Pope Francis in Canada, a journey through the wounds of the natives. What you need to know

Vatican City, 22 July 2022 – More than an apostolic journey it will be a penitential pilgrimage. A painful opportunity to touch the wounds left by the forced homologation of natives, including by the Catholic Church, to apologize for the deaths, segregations, rapes of thousands of children, to extend to the rest of the world, the authentic value of the inculturation of the faith, celebrated three years ago with the Synod on the Amazon. Only a few hours are left for Pope Francis to leave for Canada, where he will remain from 24 to 30 July. For months tried by pain in his right knee, 85-year-old Bergoglio, forced in June to forfeit his trip to Congo and South Sudan, is preparing for his 37th international apostolic journey which promises to be particularly demanding: both from a physical point of view – a dense agenda of appointments and speeches, eight hours of time zone in Edmonton – so much so that the use of a wheelchair will be inevitable, both from an emotional point of view for the encounters he will have with the survivors of what, between the end of Nineteenth and half of the last century, it was a real cultural genocide against the aborigines. In that time span, over 150,000 young natives were snatched from their families of origin by the civil authorities to be ‘re-educated’ in government residential schools, largely run by the Catholic Church. Here they were ‘stripped’ of their aboriginal identity, from language to customs, to traditional cults, and ‘clothed’ with the Western model, including the Christian religion, in conditions of abuse and segregation. Already at the beginning of the last century, a journalistic investigation revealed that 42% of these minors died before the age of 16. The discovery in May 2021 of the remains of 215 children, never returned to their families, in a mass grave near the former Indian residential school Kamioops, in British Columbia, brought the …