Pope Francis says the abuses Indigenous Peoples faced while being forced to attend residential schools amounted to genocide.
The pontiff made the comment Friday to reporters on his flight from Iqaluit back to Rome following his six-day tour of Canada.
When asked if he would use the word genocide and accept that members of the church participated in genocide, Francis said yes.“I asked for forgiveness for what has been done, which was genocide, and I did condemn this,” he said in Spanish through a translator. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission referred to residential schools as a form of cultural genocide when it released its final report in 2015. But since then a number of Indigenous groups have amended this to say it was genocide.
Neglect and physical and sexual abuse were rampant in the schools, and the Catholic Church ran 60 per cent of the institutions.“In the face of this deplorable evil, the church kneels before God and implores his forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous Peoples,” he said Monday to a group of residential school survivors and their families gathered in Maskwacis, Alta.
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