Indigenous residential schools

The pope said his reason for visiting, “was to meet the Indigenous peoples to express to them my closeness and my sorrow, and to ask for forgiveness for the harm done to them by those Christians, including many Catholics.

“I want to tell you how very sorry I am and to ask for forgiveness for the evil perpetrated by not a few Catholics” who ran the residential schools Indigenous children were forced to attend, Pope Francis said in the Canadian Arctic.

“Why has it taken so long for the Catholic Church” or others to acknowledge what happened to Native Americans?

Pope Francis delivered his apology on the treaty land of the Ermineskin and Samson Cree Nations, the Louis Bull Tribe and the Montana First Nation, as part of his “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada.

Pope Francis himself described the trip as a “penitential pilgrimage” to express, in person and on Canadian soil, his “indignation, sorrow and shame for all that these people suffered.”

Last summer, the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis employees began looking into what was already known about its involvement with boarding schools, including one it ran in west-central Minnesota in the late 1800s. Efforts are underway to share archdiocesan records with the tribal nations.