Posted at 6:00 a.m.
boarding school
First, the pope’s first activity was to visit the site of a former boarding school located an hour from Edmonton in Maskwacis. Mandy Gull-Masty, who is the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) delegate for the papal visit to Quebec, believes that a boarding school should have been visited in Quebec as well.
However, the boarding schools were far from Quebec, in Abitibi or Lac-Saint-Jean. We should have gone there by helicopter. “It would have been preferable, but the Pope’s health must be taken into account,” admits Chief Ghislain Picard, of the Assembly of First Nations of Quebec and Labrador (AFNQL).
Mass
Another logistical difference, two different places and times are planned in Alberta for the mass and the pilgrimage to a shrine dedicated to Saint Anne, the grandmother of Jesus, popular in several Aboriginal communities.
And the Commonwealth Stadium in Edmonton is easily accessible and can accommodate 65,000 people, while the basilica in Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré only holds 2,000: 1,400 in the central nave and 600 in the basement.
The broadcast on giant screens outside will allow a total of 15,000 people to follow Thursday’s mass, but much criticism has been directed at the diocese of Quebec, which has allocated 70% of the tickets to Aboriginals. “There are survivors of residential schools who could not have seats inside,” laments Chief Picard.
He thinks that the “political” tickets – between 10 and 14 places for each level of government (the federal government, the government of Quebec, the City of Quebec and the City of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré) – are too numerous.
“If we had limited that to two or three tickets, that would have left room for about forty more survivors,” he said.
Confederation
In Alberta, the Diocese of Edmonton had a single Aboriginal interlocutor, the Confederacy of Treaty 6 First Nations. interviews the Archbishop of Edmonton, Richard Smith.
In Quebec, the local community is Wendake. But since she was little affected by residential schools for Aboriginal people, she did not want to play a leading role in welcoming the pope. “He came for the survivors,” explains the great chief of Wendake, Rémy Vincent.
The Diocese of Quebec therefore dealt with the AFNQL and the APN, which repeatedly denounced the diocese in the media. Grand Chief Gull-Masty of Waswanipi has repeatedly deplored the lack of attention of the Diocese of Quebec to the needs of former residential school students, who are often elderly.
In Maskwacis, the reception was organized entirely by the local indigenous community, the former students of the boarding schools having at their disposal a primary school to rest and sustain themselves while waiting for the arrival of the pope.
Apologies and Hope
Basically, there was a dilemma: should we consider the pope’s trip to Canada as a whole, with a progression in the message, or as several trips of apologies?
“Alberta is the province where there have been the most residential schools and the most suffering,” said Gérald Cyprien Lacroix, Archbishop of Quebec, in an interview. It’s normal that we start there. We recognize the pain. »
“When you arrive in Quebec, the cradle of the Catholic faith, you are elsewhere. Once the truth has been established, reconciliation is needed. We therefore thought that the commemorations on the Plains of Abraham on Wednesday would be under the sign of hope.
But both the AFN and the AFNQL wanted the pope’s message to Quebec to focus on apologies to former residential school students.
The idea of a progression in the relationship between the pope and the Aboriginal peoples is well anchored in the Catholic hierarchy: Raymond Poisson, bishop of Saint-Jérôme and president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), declared on Saturday in The duty that the pope’s apologies had been made in Rome last spring, and that it was necessary to “move forward” during the visit to Canada.
The AFNQL denounced Mr.gr Fish in a statement Monday. In a sign that this is a thorny problem, a former Cree student of a residential school said Monday in a press conference that the apology in Alberta must be followed in Quebec by “another step” and a “concrete plan” for reconciliation.