EDMONTON, Canada —
Pope Francis was headed to Canada Sunday for a chance to personally
apologies to Indigenous survivors of abuse committed over a span of decades at
residential schools run by the Catholic Church.
اضافة اعلان
The head of the
world’s 1.3 billion Catholics will be met at Edmonton’s international airport
by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at 11:20am (5:20pm GMT).
Francis’ Canada
visit is primarily to apologize to survivors for the Church’s role in the
scandal that a national truth and reconciliation commission has called
“cultural genocide”.
Before he left Rome
earlier Sunday, the pope said on Twitter he was making a “penitential
pilgrimage” that “might contribute to the journey of reconciliation already
undertaken”.
He will be joined
on the visit by his diplomacy chief,
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s
second most senior official.
From the late 1800s
to the 1990s, Canada’s government sent about 150,000 First Nations, Metis, and
Inuit children into 139 residential schools run by the Church, where they were
cut off from their families, language, and culture.
Many were
physically and sexually abused by headmasters and teachers.
Thousands of
children are believed to have died of disease, malnutrition, or neglect.
Since May 2021,
more than 1,300 unmarked graves have been discovered at the sites of the former
schools.
A delegation of
Indigenous peoples travelled to the Vatican in April and met the pope — a
precursor to Francis’ six-day trip — after which he formally apologized.
But doing so again
on Canadian soil will be of huge significance for survivors and their families,
for whom the land of their ancestors is of particular importance.
The 10-hour flight
constitutes the longest since 2019 for the 85-year-old pope, who has been
suffering from knee pain that has forced him to use a cane or wheelchair in
recent outings.
The pope was in a
wheelchair Sunday and used a lifting platform to board the plane, an AFP
correspondent accompanying him said.
‘Too late’
After resting Sunday, the pope will travel Monday to the community of
Maskwacis, some 100km south of Edmonton, and address an estimated crowd of
15,000 expected to include former students from across the country.
“I would like a lot
of people to come,” said Charlotte Roan, 44, interviewed by AFP in June. The
member of the Ermineskin Cree Nation said she wanted people to come “to hear
that it wasn’t made up”.
Others see the
pope’s visit as too little too late, including Linda McGilvery with the Saddle
Lake Cree Nation near Saint Paul, about 200 kilometres east of Edmonton.
“I wouldn’t go out
of my way to see him,” said the 68-year-old.
“For me it’s kind
of too late, because a lot of the people suffered, and the priests and the nuns
have now passed on.”
McGilvery spent
eight years of her childhood in one of the schools, from age six to 13.
“Being in the
residential school I lost a lot of my culture, my ancestry. That’s many years
of loss,” she told AFP.
After a mass before
tens of thousands of faithful in Edmonton on Tuesday, Francis will head
northwest to an important pilgrimage site, the Lac Sainte Anne.
Following a July
27–29 visit to Quebec City, he will end his trip in Iqaluit, capital of the
northern territory of Nunavut and home to the largest Inuit population in
Canada.
There he will meet
with former residential school students, before returning to Italy.
In total, Francis
is expected to deliver four speeches and four homilies, all in Spanish.
Francis is the
second pope to visit Canada, after John Paul II, who visited three times (1984,
1987, and 2002).
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