Pope Francis to meet Indigenous survivors of Canadian schools abuses

[Judi Lynn]

First Nations, Metis and Inuit groups to travel to Vatican amid calls for papal apology over children’s deaths

Associated Press in Rome
Wed 30 Jun 2021 13.07 EDT

Pope Francis has agreed to meet Indigenous survivors of Canada’s notorious residential schools in December, amid calls for a papal apology for the Catholic church’s role in the abuse and deaths of thousands of children.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) said Francis had invited delegations to the Vatican and would meet three groups – First Nations, Métis and Inuit – separately before presiding over a final audience with all three.

The Vatican did not confirm the visit, but the Holy See’s in-house news portal reported on the bishops’ statement. The CCCB said the trip was contingent on developments in the pandemic and that the delegations would include survivors of the residential schools, Indigenous elders and youths, as well as Indigenous leaders and Canadian bishops.

In recent weeks, investigators using ground-penetrating radar have reported finding hundreds of unmarked graves at the sites of three residential schools for Indigenous children. The discoveries – more than 600 graves at one school, 215 bodies at another – have revived calls, including from the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, for the pope to make a formal apology.

From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend state-funded Christian boarding schools in an effort to assimilate them into Canadian society. Thousands of children died there of disease and other causes, and many were never returned to their families.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/30/pope-francis-to-meet-indigenous-survivors-of-canadian-schools-abuses

[Martin68]

1. Glad to hear this. Francis has some very good principles. Like his namesake, he empathizes with the

poor, the downtrodden, and the outcast who have been let down by the supposed upstanding Christian-church-going members of society. And similar acts of cultural genocide were performed here in the US. We have yet to find hundreds of unmarked graves of children...