Pope Francis condemns ‘oppressive’ policies against Indigenous in Canada
leaders on his last day of his Canadian visit that he was pained that Catholics had supported “oppressive and unjust policies” against them.
“I have come as a brother, to discover firsthand the good and bad fruit borne by members of the local Catholic family in the course of the years,” Francis said. He was referring to residential schools, where more than 150,000 Indigenous children were separated from their families and brought to between 1870 and 1996. Religious groups, most of them Catholic, ran the schools for the governments of the times to implement a cultural assimilation policy.The children were starved or beaten for speaking their native languages and many sexually abused in a system Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called “cultural genocide.
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