Pope Francis apologized on Thursday for sexual abuse in Canadian schools for indigenous children run by Catholic orders, addressing a deep wound that many survivors wanted him to acknowledge during his apology tour of Canada.
At an evening vespers service with priests and nuns at the Quebec City cathedral, the pope said the Church in Canada was on a new path after being “devastated by the evil perpetrated by some of its sons and daughters”.
“I am thinking in particular of the sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable people, scandals that require firm action and an irreversible commitment”, the Pope said on the penultimate day of his visit six days to Canada.
“Together with you, I would like once again to apologize to all the victims. The pain and shame we feel must become an occasion for conversion: never again!”.
It was the first time that the Pope specifically addressed the issue of sexual abuse in schools, where more than 150,000 indigenous children were separated from their families and brought between 1870 Y 1996.
Children starved or were beaten for speaking their native languages and many were sexually abused in a system that the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission called “cultural genocide”.
The comments are based on a historic apology by the Pope on Monday in the city from Maskwacis, the site of two former schools, when he called the role of the Church in the schools, and the forced cultural assimilation they attempted, a “deplorable evil” and “disastrous mistake.” Read more
But that apology, while eliciting strong emotion and praise as a first step in reconciliation, was also criticized by survivors for not living up to their expectations. The lack of a mention of sexual abuse was one of his complaints.
Since then, the Pope has continued to elaborate his apology and has alluded to the institutional failure of the Church in allowing abuse to proliferate in the schools, addressing another criticism from survivors.
Earlier on Thursday, the Pope made some of his strongest comments yet on the collective failure of the Catholic Church over abuses in indigenous schools .
Find others 93 possible graves in a boarding school for indigenous children in Canada https: //t.co/26li0U3IAH
— The New York Diary (@eldiariony) January 26, 2022
While presiding over a mass in the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre, on the outskirts of Quebec City, the Pope spoke of “the burning questions that this pilgrim Church in Canada asks” .
“Facing the scandal of evil and the wounded Body of Christ in the flesh of our indigenous brothers and sisters, we too have experienced deep consternation, we too feel the weight of failure”, said the Pope.
“Why did all this happen? How could this happen in the community of those who follow Jesus?”
At the beginning of the mass, two indigenous women unfurled a banner asking him to formally rescind the 15th century edicts, known as the doctrine of discovery, in which the papacy justified the seizure of indigenous lands in the New World.
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