Pope Francis Concedes To Trudeau, Apologizes For Catholic Church’s Role In Canada’s Forced Assimilation Of Indigenous Children

Pope Francis apologized Friday for Catholic involvement in the Canadian government’s boarding schools, years after a government report said these schools abused indigenous children in assimilation efforts, and less than a year after reports surfaced about the detection of unmarked graves at one of these residential schools.

Francis said that he feels “shame” and “sorrow” for the role that Catholics played “in the abuses you suffered and in the lack of respect shown for your identity, your culture and even your spiritual values,” according to the New York Times.

A Canadian Truth and Reconciliation report found in 2015 that at least 4,100 students died during their time attending the Canadian government’s schools, some from mistreatment, neglect, disease, or accident.

The pope’s apology is a response to demands from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who accepted the apology Friday as “a step forward in acknowledging the truth of our past in order to write historical wrongs.”

The world leader’s demands followed explosive media reports during the summer of 2021 that unmarked graves containing the remains of dozens of indigenous children had been discovered.

An anthropologist reported discovering remains of indigenous children in May 2021 through ground-penetrating radar near the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which opened in 1890, according to the Toronto Star. No remains appear to have been excavated.

“Given the size of the school, with up to 500 students registered and attending at any one time, we understand that this confirmed loss affects First Nations communities across British Columbia and beyond,” Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation said in a May 2021 statement.

However, The Daily Wire reported in January that the Canadian journal The Dorchester Review was questioning the discovery of unmarked graves. The anthropologist who says she detected the remains is Sarah Beaulieu, who has worked as an instructor in Anthropology and Sociology at the University of the Fraser Valley since 2018. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Daily Wire, but last July, she called her investigation “preliminary.”

“It is important to note that remote sensing, such as GPR, is not necessary to know that children went missing in the Indian residential school context,” Beaulieu said at a July news conference. “This fact has been recognized by Indigenous communities for generations.”

“Evidence has existed in government and church archives for more than a century,” she continued. “Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report identified between 4,000 and 6,000 missing children, but anticipated that these actual numbers would be much greater.”

She cited the correlation between depressions in the ground and subsurface anomalies, configurations of these subsurface anomalies, a rib bone and tooth that were found in the same location, and the oral histories recounting burials in the orchard that she believes the remains are in.

Jacques Rouillard, a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Montreal, has noted that the anthropologist who discovered the highly discussed indigenous remains based her preliminary report “on depressions and abnormalities in the soil of an apple orchard near the school – not on exhumed remains.”

Rouillard contends that, with the widely circulated reports of the unmarked graves, governments and media have moved past allegations of “cultural genocide” to allegations of “physical genocide,” something the Truth and Reconciliation Commission rejected in its 2015 report. “And all of this is based only on soil abnormalities that could easily be caused by root movements, as the anthropologist herself cautioned in the July 15 press conference.”

Following the media reports about the discovery of unmarked graves last year, at least ten Catholic Churches were vandalized or burnt to the ground. Many of these churches were on tribal grounds, the Catholic news outlet the Pillar reported at the time.

“It is unacceptable and wrong that acts of vandalism and arson are being seen across the country, including against Catholic churches,” Trudeau said at the time, noting that he understands the anger against “institutions like the Catholic Church.”

“It is real and it’s fully understandable, given the shameful history that we are all becoming more and more aware of and engaging ourselves to do better as Canadians,” he said.

“Burn it all down,” tweeted Harsha Walia, the head of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (one of the country’s most significant civil rights groups).

She subsequently left her job amid uproar over the comment.

Burn it all down. https://t.co/PwkKXuUGel

— Harsha Walia (@HarshaWalia) July 1, 2021

Calgary Police said in June 2021 that “handprints, the number ‘215’ and other markings suggest the vandalism was in response to the graves recently found at former residential schools.”

Police charged 23-year-old Sebastian Rodriguez-Huerta “with two counts of mischief to a property primarily used for religious worship” in September.

“It is alleged that these incidents also meet the threshold of being hate-motivated crimes,” the police said.

It appears that the other perpetrators have not yet been caught, and the investigation remains open pending new evidence, a Calgary Police spokeswoman told The Daily Wire on Friday.

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