To the crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square for the July 17 Angelus, Pope Francis referred to his historic trip to Canada, July 24-29, as a “penitential pilgrimage.” The Organizing Committee had only two months to prepare for this trip. Not to mention the fact that we are in the midst of a wave of COVID-19 and the South American Pope’s health remains faltering with age. He had to cancel two pastoral visits to Lebanon and Africa, on the advice of the doctor, due to knee pain which reduced his mobility.
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Francis remains determined all the same when it comes to going “towards the peripheries”, to meet the most suffering. He comes to Canada as a humble pilgrim of peace, to listen, dialogue and pray with the Aboriginal peoples marked by the tragedy of the residential schools. The Canadian Church, and especially that of Quebec, really needs this helping hand from the Pope to move forward on the long road of healing and reconciliation, hence the theme of his visit: Walking together. I believe that he will know how to touch hearts with his authenticity, his simplicity and his humanity.
In March 2022, he had met with indigenous communities in the Vatican, before issuing a public apology on 1er April: “I ask God for forgiveness and I would like to tell you, with all my heart: I am very distressed. And I join my fellow Canadian bishops in apologizing to you. He had hinted that he wanted to come this summer to apologize in person on their territory.
The visit of the head of the Church will be an opportunity for Catholics around the world to hear about the Aboriginal people of Canada, to empathize with the victims of spiritual and sexual abuse. It is one of the recommendations of the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, published in 2015. It was long, but we are there.
Remember that the boarding school system for Aboriginals was set up by the federal government of Canada in the 1870s until 1995. This powerful colonialist machine was intended to “kill the Indian in the child”. To achieve this, management was left to the various Churches, especially Catholic and Anglican, forgetting that it was Christ who was also being attacked in them: “Each time you did it to one of those least of my brothers, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40).
There were nearly 150,000 indigenous children who were taken from their families and sent to schools to “civilize” them. Between 3,000 and 6,000 children died within the walls of the 130 residential schools, which were mostly in Western Canada. There were a dozen in Quebec.
Painful reminder of the past
In May 2021, the discovery of the remains of 215 children buried at the site of a boarding school in Kamloops reopened the wounds. It was in this context that the Aboriginal trip to Rome and the visit of Pope Francis to Canada were organized.
With the free tone that we know for him, the pope will undoubtedly return to the themes that are dear to him, and that we find in the apostolic exhortation on the Amazon: justice and forgiveness, dialogue and freedom, integral ecology and contemplation, flowering of cultures and proclamation of Christ. He writes at noh 7: “I dream of an Amazon that fights for the rights of the poorest, of the indigenous peoples, of the last, where their voice is heard and their dignity is promoted. This dream can very well apply to us.