World News

Pope Francis heads to Nunavut for final stop on Canada visit | Religion News

The Pope’s six-day visit to Canada will wrap up with a meeting with residential school survivors and a public event in Iqaluit.

Warning: The story below contains details of residential schools that may be upsetting. Canada’s Indian Residential School Survivors and Family Crisis Line is available 24 hours a day at 1-866-925-4419.

Pope Francis is heading to Canada’s northern territory of Nunavut to meet with survivors of residential schoolsas the head of the Roman Catholic Church wraps up a six-day visit to Canada that has drawn mixed reactions.

The pope will travel to Iqaluit on Friday afternoon to privately meet survivors and attend a public event before flying back to Rome.

The trip’s final stop comes after Pope Francis at the start of the week apologized for the “evil” of residential schools, the forced-assimilation institutions rife with abuse that Indigenous children were obliged to attend for decades between the late 1800s and 1990s.

“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” he said during an event on Monday in Maskwacis, near Edmonton in the western province of Alberta, describing the effects of the institutions as “catastrophic”.

The Catholic Church ran a majority of the 139 federally mandated residential schools across Canada, which a commission of inquiry in 2015 determined amounted to “cultural genocide”.

For decades, Indigenous leaders had called on the church to apologize for its role in the residential school system, and the papal apology offered this week has been welcomed by some survivors as an important step in the path to healing.

Others have called on Pope Francis to go further and acknowledge the Catholic Church’s institutional role in the harms committed at residential schools, not just apologize for the actions of members of the church.

“Despite this historic apology, the Holy Father’s statement has left a deep hole in the acknowledgment of the full role of the Church in the Residential School system, by placing blame on individual members of the Church,” Murray Sinclair, the former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), said in a statement this week.

“It is important to underscore that the Church was not just an agent of the state, nor simply a participant in government policy, but was a lead co-author of the darkest chapters in the history of this country,” Sinclair said.

Indigenous people hold a banner reading, ‘Rescind the Doctrine’ as Pope Francis presides over a mass in Quebec, July 28, 2022 [Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters]

Indigenous leaders and community advocates have also urged Pope Francis to rescind the Doctrine of Discoverya concept laid out in 15th Century papal bulls that stated European colonialists could claim any territory not yet “discovered” by Christians.

The papal bulls played a key role in the European conquest of the Americas, and their effects are still felt today by Indigenous peoples across the region.

“These Papal decrees became the basis for the legalized possession of all lands on North America, which we call Turtle Island. It remains ingrained in the constitutional, legislative, and legal systems in Canada and the United States,” the Haudenosaunee External Relations Committee said in a statement on Wednesday.

“An apology to Indigenous Peoples without action are just empty words. The Vatican must revoke these Papal Bulls and stand up for Indigenous Peoples’ rights to their lands in courts, legislatures and elsewhere in the world.”

Meanwhile, a major demand of Inuit communities in Nunavut has been the extradition from France of a Catholic priest accused of sexually abusing children in the northern territory, where he was based between the 1960s and 1990s.

Canadian media outlets reported this week that the Department of Justice said it had made an extradition request for Johannes Rivoire. It did not provide further details.




Source link

Related Articles

Back to top button