The Pope Francisco He asked forgiveness this Monday “for the evil that so many Christians did to the indigenous people” during the colonization and for the “cooperation” and “indifference” of the Catholic Churchduring his visit to the town of Maskwacis, where one of the largest boarding schools in which the Canadian State organized the processes of “assimilation” of the children of the original towns.
“To tell you, with all my heart, that I am deeply hurt: I apologize for the way in which, unfortunately, many Christians adopted the colonialist mentality of the powers that oppressed indigenous peoples,” he said. Francisco sitting among the representatives of the chiefs of the original peoples and before more than 2,000 people, including many victims of these internees.
The pontiff traveled to Canada after the invitation of the original towns to come and apologize for the abuses perpetrated in boarding schools run, many of them, by the Catholic Church and where nearly 150,000 children were torn from their families, while it has been estimated that more than 4,000 died from abuse and disease. Most buried in mass graves without any identification.
“I come to your native lands to tell you personally that I am hurt, to implore God’s forgiveness, healing and reconciliation, to show you my closeness, to pray with you and for you,” he said. Francisco in Spanish, a request that the indigenous people received with applause.
He also hoped that his presence would serve to “work together, so that the sufferings of the past give way to a future of justice, healing and reconciliation”, before adding that this visit is not a point of arrival but a starting point for this process.
request for forgiveness
The papawho prayed in the cemetery where many of the indigenous children who died at the Ermineskin school are buried, explained that “it is necessary to remember how the policies of assimilation and disengagement, which also included the system of residential schoolswere disastrous for the people of these lands”.
“They ended up systematically marginalizing the Indigenous villages“, he acknowledged and described how “through the residential school system, their languages and cultures were denigrated and suppressed; the children suffered physical and verbal, psychological and spiritual abuse; they were taken from their homes when they were little and this indelibly marked the relationship between parents and children, between grandparents and grandchildren”.
And so in this place, which in the Cree language means “bear hill,” the papaas he did in the Vatican when at the end of March the representatives of the Indigenous villagesrenewed his “apology for forgiveness”.
“To tell you, with all my heart, that I am deeply hurt: I apologize for the way in which, unfortunately, many Christians adopted the colonialist mentality of the powers that oppressed the Indigenous villages“, he said applause.
And he also apologized, “in particular, for the way in which many members of the Church and religious communities cooperated, also through indifference, in those projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation of the governments of the time, who ended up in the residential school system.
“I would like to repeat with shame and clarity: I humbly ask forgiveness for the evil that so many Christians committed against the Indigenous villages“, he insisted.
Echoing some of the requests of the natives to Catholic ChurchThe pope assured that this reconciliation process will require “a serious search for the truth about the past and help the survivors of the residential schools to carry out healing processes of the traumas they have suffered.”
Representatives of First Nations, Métis and Unit have asked the Catholic Church that those responsible for the schools can be judged, that the archives be opened to be able to investigate, as well as that some pieces of art that belonged to them and that are in the Vatican Museums.
The pontiff also apologized for not being able to visit other schools such as the one in Kamloops, where the rest of more than a hundred children were found last year, but assured that he knows “the suffering, the traumas and the challenges of indigenous peoples.” in all regions of this country.
(EFE)