ROME—It is very likely that Pope Francis is dreading this week. Steady criticism for his seeming unwillingness to blame Russia for the war in Ukraine—but rather blame the West for supplying weapons that keep the war going—has been gaining steam. Even his prayer service in Rome Friday night as for Ukraine and Russia, not just for the victims of the now month-old war.
But things are very likely going to get even more uncomfortable for the ailing pontiff as 30 Indigenous elders from Canada—among them victims of horrific abuse at the hands of Canadian Catholics—will hold a series of meetings in which each one will demand he apologize for the atrocities of the church, including the burial of 215 children on Catholic grounds.
“We expect that these private encounters will allow the Holy Father to meaningfully address both the ongoing trauma and legacy of suffering faced by Indigenous peoples to this day,” the Canadian Bishops Conference said in a statement. That trauma includes what the group says is “the role of the Catholic Church in the residential school system, which contributed to the suppression of Indigenous languages, culture and spirituality.”
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Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission carried out an extensive investigation in 2015 and determined that the church carried out “cultural genocide.”
The discovery of the remains of 215 unidentified children in unmarked mass graves on the grounds of the Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, last summer is the latest chapter in the Catholic Church’s horrific record on clerical abuse. The school closed in 1978 after families complained of a push to extinguish the Indigenous culture and replace it with Catholicism.
The Catholic Church in Canada ran a program to “assimilate” 150,000 Indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their homes between 1831 and 1996. That often meant suppressing their heritage, but often devolved to the sort of horrific sexual abuse of vulnerable minors that Catholic Church prelates have carried out across the world.
The meetings in Rome will be used to lay the groundwork for an apostolic visit by Francis sometime this summer. It is yet unclear if he will go to Kamloops to visit the site where the children’s bodies were found. “This is something that is an important step,’ Gerald Antoine, chief of the Dene people and regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said in Rome ahead of the meetings.
The meetings, which were first scheduled to be held in 2020 but then postponed because of the pandemic, will culminate in an address to the delegation on Friday by Francis.
