This journey is a healing journey, a “penitential pilgrimage”. The pope insisted on these words on the plane that took him from Rome to Edmonton on Sunday, July 24. This is the pope’s most distant trip since 2019 and despite his health concerns, he boarded in a wheelchair.
If the sovereign pontiff makes this effort, a visit of several days with four speeches and four homilies, it is because the Church, of which he is the supreme head, must finally find the way to peace in the drama of the native residential schools.
Dear brothers and sisters of #Canada, I come among you to meet the indigenous peoples. I hope that, with the grace of God, my penitential pilgrimage will be able to contribute to the path of reconciliation already undertaken. Please walk me through the #pray.
— Pope Francis (@Pontifex_fr) July 24, 2022
To understand what is at stake in this move, let’s recall what happened. From the end of the 19th century, and until the 1990s – that is to say yesterday – 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly recruited into “boarding schools”. These residential schools were mostly run by the Catholic Church and subsidized by the Canadian state.
These young Amerindians were then estranged from their families, cut off from their language, their culture and suffered physical and psychological violence. The objective of Canada at the time and of the Church was clear: “Killing the Indian in the Child’s Heart”… 6,000 children died from this policy of forced assimilation.
Francis is moving now because he is aware that the Church can no longer ignore this drama. For a long time, she blamed the local clerics who had run those 130 boarding schools. But last year, the discovery of hundreds of burials near one of these establishments brought this painful past back to life and created a shock wave.
Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister has acknowledged the “mistake” of his country and apologized – the previous government had already done this once. As for an apology, Pope Francis was obviously not ready and had then entrusted the discovery of the tombs with his “sadness” and his “indignation”.
A few months later, when a delegation of natives traveled to Rome, he finally spoke the long-awaited words: the sovereign pontiff asked “forgiveness to God” and said to himself “sorry”.
Today, the pope is traveling in the footsteps of this tragedy: he is going to meet survivors and approach the horror. The locals expect a lot from his speeches, including a new apology. They also hope that the objects seized by the Church during this period will be returned to them and would like to have access to the sites near the residential schools to carry out excavations. For the victims as for their descendants, this is only the beginning.