The Pope offers forgiveness in Canada for the “evil” of indigenous boarding schools

The Pope Francisco fulfilled this Monday its promise to offer apologies to the natives of canada in their homeland for the role of the Church in the schools where they indigenous children were abusedqualifying the forced cultural assimilation of “wrong” and “disastrous error”.

Speaking near the site of a former school, Francis apologized for Christian support for the “colonizing mentality” of the time.

asked for one “serious investigation” of the calls residential schools and more assistance to help survivors and descendants heal.

“With shame and without ambiguity, I humbly ask forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against indigenous peoples,” Francis told the indigenous leaders of the First Nations, the Metis and the Inuit.

The 85-year-old Pope is carrying out a one week tour of canada to fulfill a promise he made to the indigenous delegations who visited him this year at the Vatican, where he made the initial apology.

“I apologize, in particular, for the way in which many members of the Church and religious communities cooperated, even with their indifference, in the projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of the time, which culminated in the boarding school system,” he said.

More of 150 thousand indigenous children were separated from their families and taken to boarding schools between 1881 and 1996. Many children starved, beaten and sexually abused in a system that the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission called “cultural genocide”.