boarding schools accounted for over 500 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian child deaths.” The number of recorded deaths is expected to grow, the report said.

The report is the first step in a comprehensive review that Ms. Haaland, the first Native American U.S. cabinet secretary , announced in June after the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves of children who attended similar schools in Canada provoked a national reckoning there.

Beginning in 1869 and until the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children in the United States were taken from their homes and families and placed in the boarding schools, which were operated by the government and churches.

There were 20,000 children at the schools by 1900; by 1925, the number had more than tripled, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, based in Minneapolis.

The discovery of the unmarked graves in western Canada last year — 215 in British Columbia , 750 more in Saskatchewan — led Ms. Haaland to announce in May of this year that her agency would search the grounds of former schools in the United States and identify any remains. Ms. Haaland’s grandparents attended such schools.

“The consequences of federal Indian boarding school policies — including the intergenerational trauma caused by the family separation and cultural eradication inflicted upon generations of children as young as 4 years old — are heartbreaking and undeniable,” Ms. Haaland said during a news conference. “It is my priority to not only give voice to the survivors and descendants of federal Indian boarding school policies, but also to address the lasting legacies of these policies so Indigenous peoples can continue to grow and heal.”

— Mark Walker

Tensions linger over what the Catholic Church owes school survivors.

Although Pope Francis has apologized to Indigenous people for the harm they suffered at residential schools operated by the Roman Catholic Church, another major point of contention still looms over the church’s relationship with Canada’s first people.

Unlike the Canadian government and the Protestant denominations that also ran residential schools, the Catholic Church has largely not fulfilled its commitments under a landmark class action settlement to compensate former students.

As the pope participates in reconciliation events in Canada this week, hopes remain high that he will back up the church’s apology with steps toward reparations.

Under a settlement in 2006 of a class action brought by former students, most of the 4.7 billion Canadian dollars paid in reparations came from the federal government. Protestant churches paid about 9.2 million Canadian dollars.

But the Catholic Church, which ran about 70 percent of the more than 130 schools, has paid just 1.2 million of the 25 million Canadian dollars it had agreed to raise in cash contributions as compensation. The schools operated from the 1870s until 1996.

That anemic fund-raising effort was partly because the Catholic Church lacks a central governing body in Canada, unlike its Protestant counterparts.

But the church was also effectively released from its obligations when a Conservative government led by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided in 2015 not to appeal a key court decision in favor of the church.

That decision sided with church lawyers, who argued that the 1.2 million-dollar payment settled all of its obligations.

Why the government backed off from a legal challenge is unclear.

“This was a decision of the previous Conservative government,” Justine Leblanc, a spokeswoman for Marc Miller, the current Indigenous affairs minister, wrote in an email. “We cannot speculate as to their internal decision-making process.”

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafonde, the academic director of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, accused the government of giving the Catholic Church special consideration.

“The federal government — as administrator of the settlement — treated the Catholic entity differently from other churches almost from the beginning,” she wrote in an analysis last December. “It permitted the Catholic entity to make ‘best efforts’ to raise funds to fulfill obligations and, from what is known, did only minimal monitoring of whether the entity met its obligations.”

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops announced last year that it had launched another fund-raising attempt, this time with a target of collecting 30 million Canadian dollars over five years.

So far the church has raised 4.6 million Canadian dollars.

— Ian Austen and Vjosa Isai

Indigenous leaders want the Vatican to return their heritage.

VATICAN CITY — The Vatican’s museums are undoubtedly best known for their masterpieces by Caravaggio, Raphael and Michelangelo. But unbeknownst to many, the Vatican also has an ethnological museum with some 80,000 pieces that originated from cultural items assembled for a 1925 exhibition sponsored by Pope Pius XI.

The “Vatican Missionary Exposition,” as it was known, consisted of cultural material from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania “minutely and vividly portraying the life and customs of natives in every corner of the globe where Catholic missionaries are engaged,” The Associated Press wrote at the time. Held in the Vatican gardens, the exhibition drew more than one million visitors.

Indigenous leaders in Canada now want some of these pieces back.

Last December, the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation, a group that represents the interests of Inuvialuit people, called for the “immediate return of all Indigenous artifacts held in the collection of the Vatican Museum.” The group singled out an Inuvialuit kayak that it described in a statement “as a piece of Inuvialuit history, made by Inuvialuit hands in Inuvialuit traditions.”

“It is not ‘the pope’s kayak,’” the group said.

The kayak was one of several pieces shown to representatives from Canadian Indigenous communities during a visit to the Museums last spring as part of their weeklong visit to the Vatican. Other items included moccasins, jewelry and thread-embroidered gloves.

After the trip, several delegates told Canadian news media that at least some of the material should be repatriated.

A sacred ceremonial pipe, for example, has no business being in the Vatican Museums, said Norman Yakeleya, from the Dene Nation in the Northwest Territories. He suggested that plastic models could be displayed instead.

Cody Groat, a Kanyen’kehaka citizen from Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve, Ontario, and an assistant professor of history and Indigenous studies at Western University in London, Ontario, said the items in the Vatican belonged where they originated.

“They have meaning that is contemporary to us today, they have teachings that they can provide us today,” Professor Groat said. “They’re not something that we are just going to put on display. It’s something we are going to use to help revitalize our culture and our nations.”

But the Vatican, he said, might be reluctant to repatriate items because of the precedent it could set. “It’s not just a Canadian nation issue,” Professor Groat said.

Cultural items from North America are not currently on exhibit at “Anima Mundi,” or “soul of the world,” the name of the ethnological collection. The museum is instead showcasing the permanent collection from Australia and Oceania.

Gloria Bell, who teaches art history at McGill University in Montreal, said her research countered the Vatican’s official narrative that the items in its collection were gifts given to the pope for the 1925 exhibition.

Given archival records and the history of missionary labor at church-run residential schools where Indigenous children were forcibly sent, Professor Bell said, “it’s clear that some of these were sent under coercive circumstances.”

“Using the term gift glosses over the colonial legacy of the Anima Mundi exhibition and how the majority of this collection was acquired,” she said.

Key moments on the path to the pope’s apology.

TORONTO — The last church-run residential schools in Canada that Indigenous children were forced to attend, and where many were abused, closed in the 1990s. Since then, the Canadian government and Indigenous communities have worked to address the profound damage inflicted there, which continues to reverberate today.

Here are five important moments leading to the apology Pope Francis is to deliver to Indigenous communities on Monday.

A brutal system of abuse in the name of assimilation.

The Indian Act of 1876 allowed the Canadian government to establish the residential schools, most of which were operated by the Roman Catholic Church and were meant to assimilate Indigenous children by erasing their culture and languages.

They were punished for speaking Indigenous languages, wearing their hair in braids or practicing religion outside of what was being taught at school.

Over more than a century, roughly 150,000 students attended some 130 schools, where many were sexually abused, malnourished and fell sick from the poor conditions. Many died or never returned home.

As the number of students dwindled, the last of the schools closed in 1996, ushering in a period of national reckoning, including official investigations, over Canada’s treatment of Indigenous people.

A major class action settlement for former students.

As a result of a lawsuit by former students at the schools, Canadian courts approved a sweeping class-action settlement that has paid out more than 3.2 billion Canadian dollars to about 28,000 survivors, according to a 2021 repor t by an independent committee overseeing the settlement.

In addition to financial compensation, the settlement also included funding for other initiatives, such as memorials and other commemorative projects and a program that provides mental health services to survivors and their families.

A national commission leads to a reckoning with a grim past.

A National Truth and Reconciliation Commission created in 2007 as part of the settlement agreement hosted gatherings in seven cities across the country to, among other things, hear the firsthand accounts of Indigenous people who had been sent to residential schools.

At local hearings, survivors shared their stories of Catholic monks raping children younger than 10 and hungry students resorting to stealing apples from orchards to eat.

In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an official apology from the government to Indigenous communities.

Evidence of unmarked graves discovered at residential schools.

Last year, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in British Columbia said it had found evidence of unmarked graves of 215 children on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which was once the largest in Canada, with about 500 students.

The discovery, made using ground-penetrating radar, shocked Canadians and revived a national discourse around the horrors of residential schools.

Several other communities also announced preliminary findings of possible unmarked graves on former residential school grounds. Last June, Cowessess First Nation said it had found 751 possible unmarked graves at the site of a school in Saskatchewan.

A trip to Italy and a papal apology.

In the spring, a delegation of Indigenous leaders from Canada traveled to the Vatican, and received a hoped-for apology from Pope Francis.

“I feel shame — sorrow and shame — for the role” that Catholics played “in the abuses you suffered and in the lack of respect shown for your identity, your culture and even your spiritual values,” Francis said . He also promised to travel to Canada and deliver a personal apology.

Ian Austen contributed reporting from Ottawa.

— Vjosa Isai

Papal apologies have a long tradition in a church with a troubled legacy.

VATICAN CITY — When Pope Francis apologized in Canada for the Roman Catholic Church’s involvement in a system of boarding schools that abused Indigenous children for more than a century, he wasn’t the first pontiff to try to make belated amends.

During his 27-year papacy, Saint John Paul II issued some 100 apologies, some specific, others broad.

Visiting the Dominican Republic in 1992 , John Paul recalled “the enormous suffering” endured by the Indigenous people during centuries of colonization. “We must in all sincerity acknowledge the abuses that were committed,” he said.

In 2000, the pope issued a sweeping apology for two millennia worth of past sins, citing religious intolerance and injustice toward Jews, Muslims, women, immigrants, the poor, Indigenous peoples, and others.

And a year later, writing to the church in Oceania , the area that includes Australia, New Zealand and scattered South Pacific islands, John Paul II expressed deep regret for “the shameful injustices done to Indigenous peoples,” lamenting the role that members of the Church may have played, “especially where children were forcibly separated from their families,” he wrote. (A footnote: it was the first papal document posted via the internet.)

Pope Benedict XVI wrote a letter in 2010 to Irish Catholics saying he was “truly sorry” about the abuses suffered by Irish children, including those who were abused in residential institutions.

And he met with Canadian Indigenous leaders in 2009 , expressing “sorrow at the anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of some members of the Church” in Canada. He offered “his sympathy and prayerful solidarity,” adding that “acts of abuse cannot be tolerated in society,” but stopped short of a full apology.

Pope Francis has been more decisive. While on a 2015 trip to Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay, Pope Francis issued a direct apology for the complicity of the Roman Catholic Church in the oppression of Latin America during the colonial era. “I say this to you with regret: many grave sins were committed against the native peoples of America in the name of God,” Francis told a gathering of social activists, farmers, workers and Bolivian Indigenous people in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.

He then “humbly” asked for forgiveness. “Not only for the offenses of the Church herself, but also for crimes committed against the native peoples during the so-called conquest of America,” he said.

Two years later, Francis apologized for the “sins and failings of the Church and its members, among whom priests, and religious men and women who succumbed to hatred and violence, betraying their own evangelical mission” in the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

In 2020, the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, wrote a letter to Pope Francis demanding a public apology for the abuses inflicted on the Indigenous peoples of Mexico.

A year later, Francis wrote to Mexican bishops urging clergy members to “recognize the painful errors committed in the past,” and calling on them to re-examine the role the church had played in the country’s history. The letter prompted controversy among the political right in Spain , which rallied behind the country’s role in conquering the Americas 500 years ago.

How a papal resignation has complicated Pope Francis’s tenure.

ROME — Over the last few weeks, close watchers of the Roman Catholic Church have carefully studied shadows on the Vatican walls for proof that Pope Francis is about to retire .

They pointed at an unexpected move to create new cardinals in August as a sign that Francis, 85, was stacking the college that will pick his successor before an early exit. They read deep into his planned visit to an Italian town with a connection to a medieval pope who called it quits. They saw the pope’s use of a wheelchair and his cancellation of a trip to Africa as evidence of his papacy’s premature ending, despite Vatican explanations about a healing right knee.

But in an interview this month, Francis, who is on the second day of a planned six-day visit to Canada, dispelled the rumors, calling the supposed evidence mere “coincidences” and telling Reuters that the idea of resignation “never entered my mind. For the moment no. For the moment, no. Really.”

The only shadow that seemed real then was the one cast by Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, who in 2013 became the first pontiff to retire in nearly 600 years . In doing so, he changed the nature, and perception, of the papacy from a lifetime mission assigned by the Holy Spirit to a more earthly calling, subject to political pressures, health assessments and considerations about the church’s best interests.

“Now it is much easier to envision a resignation because Benedict paved the way for that, and it changed our perception,” said Giovanna Chirri , a veteran Vatican reporter who broke the news of Benedict’s retirement when she understood the pope, to the shock of the cardinals around him, tender his resignation while speaking in Latin. “It is not like before.”

For all of Benedict’s struggles to leave a mark on the church, his papacy is often remembered for its public relations missteps and inconvenient revelations about dysfunction within the Vatican. But the German pontiff’s decision to quit transformed the office, creating pre-Benedict and post-Benedict eras when it comes to the expectations of how long popes will stay in power.

Francis is clearly living in the post-Benedict era, often leaving open the possibility of one day resigning if declining health made it impossible to run the church.

“But when the time comes that I see that I can’t do it, I will do it,” Francis said again of retirement in the Reuters interview. “And that was the great example of Pope Benedict. It was such a very good thing for the church. He told popes to stop in time. He is one of the greats, Benedict.”

Gaia Pianigiani contributed reporting.

The ‘Deplorable’ History Behind the Pope’s Apology to Canada’s Indigenous Communities

M any of Wahéhshon Whitebean’s family members attended Canada’s residential schools—largely Catholic-run institutions designed to erode Indigenous culture and that were rife with abuse. So Pope Francis’s six-day trip across Canada, which began Sunday, feels personal for 39-year-old Whitebean, who attended an Indian day school, a similar institution but one in which students returned to their families in the evenings. (Pope Francis has called the tour a “pilgrimage of penance” and apologized on Monday .)

The issue is also an academic pursuit for Whitebean, who is pursuing a Ph.D. at McGill University researching Indian day schools in her home community of Kahnawà:ke, just outside of Montreal, Québec. For the last few months, Whitebean has been poring over archives and interviewing dozens of survivors from these institutions. She used to think of herself as somewhat de-sensitized to the issue but says that lately it’s been hard to hold it together while reading detailed complaints—from parents about abuses their children suffered from not being allowed to use the bathroom to having their hands burned on a stove. “I don’t know what came over me. I just started to cry. I bawled and realized at that point it was like a dam broke and all the emotion and my anger and grief was just building up for a while doing this work,” Whitebean says. “There’s no justice for us. There hasn’t been justice.”

Whitebean’s story shows how important the matter is for Indigenous peoples as Pope Francis visits various communities across Edmonton, Québec and Iqaluit in the northern territory of Nunavut. (Francis was welcomed to Canada on Sunday by Indigenous leaders as well as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.)

Read more: What to Know About the Pope’s Visit to Canada and Apology to Indigenous Communities

The Catholic church’s role in residential schools

In 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) issued a report documenting how the nation’s policy toward Indigenous peoples amounted to “cultural genocide” through its attempts to eliminate Indigenous governments, ignore Indigenous rights and “through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada.” The report noted that a key way in which the Canadian government executed this policy was through residential schools, which more than 150,000 children have attended since the late 19th century. The Catholic church operated about 70% of residential schools in Canada, before the government took control of them in 1969. The last residential school shut in the 1990s.

In recent years, the remains of more than 1,300 people —mainly children—have been discovered using new technology on the grounds of three former residential schools in Canada, prompting an outcry. Indigenous communities say the figures confirm what they have long suspected; estimates suggest between 10,000 and 50,000 children never returned home after attending the schools.

“Deliberately going after Indigenous children as the quickest path to assimilation is just inhumane,” says Dale Turner, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

“In establishing residential schools, the Canadian government essentially declared Aboriginal people to be unfit parents,” the TRC report noted. “The residential school system was based on an assumption that European civilization and Christian religions were superior to Aboriginal culture.” In these schools, children were banned from speaking their own languages and church-led campaigns prohibited Indigenous spiritual practices.

The facilities were also overcrowded, and diseases such as tuberculosis and measles wreaked deadly havoc on Indigenous children.

“When you leave a home that has structure, love and empathy to go into an institution that has no love, no compassion, very cold and in many cases physical, emotional and sexual abuse to children, it has an impact that will stay with them for their entire life—as well as the lives of their children and grandchildren,” says Angela White, executive director of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society (IRSSS). “Many of these residential school survivors went to these institutions, not knowing a parent’s love, and blaming their parents for making them go—without knowing that they were forced to go.”

For Whitebean, the older generations in her family have embraced a culture of silence around their experience at residential schools because of the trauma and shame associated with them. Her grandmother told her that her great-grandmother’s body was full of scars from residential school. She says that others in her family reported different forms of physical and sexual abuse.

What the Pope’s apology means

The Pope’s apology, which comes seven years after the TRC recommended one, will hold different weight across Indigenous communities—but for many there is a sense that it isn’t enough.

Whitebean says she has mixed feelings about the Pope’s visit. “I just don’t believe that anything practical or real or beyond lip service will come out of the visit. I don’t want any more hollow apologies,” she says.

The IRSSS’s White notes that the people her organization represents hold diverse views but personally, she’s not sure it’s enough. “They had many opportunities to provide this apology—along with accountability and transparency about their participation in how these schools were operated, so it’s too little, too late,” White says.

That’s not to say that the apology doesn’t hold greater meaning for other Indigenous peoples, a large number of whom are still Catholic. In April, while meeting with a delegation of Indigenous leaders in the Vatican, the Pope issued an historic apology for the “deplorable” abuses at residential schools. He had promised the delegation he would apologize on Canadian soil.

Indeed, the trip marks the first time a papal visit to Canada is focused on reckoning with the harm caused by the church. “To say that the Pope’s apology does not have political significance in what’s going on in contemporary politics is a mistake because I do think the Pope has an opportunity to come down on the side of Indigenous peoples here,” Turner says. “Part of that reconciliation is to recognize what they took from Indigenous people, which is those important, historical, philosophical, everyday relationships they have with their homelands.”

“This ritual needs to take place for meaningful reconciliation to take place,” Turner says, adding that it was important for it to occur on Indigenous homelands.

And the Pope’s apology is part of a growing movement towards recognizing past abuses against Indigenous peoples. Last year, Trudeau became the first Canadian prime minister to apologize for the “incredibly harmful government policy” that created the residential schooling system.

What Canada’s Indigenous communities want next

For Whitebean, it’s important that the church honor its pledge to raise funds. Some 48 local Catholic church entities were required to use their “best efforts” to fundraise 25 million Canadian dollars for survivors as part of the 2008 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), between the government of Canada and thousands of survivors, but ended up raising less than 4 million.

That fundraising gap set the stage for a subsequent pledge. Last year, a group of Canadian bishops announced they would set up an Indigenous Reconciliation Fund that would raise up to 30 million Canadian dollars . So far, less than 5 million has been raised.

By contrast, the IRSSA saw the federal government set up a major compensation fund for children who had been enrolled in residential schools. A 2021 report found that the government has paid out at least 3 billion Canadian dollars in compensation so far.

Whitebean says that the church should also return cultural artifacts held in the Vatican, give back land to Indigenous owners and make it easier for the public to access records related to residential and day schools. Many records are housed within individual religious orders and can still be difficult to access, according to Whitebean.

But whatever comes next, many Indigenous peoples will agree that Pope Francis did not mince his words while condemning the residential school system. “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” he said on Monday outside a former residential school in Maskwacis, Alberta.

Correction, July 26

The original version of this story misstated the university where Dale Turner works. It is the University of Toronto, not McGill University.

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Pope Francis apologizes to Indigenous community in Canada over church's role in boarding school abuse

"I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed" by Christians, he said.

Pope Francis offered a long-sought apology to the Indigenous community in Canada on Monday over the Catholic church's role in the generational abuse they suffered at Indigenous residential schools for nearly 150 years.

The schools were operated for decades by churches and the federal government of Canada to force assimilation.

"I am here because the first step of my penitential pilgrimage among you is that of again asking forgiveness, of telling you once more that I am deeply sorry," Francis said. "Sorry for the ways in which, regrettably, many Christians supported the colonizing mentality of the powers that oppressed the Indigenous peoples."

"I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples," he added.

Beginning in the 1800s, thousands of Indigenous children from Canada were taken from their homes and families and placed into so-called residential schools aimed at ridding the children from ties to their Native communities, language and culture. Some of the schools were run by the Catholic church, where missionaries participated in the policies of forced assimilation and abuse.

Upon his arrival in Edmonton, the capital city of the Canadian province of Alberta, Pope Francis was greeted on Sunday at the airport by First Nations, Metis and Inuit leaders, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mary Simon, who is Canada's first Indigenous governor general.

Francis met with residential school survivors on Monday near the site of a former residential school in Maskwacis in central Alberta.

Francis said that an apology is only a "starting point" and acknowledged that some in the Indigenous community have called for further action to address the injustice of the boarding school legacy.

"Dear brothers and sisters, many of you and your representatives have stated that begging pardon is not the end of the matter. I fully agree: that is only the first step, the starting point," Francis said. "An important part of this process will be to conduct a serious investigation into the facts of what took place in the past and to assist the survivors of the residential schools to experience healing from the traumas they suffered."

MORE: As recently discovered unmarked Indigenous graves in Canada nears 1,000, activists demand justice

Chief Tony Alexis of the Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation, who had called for Pope Francis to deliver an in-person apology on behalf of the church, told ABC News' Marcus Moore that Francis' visit is "a validation of what has happened with the church and how they've hurt and abused our people."

Ahead of his historic seven-day trip to Canada, Pope Francis asked for prayers to accompany him on what he called a "penitential pilgrimage" and offered an apology to Native communities for the Catholic church's role in the abuse.

"Unfortunately, in Canada, many Christians, including some members of religious institutions, contributed to the policies of cultural assimilation, that, in the past, gravely damaged, in various ways, the Native communities," Francis said in a July 17 address delivered from the Apostolic Palace to the public in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City, according to The Associated Press.

"For this reason, recently, at the Vatican, I received several groups, representatives of Indigenous peoples, to whom I manifested by sorrow and my solidarity for the evil they have suffered,″ Francis added.

MORE: Tribal elders testify before federal officials on painful memories of Indian boarding schools

According to a 2015 report released by Canada's National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, Indigenous residential schools were an integral part of the Canadian government's "conscious policy of cultural genocide," where children were disconnected from their families, punished for speaking their Native languages and some faced physical and sexual abuse.

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"The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources. If every Aboriginal person had been 'absorbed into the body politic,' there would be no reserves, no Treaties, and no Aboriginal rights," according to the report.

Reflecting on the generational trauma that was inflicted on Indigenous communities, Alexis recalled a conversation with a survivor who told him, "The only thing I learned in the residential school was how to hate myself."

The pope's visit comes a year after nearly 1,000 sets of human remains were found at the cemetery of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan in western Canada and at the former St. Eugene's Mission School for Indigenous children in Aqam, a community in British Colombia. It is unclear how many total students died at residential boarding schools and what their causes of death were.

MORE: Report outlines federal 'abuse' of Native children at boarding schools

After the graves were discovered in Canada, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland -- the first Native American to hold a Cabinet position -- launched a probe in June 2021 into the U.S. government's own role in funding Indian boarding schools as part of an effort to dispossess Indigenous people of their land to expand the United States.

The probe's initial findings were outlined in a May report that found more than 500 American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children died over the course of 150 years in Indigenous boarding schools run by the American government and churches.

Native Nations scholars estimate that almost 40,000 children have died at Indigenous boarding schools. According to the federal report, the Interior Department "expects that continued investigation will reveal the approximate number of Indian children who died at Federal Indian boarding schools to be in the thousands or tens of thousands."

Haaland, whose grandparents attended Indian boarding schools, now oversees the government agency that historically played a major role in the forced relocation and oppression of Indigenous people and said that her work is a chance to bring some healing to the community.

"I have a great obligation, but I was taught by my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother that when you are asked to do something for your people that you step up," Haaland told "Nightline" in an interview earlier this year.

ABC’s Derricke Dennis reports:

ABC News' Christine Theodorou, Kiara Alfonseca and Tenzin Shakya contributed to this report.

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The pope's apology to Indigenous people doesn't go far enough, Canada says

The Associated Press

Pope Francis accompanied by Governor-General Mary Simon, right, arrives at the Citadelle de Quebec on Wednesday in Quebec City, Quebec City, Quebec. John Locher/AP hide caption

Pope Francis accompanied by Governor-General Mary Simon, right, arrives at the Citadelle de Quebec on Wednesday in Quebec City, Quebec City, Quebec.

QUEBEC CITY — The Canadian government made clear Wednesday that Pope Francis' apology to Indigenous peoples for abuses in the country's church-run residential schools didn't go far enough, suggesting that reconciliation over the fraught history is still very much a work in progress.

The official government reaction came as Francis arrived in Quebec City for meetings with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Governor General Mary Simon at her Quebec residence, the hilltop Citadelle fortress, on the second leg of Francis' week-long visit to Canada.

The government's criticisms echo those of some survivors and concern Francis' omission of any reference to the sexual abuse suffered by Indigenous children in the schools, as well as his original reluctance to name the Catholic Church as an institution bearing responsibility.

Francis has said he is on a "penitential pilgrimage" to atone for the church's role in the residential school system, in which generations of Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and forced to attend church-run, government-funded boarding schools t o assimilate them into Christian, Canadian society . The Canadian government has said physical and sexual abuse were rampant at the schools, with students beaten for speaking their native languages.

Francis on Monday apologized for the "evil" of church personnel who worked in the schools and the "catastrophic" effect of the school system on Indigenous families. In a speech before government authorities Wednesday, Francis apologized anew and blasted the school system as "deplorable."

Francis noted that the school system was "promoted by the governmental authorities at the time" as part of a policy of assimilation and enfranchisement. But responding to criticism, he added that "local Catholic institutions had a part" in implementing that policy.

Indigenous peoples have long demanded that the pope assume responsibility not just for abuses committed by individual Catholic priests and religious orders, but for the Catholic Church's institutional support of the assimilation policy and the papacy's 15th century religious justification for European colonial expansion to spread Christianity.

More than 150,000 Native children in Canada were taken from their homes from the 19th century until the 1970s and placed in the schools in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their families and culture.

Trudeau, a Catholic whose father, Pierre Trudeau, was prime minister while the last residential schools were in operation, insisted that the Catholic Church as an institution bore blame and needed to do more to atone.

Speaking before Francis, he noted that Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 had called for a papal apology to be delivered on Canadian soil, but that Francis' visit "would not have been possible without the courage and perseverance" of survivors of First Nations, Inuit and Metis who travelled to the Vatican last spring to press their case for an apology.

"Apologies for the role that the Roman Catholic Church, as an institution, played in the mistreatment on the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical and sexual abuse that Indigenous children suffered in residential schools run by the church," Trudeau said.

The Canadian government has apologized for its role in the school legacy. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology over the residential schools in Parliament in 2008, calling them a sad chapter in Canadian history and saying the policy of forced assimilation caused great harm.

As part of a settlement of a lawsuit involving the government, churches and the approximately 90,000 surviving students, Canada paid reparations that amounted to billions of dollars being transferred to Indigenous communities. The Catholic Church, for its part, has paid over $50 million and intends to add $30 million more over the next five years.

Trudeau implied that much more needed to be done by the church, and that while Francis' visit had "an enormous impact" on survivors, it was but a first step.

Aside from the content of his speech, Trudeau's remarks broke customary protocol for papal trips. According to diplomatic protocol, only Simon was supposed to address the pope in her capacity as the representative head of state. Simon, an Inuk who is the first Indigenous person to hold the largely ceremonial position governor general, did address Francis.

But the Vatican said Trudeau's office requested the prime minister be allowed to offer some introductory remarks, a request that arrived in the days before Francis left Rome but after the pope's itinerary had been finalized and printed.

A senior Canadian government official said Trudeau typically delivers remarks during visits by foreign leaders and that it was important for him to address Canadians during Francis' visit "particularly given the importance of the matter." It was, however, added in at the last minute.

Before Francis arrived in Quebec City, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller said the "gaps" in Francis' apology could not be ignored.

Echoing criticism from some school survivors, Miller noted that Francis didn't mention sexual abuse in his list of abuses endured by Indigenous children in the schools. Francis on Monday listed instead physical, verbal, psychological and spiritual abuse. In addition, Miller noted that Francis on Monday spoke of "evil" committed by individual Christians "but not the Catholic Church as an institution."

Phil Fontaine, a survivor of sexual abuse at the schools and former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said the additional reference Wednesday to "local Catholic institutions" went beyond Francis' original apology and was significant and the closest he could get to apologizing for the entire Church in Canada.

"It reflects the reality that the Catholic Church in Canada is not one institution. It is made up of about 73 different legal institutions, all of which were defendants in the lawsuits," Fontaine said in a statement.

Francis' visit has stirred mixed emotions among survivors and their relatives, as well as Indigenous leaders and community members. Some have welcomed his apology as genuine and useful in helping them heal. Others have said it was merely the first step in a long process of reconciliation. Still others have said it didn't go far enough in assuming responsibility for institutional wrongs dating back centuries.

Francis himself has acknowledged that the wounds will take time to heal and that his visit and apology were but first steps. On Wednesday he committed himself and the local Canadian church to "move forward on a fraternal and patient journey with all Canadians, in accordance with truth and justice, working for healing and reconciliation, and constantly inspired by hope."

"It is our desire to renew the relationship between the Church and the indigenous peoples of Canada, a relationship marked both by a love that has borne outstanding fruit and, tragically, deep wounds that we are committed to understanding and healing," he said.

But he didn't list any specific actions the Holy See was prepared to take.

Trudeau, too, said the visit was a beginning and that reconciliation was the duty of everyone. "It's our responsibility to see our differences not as an obstacle but as an occasion to learn, to better understand one another and to move to action."

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

Pope’s visit to Canada: Indigenous communities await a new apology — and a commitment to justice

Assistant Professor, Sociology Department, University of Lethbridge

Disclosure statement

Tiffany Dionne Prete received funding from SSHRC, the National Indian Brotherhood Trust Fund, Community University Research Alliance and Networked Environment of Aboriginal Health Research. She currently receives funding from the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

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Only in the past few decades have survivors of the residential school system spoken out publicly about the injustices they endured in these colonial school systems.

More recently, governments, organizations and institutions have initiated acts of reconciliation, particularly in light of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and its Calls to Action .

While there have been some apologies issued , many survivors have highly anticipated an apology from the Pope, in Canada.

Read more: Indian Residential Schools: What does it mean if the Pope apologizes in Canada?

Pope Francis will visit Canada from July 24 to 29 . Many are hopeful he will issue an additional apology — one that is full of accountability and institutional responsibility, unlike the one issued at the Vatican on April 1 .

Years of research

As a member of the Kainai (Blood Tribe), part of the Blackfoot Confederacy, it took years of research before I understood the connection between the strange and heavy silences I recognized as a child but could not name and the devastation caused by colonialism inflicted by the Canadian government and Christian churches through the Indian Residential School System.

Part of my research involved articulating my journey and that of my community in navigating the written records of the Roman Catholic order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate . These records contained information about our people, and we used them to identify our ancestors and to research the colonial education system on the Blood Reserve. The Oblates came to the Blood Reserve and opened a residential school , as did representatives of the Anglican Church . Representatives of Catholic, Anglican and Methodist denominations were involved in running colonial schools on the Blood Reserve.

Earlier statement made in Rome

The TRC’s Call to Action No. 58 asks the Pope to “issue an apology to survivors, their families, and communities for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of First Nations, Inuit and Métis children in Catholic-run residential schools,” and to do so in Canada.

An apology in line with this call would help demonstrate the Roman Catholics’ responsibility in the colonial education system.

Pope Francis’s earlier apology , in April, mainly addressed the cultural abuse Indigenous Peoples suffered. He said:

“The chain that passed on knowledge and ways of life in union with the land was broken by a colonization that lacked respect for you, tore many of you from your vital milieu and tried to conform you to another mentality. In this way, great harm was done to your identity and your culture … following programs devised in offices rather than the desire to respect the life of peoples.”

A statement like this places the blame on colonization and fails to acknowledge the Catholic Church’s role in supporting these negative colonial outcomes for Indigenous Peoples.

Pope Francis also said, “I feel shame … in the abuses you suffered and in the lack of respect shown for your identity, your culture and even your spiritual values.” This is the extent to which the Pope acknowledged specific types of abuse that Indigenous children suffered at the hands of religious members.

Read more: Catholic Church response to sexual abuse must centre on survivor well-being, not defensiveness

Pope Francis did not address how Catholic-run residential schools negatively impacted generations of Indigenous Peoples through spiritual, emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Nor did he articulate any formal plan for how the Catholic Church would attempt to walk the path of reconciliation.

Truth, justice, relationships

There are many of us who hope Pope Francis’s visit will bring a new and more sincere apology.

The Pope must set foot in our communities and onto our reserves. He must see the lasting impacts the Catholic Church has had. He must have conversations, build relationships and listen to the needs of First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples. He must learn that healing and reconciliation will look different across various communities.

The Pope must make a plan with us, not for us, in order to walk the path of reconciliation.

If the Pope cannot provide a plan while he is here, due to the short visit, he can set things in motion. Indigenous Peoples need more than words. Pope Francis should commit to timelines for formal actions and plans.

These plans should include commitments for representatives of the Catholic Church with the power to make high-level decisions to work with Indigenous communities, and to fulfil all of the TRC’s Calls to Action related to the Catholic Church and to attend to any additional needs.

How to move forward

As someone who has researched colonial schooling, and who has learned from other experts and Elders in my community, I offer the following suggestions of how to move forward. This is by no means an exhaustive list:

The Catholic Church should work with Indigenous communities to determine if criminal investigations will be made into the abuses Indigenous children suffered at the hands of adults who were in charge of residential schools. Survivors have asked the Pope to acknowledge church failures in reporting abusers, and the church must hold those accountable who are still alive today .

The papal bulls (edicts) used to justify the doctrine of discovery and terra nullius must be revoked .

Catholic records pertaining to the 1870-1990s colonial school systems must be released and copies given to relevant Indigenous communities.

In response to requests from survivors, Pope Francis must recognize that many students were buried in unmarked graves and a plan should be shared to aid Indigenous Peoples while they uncover unmarked graves .

Read more: Indigenous lawyer: Investigate discovery of 215 children's graves in Kamloops as a crime against humanity

Indigenous artifacts at the Vatican must be investigated to determine authorship, and dialogue must happen with the appropriate communities on the fate of the artifacts.

The Catholic Church must live up to the original Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement .

A new apology from the Pope must be issued on Canadian soil.

As Pope Francis declared in his April statement, “ Whenever memory and identity are cherished and protected, we become more human .”

Let us see how the Pope will cherish and protect the memory and identity of Indigenous Peoples by engaging in truth and justice. Such actions will help the world see we are human beings, which colonization and the colonial education system stole from us.

If you are an Indian Residential School survivor, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419.

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Pope visits Nunavut for final apology of his Canadian tour

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IQALUIT, Nunavut (AP) — Pope Francis traveled to the edge of the Arctic on Friday to deliver an apology to the Inuit people for the “evil” of Canada’s residential schools, wrapping up his week-long “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada with a dramatic visit to the remote territory of Nunavut to meet with school survivors.

Francis landed in Iqaluit, population 7,500, and met with former students at a primary school to hear first-hand their experiences of being torn from their families and forced to attend church-run, government funded boarding schools. The aim of the policy, which was in effect from the late 1800s to the 1970s, was to sever children from their Native cultures and assimilate them into Canadian, Christian society.

“How evil it is to break the bonds uniting parents and children, to damage our closest relationships, to harm and scandalize the little ones!” Francis told a gathering of Inuit youths and elders outside the school.

He thanked the school survivors for their courage in sharing their suffering, which he had heard for the first time this past spring when delegations of First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples traveled to the Vatican to seek an apology.

“This only renewed in me the indignation and shame that I have felt for months,” Francis said. "I want to tell you how very sorry I am and to ask for forgiveness for the evil perpetrated by not a few Catholics who contributed to the policies of cultural assimilation and enfranchisement in those schools.”

Before his speech, the pope — seated in a chair covered in seal skin — watched Inuit throat singers and dancers perform. During his address, he said “I’m sorry” in Inuktitut, the Inuit language, drawing cheers. And he ended by saying “thank you” in Inuktitut.

The events stretched far longer than planned; the pope's plane took off for Rome about 90 minutes behind schedule.

The visit capped an unusual tour designed specifically to give the pope opportunities to apologize to generations of Native peoples for the abuses and injustices they suffered and to assure them that he was committed to helping them reconcile their relationship with the Catholic Church. After stops in Edmonton, Alberta, and Quebec City, Francis ended his pilgrimage in Nunavut, a vast territory straddling the Arctic Circle that represents the farthest north the Argentine pope has ever traveled.

Ahead of his arrival, organizers readied scores of hats with mesh face protection to guard against the mosquitoes that sometimes abound in the mild summer temperatures of Iqaluit, which is some 200 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

The Canadian government has said physical and sexual abuse were rampant at the residential schools, and Francis on Thursday begged forgiveness for the “evil” of clergy sexual abuse, vowing an “irreversible commitment” to prevent it from happening again. His vow came after he omitted a reference to sexual abuse in his initial apology this week, upsetting some survivors and earning a complaint from the Canadian government.

Francis’ apologies have received a mixed response, with some school survivors welcoming them as helpful to their healing and others saying far more needs to be done to correct past wrongs and pursue justice. Several protesters appeared at the main event in Iqaluit with placards making demands of this nature.

The Inuit community is seeking Vatican assistance to extradite an Oblate priest, the Rev. Joannes Rivoire, who ministered to Inuit communities until he left in the 1990s and returned to France. Canadian authorities issued an arrest warrant for him in 1998 on accusations of several counts of sexual abuse, but it has never been served.

The Canadian government said this week that it had asked France to extradite Rivoire, but did not say when. Rivoire has denied wrongdoing.

Francis heard from survivors in a private meeting, including one woman whose daughter died at a residential school; the woman and her husband have been searching for her grave for years. Another speaker was the daughter of one of Rivoire’s victims, who died after years of alcohol abuse, said Lieve Halsberghe, an advocate for clergy abuse victims who has fought for years to bring Rivoire to justice.

The Inuit warmly welcomed Francis to their homeland and lit a ceremonial lamp, or qulliq, for the occasion.

Francis referred to its symbolic significance in his remarks, saying it dispelled the darkness and brought warmth.

“We are here with the desire to pursue together a journey of healing and reconciliation that, with the help of the Creator, can help us shed light on what happened and move beyond that dark past,” Francis said

Directing himself to younger generations, Francis urged them, too, to choose light rather than dark, to keep hopes alive, aim high and protect the environment. He stressed the value of teamwork, recalling the successes of Canada’s beloved national sport of ice hockey.

Jimmy Lucassi, an Inuit from Iqaluit, was at the school grounds for Francis’ visit along with his wife and children. “It probably means a lot to a lot of people,” he said. “It’s all we’ve been talking about. They closed the stores to celebrate.”

The trip was the first in which the 85-year-old pope was forced to use a wheelchair, walker and cane because of painful strained knee ligaments that forced him to cancel a trip to Africa earlier this month. Even with a reduced schedule, the trip was clearly uncomfortable for Francis and he has said he felt “limited” by his inability to freely move about as he pleases.

Future travel is not clear. Francis has said he wants to visit Kyiv, Ukraine, but no trip is immediately on the horizon. He is also expected in Kazakhstan in mid September for an inter-religious meeting that might provide an opportunity to meet with the Russian Patriarch Kirill, who has justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Reaction to Francis’ visit to Canada has been mixed, with even the government saying his apology didn’t go far enough in accepting blame for the institutional role the Catholic Church played in supporting the school policy.

Some school survivors have accepted his apology as genuine and helpful to their process of healing from trauma. Others have found it still wanting, angered that it took the discovery of presumed unmarked graves outside some residential schools for the pope to apologize after Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 specifically called for a papal apology to be delivered on Canadian soil.

Still others have demanded the church provide further information about the fate of children who never returned home from the schools and repudiating the 15th century papal bulls that informed the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery” which legitimized the colonial-era seizure of Native lands for the sake of spreading Christianity.

It is unlikely that the Vatican itself would hold records concerning the fate of Indigenous children who died at the schools, though it would have documentation on any priests who faced canonical penalties after 2001, and possibly some before then. If the documents about the children exist, they would likely be in the archives of individual religious orders.

Gillies reported from Quebec City.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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Indigenous people hope Pope Francis goes beyond apology after visit to Canada

With Pope Francis set to embark on a six-day "penitential" visit to Canada this Sunday, Indigenous people say they hope the pontiff goes beyond delivering a simple apology.

Pan Palmater, Chair in Indigenous Governance at Toronto Metropolitan University, says the Pope also needs to offer "fulsome acceptance of responsibility" for the Catholic Church's role in the residential school system, which saw widespread cases of abuse and neglect.

"No minimizing, no qualifying, but, 'Here's what we did, in terms of the people on the ground in residential schools,'" she told CTV's Your Morning on Friday.

Rod Alexis, a residential school survivor from Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation in Alberta, called the Pope's visit a "good first step."

"It's just a beginning. This announcement is just a beginning, understanding each other," he told CTV News on Thursday.

Palmater also wants to see the Church take accountability for not sharing information and documents relating to residential schools, as well as its in action holding abusers accountable.

"That should all come before a really sincere apology," she said.

Palmater also wants to see the Church properly fulfil its compensation commitments . In 2006, Catholic dioceses in Canada agreed to use their "best efforts" to fundraise $25 million for residential school survivors, but ended up raising less than $4 million.

There's also the Doctrine of Discovery , which Palameter says the Church needs to revoke. Originating from statements from the Pope in the 1400s, the doctrine gave legal and moral justification during the "Age of Discovery" to legitimize European colonial land claims outside of Europe.

Indigenous leaders have also called on the Vatican to return colonial-era Indigenous artworks and artifacts , which the Vatican says were obtained as "gifts."

And while some survivors need to hear the Pope's apology for their own personal healing, Palmeter noted that not all Indigenous people are eager to see him in Canada.

"(There are) some who want him here and there's a good number who don't want him here, who actually take great offence that he’s even coming here. So, you know, there's a wide variety of opinion," she said.

For Alexis, who will be welcoming Pope Francis at Lac Ste. Anne, Alta., it's important for the Pope to acknowledge the Indigenous members of the Roman Catholic community.

"We wanted (the Pope) to come here because we knew that healing has to begin someplace. He represents the most powerful religious organization in the world. And then a lot of us are part of that," he said.

With files from CTV National News Atlantic Bureau Chief Creeson Agecoutay

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Pope Francis will visit Canada for Indigenous reconciliation. What did it take to get here?

This article was published more than 2 years ago. Some information may no longer be current.

Pope Francis arrives to hold a general audience in Paul VI Hall at the Vatican, on Oct. 27, 2021. FILIPPO MONTEFORTE/AFP/Getty Images

Pope Francis’s willingness to visit Canada over reconciliation comes after Indigenous survivors have spent years calling for a papal apology on Canadian soil. Popes have visited Canada in the past, though not issued an apology to Indigenous peoples over residential schools. There are recent precedents for apologies, however – Pope Francis apologized for the church’s “crimes” against Indigenous peoples in Bolivia in 2015, and for abuses in Ireland, in 2018.

Pope Benedict XVI expresses “sorrow” over abuses at residential schools, to a delegation from the Assembly of First Nations in a private meeting at the Vatican. The meeting is summarized in a three-paragraph statement from the Vatican. Many survivors, however, say this falls short of a full, public apology that is delivered in Canada.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission issues its final report that includes 94 calls to action. Number 58 calls upon the Pope to issue an apology to survivors, their families and communities for the Catholic Church’s role “in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children in Catholic-run residential schools.” This apology, it said, should occur within one year of the issuing of its report and be given by the Pope in Canada.

In a meeting at the Vatican, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau personally invites the Pope to come to Canada and apologize, as part of reconciliation efforts, in the coming years.

Pope Francis says he will not apologize to residential school survivors and their families for the role the church played in operating the schools. The announcement is made through a letter from the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, which said the pope is aware of the TRC’s call to action No. 58, but that he “felt that he could not personally respond” to the request for an apology. Mr. Trudeau says he is “disappointed” at the response; the House of Commons votes overwhelmingly in support of a motion for a papal apology.

Evelyn Kormaz, a residential school survivor who suffered abuse at the St. Anne’s Indian Residential School in Northern Ontario, travels to the Vatican. She is representing Indigenous peoples as part of the group Ending Clergy Abuse and wants to personally ask the Pope to apologize for the abuses her people experienced at the hands of the church. She is not allowed to meet with him and leaves disappointed.

Indigenous leaders and survivors again call on the Pope to make an apology. So do many Catholics, in petitions. In a June address at the Vatican, Pope Francis expresses pain at the news of children’s remains in unmarked graves. He does not, however, apologize. In September, the bishops of Canada “unequivocally” apologize. They don’t say whether they’ve invited the Pope to come to Canada and do so. In October, the Vatican says the CCCB has invited the Pope to come to Canada, in the context of the reconciliation process. The statement doesn’t specifically mention an apology.

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Pope Francis apologizes over use of homophobic slur, Vatican says

Incident alleged to have happened may 20 in private meeting with bishops.

Pope apologizes for using homophobic slur

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WARNING: This story contains derogatory language.

Pope Francis, widely quoted as having used a highly derogatory word to describe the 2SLGBTQ+ community, did not intend to use homophobic language and apologizes to anyone offended by it, the Vatican said on Tuesday.

It is extremely rare for a pope to issue a public apology.

"The Pope never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms, and he apologizes to those who felt offended by the use of a term reported by others," Vatican spokesperson Matteo Bruni said in an emailed statement.

Italian media had reported on Monday that Francis used the Italian term frociaggine , roughly translating as "faggotness" or "faggotry," as he told Italian bishops he remained opposed to admitting gay people into the priesthood.

Italian political gossip website Dagospia was the first to report the alleged incident, said to have happened on May 20, when the pontiff met Italian bishops behind closed doors.

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Bruni said Francis was "aware" of the reports. The Vatican spokesperson reiterated that the Pope remained committed to a welcoming church for all, where "nobody is useless, nobody is superfluous, [where] there is room for everyone."

His reported comments caused shock and consternation, even among his supporters.

Vito Mancuso, an Italian theologian and former priest, told the daily La Stampa that Francis's language was "despicable and surprising because it blatantly jars" with his previous messages on LGBTQ issues.

Dialogue between groups 'must go on,' says LGBTQ+ association spokesperson

Francis, 87, has been credited with making substantial overtures toward the 2SLGBTQ+ community during his 11-year papacy.

In 2013, at the start of his papacy, he famously said: "If a person is gay and seeks God and has goodwill, who am I to judge?" Last year, he allowed priests to bless members of same-sex couples, triggering substantial conservative backlash.

Back in 2018, Francis admitted making "grave mistakes" in the handling of a sexual abuse crisis in Chile, where he initially dismissed as slander accusations against a bishop suspected of protecting a predator priest.

"I apologize to all those I have offended and I hope to be able to do it personally in the coming weeks, in the meetings I will have [with victims]," he wrote in a letter to Chilean bishops.

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Vatican issues apology after Pope Francis’s ‘homophobic’ slur

Pope Francis ‘apologises to those who felt offended by the use of a term reported by others’, Vatican spokesman says.

Pope Francis has issued an apology after he was quoted as having used a highly derogatory word to describe the LGBT community , the Vatican said.

Italian media reported on Monday that Francis used the Italian term “frociaggine”, roughly translating as “f****try”, in a private meeting last week when he was asked whether gay men should be allowed to train for the priesthood provided they remained celibate.

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Italian political gossip website Dagospia was the first to report the alleged incident, said to have happened on May 20 when the pontiff met Italian bishops behind closed doors.

“The Pope never intended to offend or express himself in homophobic terms, and he apologises to those who felt offended by the use of a term reported by others,” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said in a statement on Tuesday.

Francis was addressing an assembly of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, which recently approved a new document outlining training for Italian seminarians.

The document, which hasn’t been published pending review by the Holy See, reportedly sought to open some wiggle room in the Vatican’s absolute ban on gay priests.

The Vatican ban was articulated in a 2005 document from the Congregation for Catholic Education, and later repeated in a subsequent document in 2016, which said the church cannot admit to seminaries or ordain men who “practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called gay culture”.

Francis strongly reaffirmed that position in his May 20 meeting with the Italian bishops, joking that “there is already an air of f****tness” in seminaries, the Italian media reported, after initial reporting from Dagospia.

Bruni reiterated that the pope remained committed to a welcoming Catholic Church for all, where “nobody is useless, nobody is superfluous, [where] there is room for everyone”.

Italian is not Francis’s native language, and the Argentine pope has made linguistic gaffes in the past that raised eyebrows.

The 87-year-old has been known for his outreach to LGBTQ+ Catholics, however, starting from his famous “Who am I to judge?” comment in 2013 about a priest who purportedly had a gay lover in his past.

Vatican issues apology after Pope Francis’ use of an anti-gay slur

A day after news broke that Pope Francis had allegedly used a derogatory word in a private conversation with Italian bishops about gay men applying to Italian seminaries, the Vatican has issued an official response.

“Pope Francis never intended to offend or to express himself in homophobic terms, and he apologizes to those who felt offended by the use of a word, referred [to] by others,” the Vatican said in a statement issued this afternoon, May 28.

The statement from Matteo Bruni, the director of the Holy See Press Office, came in response to questions from journalists regarding the pope’s use of the word “frociaggine,” an offensive word that, according to Italian media, Francis had used in a discussion about homosexuals in seminaries at his closed-door meeting with the Italian bishops’ conference on May 20. His usage of the slur caused an uproar in the media and L.G.B.T. groups.

“Pope Francis is aware of recent articles [in the media] about a conversation, behind closed doors, [that he had] with the Italian Bishops Conference,” the statement read. It notably says the word was “referred [to] by others.” America has learned from informed sources who wish to remain anonymous that Francis repeated the word that had been used by one or more bishops during the 90-minute question-and-answer session with the Italian bishops in the Vatican’s old synod hall.

Something similar happened earlier this year when Francis was interviewed by a journalist for Swiss media. The interviewer then asked whether Ukraine should raise “the white flag,” and Francis repeated the words “white flag” in his response. That statement gave rise to much controversy, with many in the media claiming that the pope was suggesting that Ukraine surrender. In reality, the pope was encouraging Ukrainians to seek a negotiated resolution to the war.

In today’s statement, Mr. Bruni said: “As [the pope] has had the opportunity to state on several occasions, ‘In the Church there is room for everyone, for everyone! No one is useless, no one is superfluous, there is room for everyone. Just as we are, everyone.’”

The statement notes that Francis’ use of “frociaggine” was not meant to offend as a slur. After all, this is the pope who in July 2013 responded “Who am I to judge ?” when asked about a priest alleged to be gay.

As reported yesterday in America , the question regarding homosexuality and seminarians has been in discussion for some time by the Italian bishops’ conference, and according to the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, at their meeting in Assisi last November, they “had approved a new document ‘Ratio Formationis Sacerdotalis,’ not yet approved by the Holy See, regulating admission to and formation in [Italian] seminaries, in which they approved by majority vote an amendment that recognized the distinction between simple homosexual orientation and ‘deeply rooted tendencies.’”

This, the paper reported, meant “in substance, that a homosexual person could be admitted to the seminary if, like the heterosexual, he gave the guarantee that he knows how to live the discipline of celibacy. The implication is that it is more difficult for homosexuals because they will be living in an all-male community for many years.” But, the paper observed, “it seems that Pope Francis has a more radical vision: to avoid problems of this kind, homosexual persons should not be admitted to the seminary. Full stop!”

Some in Rome are now saying that the question regarding homosexuality and seminarians put to the pope may have come from one of those bishops who did not agree with the decision made by the Italian bishops’ conference by majority vote at the Assisi meeting.

Pope Francis’ stance echoes the official position of the Vatican held since 2005 when the Congregation for Catholic Education, with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI, issued a document on the question, titled “ Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders .”

[T]his Dicastery, in accord with the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, believes it necessary to state clearly that the Church, while profoundly respecting the persons in question, cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called “gay culture.”

During a similar closed-door meeting with Italian bishops in 2018, La Repubblica reported, the pope told them if they had “even the slightest doubt” about a gay candidate being able to live a life of celibacy in the seminary and as a priest, “it is better not to let them in.”

In a book-length interview in 2018, Pope Francis said superiors must be able to help gay candidates prepare for a life of celibacy or encourage them to leave the seminary.

“Homosexuality is a very serious matter, which must be discerned adequately from the beginning with candidates, if it is the case. We must be demanding,” the pope had told Claretian Father Fernando Prado in the book interview, The Strength of Vocation: Consecrated Life Today.

Pope Francis made it clear in the interview that he was talking about homosexual activity among priests and religious who make vows of chastity and celibacy.

“In consecrated life or that of the priesthood, there is no place for this type of affection,” the pope said. “For that reason, the church recommends that persons with this deep-seated tendency not be accepted for ministry or consecrated life.”

Material from Catholic News Service was used in this report.

Gerard O’Connell is America’s Vatican correspondent and author of The Election of Pope Francis: An Inside Story of the Conclave That Changed History . He has been covering the Vatican since 1985.

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