Pope in Canada prays for healing for ‘terrible’ colonization
LAC SAINTE ANNE, Alberta — Pope Francis prayed for healing Tuesday from the “terrible effects of colonization” as he led a pilgrimage to a Canadian lake that has been known to Native peoples for centuries as a sacred place of healing.
The prayer service at Lac Sainte Anne in Alberta was one of the spiritual highlights of the pontiff’s six-day visit to Canada to atone for the Catholic Church’s role in running residential schools that forcibly assimilated the country’s Indigenous children into Christian society.
ADVERTISING
On Monday he apologized for the “catastrophic” ways families were torn apart; the following day he transitioned to praying to help them heal from the “wounds of violence.”
“In this blessed place, where harmony and peace reign, we present to you the disharmony of our experiences, the terrible effects of colonization, the indelible pain of so many families, grandparents and children,” Francis said on the shore of the lake. “Help us to be healed of our wounds.”
The ceremony fell on the Feast of St. Anne, the grandmother of Jesus and a figure of particular devotion for Indigenous Catholics, who every year make pilgrimages to Lac Sainte Anne to wade into its waters.
Francis highlighted the importance grandmothers have in Indigenous families, and recalled the critical role his own grandmother Rosa had in transmitting the faith to him as a youngster in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“Part of the painful legacy we are now confronting stems from the fact that Indigenous grandmothers were prevented from passing on the faith in their own language and culture,” he said.
More than 150,000 Native children in Canada were taken from their homes and made to attend government-funded Christian schools from the 19th century until the 1970s in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their families and culture.
The aim was to Christianize and assimilate them into mainstream society, which previous Canadian governments considered superior.
In his first event in Canada, Francis blasted the residential schools Monday as a “disastrous error” and apologized at the site of a former school in Maskwacis for the “evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples.”
Emotions were still raw a day later as those words were digested and dissected.
Murray Sinclair, the First Nations chairman of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, welcomed the apology but said Tuesday that it didn’t go far enough in acknowledging institutional blame for the papacy’s own role in justifying European colonial expansion and the hierarchy’s endorsement of Canada’s assimilation policy.
