TORONTO (AP) — Indigenous leaders met with Canadian bishops and were told Pope Francis will not add any more stops – despite their request – during his trip to Canada this month, when he will apologize in person for the abuse suffered by Indigenous people at the hands of the Catholic church.
Pope Francis, who has been using a wheelchair because of a bad knee, will head to Canada on July 24 and visit Alberta, Quebec and Iqaluit, a small town in the far north that is closer to Greenland than it is to any major Canadian city. The pope will depart Canada on July 29.
“Three locations were picked. The survivors had no say in that. We weren’t asked,” said Ken Young, a former regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Manitoba.
“We asked the bishops if that could change to include other venues, perhaps Kamloops (British Columbia), and that answer was no.”
Richard Smith, the archbishop of Edmonton, said the Vatican made it clear the trip had to be short, considering the pope’s health. “The Vatican has announced those three sites, and when the Vatican announces it, that’s it,” Smith said.
With the Canada trip, Francis, 85, will be testing his stamina. After weeks of limping badly due to what the Vatican has said is a badly strained knee ligament, Francis began arriving at some public appearances in a wheelchair.
In Edmonton, the pope will take part in an open-air mass at Commonwealth Stadium to mark the feast of St Anne on July 26. The next day, he will travel to Quebec City, where he is expected to meet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
He will hold mass on July 28 at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre, in Quebec, one of the oldest pilgrimage sites in North America. On July 29, the pope will travel to his final stop on the trip in Iqaluit, in the northern territory of Nunavut, where he will hold a private meeting with residential school survivors before joining a public event.
Pressure for a papal apology to Canada’s Indigenous people increased when the apparent remains of more than 200 children were detected buried in unmarked graves in Kamloops, British Columbia, last year at what had been Canada's largest Indigenous residential school. There are also unidentified remains in unmarked graves at other residential schools across Canada. Indigenous leaders wanted Francis to visit Kamloops.
From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 Indigenous children in Canada were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools as an effort to assimilate them into Canadian society. Canada's government has admitted that physical and sexual abuse was rampant in the schools, with students beaten for speaking their native languages.
Earlier this year, Francis made a historic apology in the Vatican for abuses in Canada's church-run residential schools and expressed “sorrow and shame” for the lack of respect for Indigenous identities, culture and spiritual values. He said then that he wanted to go to Canada to deliver the apology personally to survivors.
Young said the apology at the Vatican didn’t go far enough but said he’s confident the pope will say the right thing.
“The church has to accept ownership and responsibility for what happened to First Nations people and families,” Young said. “The impacts were life changing and life lasting. We expect, at least I expect, the pope to apologize on behalf of the Catholic Church in the right way.”
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