Pope Francis has apologised to Indigenous people in Canada for the “evil” of residential schools, the church-run, forced-assimilation institutions that First Nation, Inuit and Metis children were forced to attend for decades.
After a visit on Monday to the former site of Ermineskin Indian Residential School in Maskwacis, in the western province of Alberta, the pope said he travelled to Canada “to tell you in person of my sorrow [and] to implore God’s forgiveness, healing and reconciliation”.
“I am here because the first step of my penitential pilgrimage among you is that of again asking forgiveness, of telling you once more that I am deeply sorry,” Pope Francis said during a ceremony attended by Indigenous leaders, residential school survivors, elders and others.
“What our Christian faith tells us is that this was a disastrous error incompatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ,” he said, describing the effects of residential schools as “catastrophic”. “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples.”
The pope’s six-day visit to Canada this week comes after hundreds of unmarked graves were recently uncovered at several former residential school sites, spurring renewed calls for accountability from the government and the Catholic Church, in particular.
Ermineskin, which operated from 1895 to 1975 and was run by the Catholic Church, was one of Canada’s largest residential schools. The government-funded and church-run institutions aimed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into mainstream European culture.
More than 150,000 First Nation, Metis and Inuit children were separated from their families and forced into residential schools between the late 1800s and 1990s. They were subjected to widespread physical, psychological and sexual abuse and banned from speaking Indigenous languages, and thousands of children are believed to have died while in attendance.
During Monday’s event, Pope Francis recognised that his apology was only a first step.
He said that to prevent such abuses from taking place again, “a serious investigation into the facts of what took place” must be conducted. The pope did not go into further detail about what such a probe would entail.
Pope Francis’s visit and expected apology have drawn diverse reactions from Indigenous leaders and residential school survivors, with some welcoming this as an important step on the path to healing, and others saying it is too little, too late.
Some also argue that the Catholic Church needs to do much more to atone for its role in residential schools, including releasing all the documents related to the institutions, providing full reparations to survivors and communities, and helping bring the perpetrators of abuse to justice.