From Canada..Francesco asks for forgiveness

On the evening of Monday 25 July 2022, Pope Francis arrived at the site of a former Aboriginal college in Canada; Apologize and ask forgiveness for the “unjust practices of the past” of the Catholic Church.

The Pope began his historic 6-day visit, in a journey of “repentance”, as he himself defined it, where he will once again express his pain and apologize for the violations committed by the colleges run by the Church against indigenous children. Pope Francis offered his long-awaited historical apology for the role of the Church in the violence suffered by thousands of children in Aboriginal boarding schools for more than a century. in Canada. Upon his arrival at the site of a former historical school, he said: “I ask for forgiveness. I am deeply sorry.”

Surrounded by presidents in representing all three Aboriginal groups, Francis was apologizing at the site of the former Ermenskine boarding school in Masquasis, Alberta. The Pope also apologized for what he called the “destructive” policy of forced assimilation in indigenous colleges.

The Canadian government officially apologized 14 years ago for setting up these schools and paid billions of dollars in compensation to alumni. Pope Francis arrived on Sunday evening in Edmonton, in the province of Alberta (west), where he will spend three days before heading to Quebec and then Iqaluit in the Arctic archipelago.

During this 37th international journey since his election in 2013, the Pope will speak for the first time to the Aborigines, the Amerindian peoples who make up 5 percent of the Canadian population, with the aim of achieving reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the populations. indigenous to Canada.

It should be noted that between the late 19th century and the 1990s, around 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly enrolled in more than 130 state-funded colleges, most of which run by the Catholic Church. Where these children have been separated from their families, language and culture and have often been subjected to violence, sometimes sexual assault, and about six thousand children have died, in what a national commission of inquiry considered a “cultural genocide”, in a country where the discovery of over 1,300 tombs of unknown persons erected in 2021, a real shock; This prompted the authorities to declare a “day of reconciliation”.

Follow AsumeTech on

More From Category

More Stories Today

Leave a Reply