"The first step of this penitential pilgrimage among you is to renew your request for forgiveness and to tell you with all my heart that I am deeply saddened: I ask forgiveness for the ways in which unfortunately many Christians have supported the colonizing mentality of the powers that have oppressed the indigenous peoples . I am sorry. I ask forgiveness in particular for the ways in which many members of the Church and religious communities cooperated also through indifference to those projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation of the governments of the time that culminated in the residential school system ”.
It is part of Pope Francis' touching mea culpa , who today met the indigenous peoples of Canada in Maskwacis .
According to the Pope, the consequences of the policies linked to residential schools were "catastrophic".
“It pains - added Bergoglio - to know that that compact ground of values, language and culture that has given your populations a genuine sense of identity has been eroded, and that you continue to pay the effects. Faced with this evil, the Church kneels before God and begs forgiveness for the sins of her children. I would like to reiterate it with shame and clarity: I humbly ask forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against indigenous peoples ”.
Bergoglio is aware that these are traumas that "relive every time they are recalled", but "it is right to remember them, it is necessary to remember how the policies of assimilation and liberation, which also included the residential school system, have been devastating for people of these lands ".
School system that has "denigrated and suppressed" the languages and cultures of indigenous peoples. Whose children " suffered physical and verbal, psychological and spiritual abuse, taken away from their homes when they were small , which indelibly marked the relationship between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren".
At the end of the meeting, the indigenous chief Wilton Littlechild, a survivor of the former Ermineskin residential school where the ceremony took place, , placing it solemnly on his head to the sound of drums and a song. traditional autochthonous, to the loud applause of those present.
