(Vatican City) Pope Francis will visit Canada, at an undetermined date, at the invitation of the Canadian episcopate splashed by the scandal of indigenous people abused in residential schools in this country, the Vatican announced on Wednesday .
“The Canadian Episcopal Conference has invited the Holy Father Francis to make an apostolic visit to Canada, also in the context of the pastoral process which has been going on for a long time, of reconciliation with the indigenous peoples,” a brief Vatican statement read.
Pope Francis “has shown his availability to visit the country on a date to be fixed later,” the statement concluded.
A month ago, the Catholic Church of Canada issued a formal apology to Indigenous peoples after the discovery in recent months of more than a thousand graves near former residential schools, but activists in this country are still waiting for the Pope François un mea culpa considered crucial for the process of reconciliation.
In total, more than a thousand anonymous graves near former Catholic Indian residential schools were found this summer, shedding light on a dark page in Canadian history and its policy of forced assimilation of First Nations.
Some 150,000 Native American, Métis and Inuit children were forcibly conscripted into 139 such residential schools across the country, where they were cut off from their families, language and culture.
Many of them have been subjected to ill-treatment or sexual abuse, and more than 4000 have died there, according to a commission of inquiry which had concluded to a true “cultural genocide”.