Pope Francis meets with Canada’s First Nations delegation

Pope Francis met on Monday, March 28 at the Vatican with representatives of Canada’s indigenous communities to listen to the horrors committed for decades in the boarding schools of the Catholic Church as a policy of forced assimilation.

“The Pope heard us. He heard three of the many stories we have to share” and “nodded his head as our survivors recounted their experiences,” Cassidy Caron, president of the National Mestizo Council, told reporters at the end of the meeting.

” The only words he spoke in English were: ‘truth, justice, and reparation’. I take that as a personal commitment,” Caron added outside St. Peter’s Square.

Canada visit
“We hope that on Friday, during the audience with everyone, the pope will acknowledge what we have shared with him” and that this “will lead to a public request for forgiveness when he visits Canada,” he said, referring to Francis’ possible trip to that country, whose date could be announced at that time.

Francis should join the request for forgiveness made by representatives of other Christian churches involved in that tragedy as a gesture intended to close wounds. It was the first of a series of meetings in the Vatican with 32 representatives of the native peoples of Canada, who traveled to Rome and the Vatican accompanied by bishops from that country, to hold individual meetings with the pontiff throughout the week.

The Catholic Church of Canada presented a formal apology to indigenous peoples last September after the discovery of more than 1,000 graves near former boarding schools, where children had been isolated from their families and culture and subjected to physical and sexual abuse.