A delegation of Canada's Indigenous leaders and survivors of mistreatment in the country's residential schools met with Pope Francis at the Vatican where they provided the Pontiff their personal accounts of being among the 150,000 children subjected to cruelty and abuse by Catholic priests and school employees, the Canadian Broadcasting Company reported on Monday
TORONTO (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 28th March, 2022) A delegation of Canada's Indigenous leaders and survivors of mistreatment in the country's residential schools met with Pope Francis at the Vatican where they provided the Pontiff their personal accounts of being among the 150,000 children subjected to cruelty and abuse by Catholic priests and school employees, the Canadian Broadcasting Company reported on Monday.
The Pope listened attentively and nodded along as the survivors told their stories of how they were subjected to abuse, the report cited Metis National Council President Cassidy Caron as saying.
The delegation sought an apology from the Pope on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church and a commitment to repair the decades of considerable harm done to Indigenous children, but the Pontiff did neither, the report said.
An Inuit leaders and survivors is scheduled to meet with the Pope today and a First Nations delegation is scheduled to meet him on Thursday, while the entire group will then attend a more formal audience for the Pope will deliver an address.
From more mid-1800s until the 1970s, the Canadian government forcefully removed more than 150,000 Indigenous children from their homes and placed them in state-funded mostly Catholic schools. The Children were beaten for speaking their native languages, maltreated because they were considered inferior, sexually assaulted and brutalized while being Christianized. An undetermined number of them died and were buried in graves at residential schools across Canada.
The meetings with the Pope are an attempt by the Canadian church and government to respond to the sustained demands for justice by the Indigenous people, including achieving reconciliation and being afforded reparations. The demands have gained Currency since the discovery in the past couple of years of hundreds of unmarked children's graves on the schools' grounds.
