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‘I Feel Shame’: Pope Apologizes to Indigenous People of Canada
Pope Francis also promised to visit Canada as part of a process of healing and reconciliation over the church’s involvement in an abusive system of residential schools.
Pope Francis apologized for the Roman Catholic Church’s involvement in residential schools that abused Indigenous children for 100 years, and where signs of hundreds of unmarked graves have been discovered. [Amber Bracken for The New York Times]
Pope Francis apologized on Friday for the Roman Catholic Church’s involvement in a system of Canadian boarding schools that abused Indigenous children for 100 years, and said he would travel to Canada as part of a process of healing and reconciliation.
His apology comes after Canada was jolted last year by the discovery of evidence that more than 1,000 people, most of them children, were buried in unmarked graves on the grounds of some of the former schools.
“I feel shame — sorrow and shame — for the role” that Catholics played “in the abuses you suffered and in the lack of respect shown for your identity, your culture and even your spiritual values,” Francis said.
Francis spoke during an audience at the Apostolic Palace with dozens of delegates from Canada’s three largest Indigenous groups, who had traveled to the Vatican in the hope that he would apologize to survivors in Canada. This was the first apology to the Indigenous people of Canada from a pope and was a reversal of Francis’s earlier position.
“I ask for God’s forgiveness and I want to say to you with all my heart: I am very sorry,” Francis said, adding that he joined with Canadian bishops “in asking your pardon.”
From the 1880s to the 1990s, the Canadian government ran a system of compulsory boarding schools that a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission called a form of “cultural genocide.” The Catholic Church operated about 70 percent of the schools in the system.
About 150,000 Indigenous children were separated from their families and sent to these residential schools, where abuse, both physical and sexual, was widespread, along with neglect and disease. Murray Sinclair, the former judge who headed the commission, estimates that at least 6,000 children went missing.
Whether the Vatican knew about the extent of abuses at the schools while they were open is unclear. The Catholic orders that operated them have been slow to open their records to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, a Canadian archive and research body.
In a statement, Stephanie Scott, the center’s executive director, said that she expected it to receive full access to the records of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, an order that ran most of the Catholic schools, next month. Those documents are now largely in Rome.
“We will then be able to uncover more of what the church knew and understood during the operation of the residential schools,” she said.
The Canadian government and the Protestant churches that ran just under a third of the schools long ago apologized and fulfilled their obligation to pay reparations under a 2006 class-action settlement. About 4.7 billion Canadian dollars, most of it from the government, has been paid to survivors and spent on projects, including the commission.
But the Catholic Church, through the Canadian bishops’ conference, failed to pay most of its share of the reparations, including 25 million Canadian dollars in cash compensation. In September, the Canadian bishops’ conference apologized for the church’s role in the residential school system and pledged a new effort to raise 30 million dollars for reparations.
Given the church’s decades of refusal to apologize and failure to honor its financial commitments, some Indigenous people, particularly those who are not practicing Catholics, see little value in a papal apology.
But for others, Friday’s audience, which began with prayers in the languages of various Indigenous groups, ended an emotionally gratifying — and at times painful — weeklong encounter at the Vatican .
“For 40 years plus I’ve been on this walk to Rome,” said Wilton Littlechild, the former grand chief of the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations in Alberta and Saskatchewan, said at a media briefing on Thursday.
In private sessions earlier this week with Métis, Inuit and First Nations delegates, Francis heard story after painful story of the abuse suffered at the hands of Catholic educators at the schools. Delegates — including survivors, leaders, elders, youth and spiritual advisers from various nations — said that the pope had listened attentively and had expressed his sorrow. The delegates said this week that they believed the pope’s commitment to healing open wounds was sincere.
Immediately after Friday’s meeting, delegates said that they were overjoyed and somewhat surprised by the papal apology, and that they looked forward to greeting the pope in Canada, where he would be able to apologize directly to survivors and their families.
“The pope’s words today were historic, to be sure. They were necessary and I appreciate them deeply,” said Cassidy Caron, president of the Métis National Council. “And I now look forward to the pope’s visit to Canada, where he can offer those sincere words of apology directly to our survivors and their families whose acceptance and healing ultimately matters the most.”
Natan Obed, the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national Inuit organization, said his group was looking forward to “working with the Canadian Council of Bishops and the Vatican to not only plan for this message to be brought to Canada” but also “see action that really will be the hallmark of this reconciliation journey with the church.”
“Today is a day that we’ve been waiting for, certainly one that will be uplifted in our history,” said Gerald Antoine, the Dene national chief, saying that the apology had been “long overdue.”
“It’s a historical first step, however, only a first step. More needs to be done,” he said.
In addition to asking Francis to come to Canada to apologize to survivors and their families, the delegates asked Francis to repatriate artifacts in the collections of Vatican Museums and open the Vatican archives so that researchers could comb through records and documents regarding the residential school system.
The delegates also asked Francis to revoke a 1493 papal bull issued by Pope Alexander VI that had given Spain authority over the newly discovered lands of the Americas, allowing the Spanish to colonize and enslave the Indigenous peoples and convert them to Catholicism. The papal bull, which informed the “doctrine of discovery,” was “used for centuries to expropriate Indigenous lands and facilitate their transfer to colonizing or dominating nations,” according to the United Nations.
Indigenous groups in Canada say that while the theories of racial superiority that underlie the doctrine have long been discredited, it continued to surface in legal disputes over land until 2014. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that year, without naming the papal bull, that the idea that no one owned land until it was claimed by Europeans “never applied in Canada.”
Bishop William T. McGrattan, the vice president of the Canadian Conference of Bishops, said Friday afternoon that Canadian bishops had refuted the doctrine, and in 2016 offered a pastoral letter denouncing it. Discussions were ongoing about the issue among various bishops conferences around the world, he added, and the Vatican was “studying those particular responses.”
Phil Fontaine, another delegate and former residential-school student who, as national chief of the Assembly of the First Nations, first traveled to the Vatican in 2009 to ask for an apology from Pope Benedict XVI, said this visit had been decidedly different. There appeared to be real commitment on the part of Pope Francis “to fix things to better the lives of our people,” he said.
The apology won’t heal every survivor, but it will open a door, said Ms. Caron. “Survivors are at different stages of the healing journey,” she said. “Some turned away from the church and they say they don’t need an apology to heal, but for others, it was very much necessary.”
“It changes the direction we continue to move forward,” Ms. Caron added.
The church softened its stance on apologizing last year, after three Indigenous groups announced that ground-penetrating radar had discovered signs of many hundreds of unmarked graves containing human remains, mostly those of children.
Chief Antoine, the Dene national chief, said that the Indigenous people of Canada were looking forward to the pope’s visit and that he hoped they would be “active partners” in planning it and in determining the sites Francis would travel to. “Why? Because it’s our home,” he said. “And our family needs to be involved in it.”
(c) 2022, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/world/europe/pope-apology-indigenous-people-canada.html
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