Pope Prepares To Travel To Canada For Penance

Pope Francis (Photo: Reuters via ANTARA)

JAKARTA - Pope Francis will travel to Canada as a "pilgrimage of penance". The July 24-30 trip will include at least five meetings with indigenous people as Francis fulfills a promise to apologize in their home region for the Church's role in state-sanctioned schools seeking to eradicate indigenous culture.

He hopes the visit will help correct the wrongs committed against the natives by Roman Catholic priests and nuns who run an arbitrary number of boarding schools.

"Unfortunately in Canada many Christians, including some members of religious orders, have contributed to a policy of cultural integration that in the past has severely damaged indigenous peoples in various ways," Francis said in his weekly address to residents in St. Peter's Square.

About 150,000 children were taken from their homes. Many were subjected to harassment, rape and malnutrition which the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission called in 2015 "cultural genocide".

The aim of the schools, which operated between 1831 and 1996, was to assimilate indigenous children.

A number of these schools are run by Christian denominations on behalf of the government, mostly by the Catholic Church.

The schools became the main discussion between the pope and indigenous peoples at the Vatican in March and April.

Recalling the meeting, Pope Francis said on Sunday he had expressed "my pain and solidarity for the crimes they have endured."

"I will make a pilgrimage of penance, which I hope by the grace of God can contribute to the path of healing and reconciliation that has already begun," he was quoted as saying by ANTARA.

The 85-year-old pope will visit Edmonton, Maskwacis, Lac Ste. Anne, Quebec, and Iqaluit in the Canadian Arctic region.

He is scheduled to give nine homily and speeches and say two Masses.

The repeated school scandal broke out again last year with the discovery of the remains of 215 children at the former Indian Boarding School in Kamloops in the western Canadian province of British Columbia. The school closed in 1978.

The discovery of the body brought new demands for accountability. Hundreds of unmarked burial sites have been found since then.

Francis was elected pope nearly two decades after the last school closed.

The pope had to cancel trips to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan in early July because of knee problems that forced him to use a wheelchair first and then a cane.

In an interview with Reuters on July 2, he gave details of his illness for the first time to the public, saying he suffered a "fractured bone" in the knee when he made a misstep when the ligaments became inflamed.