Asking forgiveness from Canada's Indigenous peoples
While in Canada next week, Pope Francis is expected to again apologize for his Church's complicity in abusing Aboriginal children, something other institutions have already done
"For the deplorable conduct of those members of the Catholic Church, I ask for God's forgiveness and I want to say to you with all my heart: I am very sorry," Pope Francis told a delegation of Aboriginal Canadians who were visiting Rome at the end of March and early April.
The pope promised to renew that apology on Canadian soil, where between 1831 and 1996 some 150,000 Inuit, Métis and First Nations children were forcibly enrolled, mistreated and often sexually abused in Catholic-operated residential schools.
Entrusted to religious congregations by the government, these schools aimed to cut children off from their families, language and culture in order to "civilize" and Christianize them.
Several State and religious institutions have already acknowledged their responsibility in what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) called in 2015 "cultural genocide".
The Anglican Church was the first to apologize
Of the 139 residential schools officially recognized by Ottawa, two-thirds were run by the Catholic Church.
The Anglican Church was responsible for a quarter of the schools, with the United Church (Calvinist and Methodist) and the Presbyterian Church managing the rest.
In 1990, in an iconic testimony to freeing the words of former students, First Nations activist Phil Fontaine brought the issue of residential schools to the fore by speaking publicly about the physical, psychological and sexual abuse he suffered at a Catholic residential school.
In 1993, the Anglican Church was the first church to formally apologize to Aboriginals for abuse in its schools.
The Presbyterian Church and the United Church also issued apologies in the 1990s.
The Canadian government's record compensation
In 2006, under pressure from aboriginal activists, the government, the Churches involved, the Assembly of First Nations and advocates for survivors signed the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA).
This legal pact recognized the damage inflicted on Aboriginal people by residential schools and set up a fund of 1.9 billion Canadian dollars (1.4 billion euros) to compensate former residents.
It provides for the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which from 2008 to 2015 documented the history of the residential schools.
In the wake of this, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized in 2008 on behalf of the Canadian government.
"We now recognize that we were wrong to separate children from their culture and from their rich and vibrant traditions," he said.
The Catholic Church's long-awaited apology
The Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who ran the bulk of the Catholic residential schools, apologized in 1991 for rejecting "many of the riches of the Aboriginal religious tradition" and for the "sexual and physical abuse" that occurred under their care.
Other Catholic institutions later apologized in a piecemeal fashion. In its report, the TRC criticized this as "a hodgepodge of statements that many survivors and religious will never be aware of".
Then in 2021 there was the scandalous discovery of 1,300 unmarked graves at former residential school sites, followed by the burning of churches in aboriginal territory.
This prompted current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to put pressure on the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops to make a formal apology.
Up to this point, Church leaders insisted that responsibility for residential schools rested with the dioceses and religious orders that operated them.
The bishops have now committed 30 million Canadian dollars (22.8 million euros) to improve the living conditions of the survivors and their communities, where unemployment rates and alcohol and drug abuse are soaring.
The reparations are long overdue, as the Aboriginals have criticized the Church for failing to honor promises made under the IRSSA.
In fact, the Church has never raised the 25 million Canadian dollars that it promised to do back in 2016.
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