Pope Francis sat in his wheelchair watching the very customs and traditions performed by First Nations singers and dancers that the Catholic church once sought to snuff out. The pontiff, on a week long “pilgrimage of penance,” felt it important to apologize for the crimes of clerical sex abuse and the inexplicable presence of mass graves in residential centers the church ran from the 19th century to the 1970s. During that time, the government of Canada took thousands of young children from indigenous families to “retrain” them to mirror Canada’s Christian society. The groups had asked the pope for an apology, but they also want financial reparations, justice brought against any living perpetrators and access to Vatican archives that might explain how and why children as young as 3 were buried in unmarked graves.
