Pope Francis confessed on Wednesday that he received as a “slap” the dramatic testimonies he heard during his trip to Canada from indigenous victims of abuse in Catholic boarding schools.
“I assure you that in those meetings, especially in the last one, I received the pain of those people like a slap in the face,” said the Argentine pontiff during the weekly general audience at the Vatican.
The pontiff returned on Saturday from a six-day trip to Canada during which he apologized for the decades-long abuses committed by the Catholic Church against First Nations, Métis and Inuit representatives.
Before the journalists who accompanied him on the flight back to Rome, Francis did not hesitate to admit that the treatment of indigenous people in Canada amounted to “genocide”, a word he did not utter during his trip.
Listening to “old people who have lost children, who don’t know where they are” was “a painful moment,” he acknowledged.
Francis concluded his trip to Canada on Friday in Iqaluit, capital of the vast territory of Nunavut in the Arctic archipelago, where he again apologized for the violence in the 139 boarding schools where some 150,000 indigenous children were sent from the end of the 19th century to the decade of 1990.
Many suffered physical and sexual abuse there and at least 6,000 are believed to have died from malnutrition, disease, mistreatment or neglect.
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