Pope Apologizes for ‘Evil’ Committed at Canada’s Indigenous Schools – By VOA News Staff (VOA News) / July 25, 2022
Pope Francis apologized Monday for the Catholic Church’s role in Canada’s former policy of separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to attend Christian schools, where many were abused.
“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” Pope Francis said at a former Indigenous residential school in the western Canadian town of Maskwacis, Alberta.
More than 150,000 Indigenous children in Canada were forced to attend government-funded Christian residential schools from the late 1880s to the 1970s in an effort to distance them from their native languages and cultures.
Many of the children were physically and sexually abused in a system that Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has called “cultural genocide.”
