Tour signals a rethink of missionary legacy
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis’ trip to Canada to apologize for the horrors of church-run Indigenous residential schools marks a radical rethink of the Catholic Church’s missionary legacy, spurred on by the first pope from the Americas and the discovery of hundreds of probable graves at the school sites.
Francis has said his weeklong visit, which begins Sunday, is a “penitential pilgrimage” to beg forgiveness on Canadian soil for the “evil” done to Native peoples by Catholic missionaries. It follows his April 1 apology in the Vatican for the generations of trauma Indigenous peoples suffered as a result of a church-enforced policy to eliminate their culture and assimilate them into Canadian, Christian society.
Francis’ tone of personal repentance has signaled a notable shift for the papacy, which has long acknowledged abuses in the residential schools and strongly asserted the rights and dignity of Indigenous peoples. But past popes have also hailed the sacrifice and holiness of the European Catholic missionaries who brought Christianity to the Americas — something Francis, too, has done but isn’t expected to emphasize during this trip.
Cardinal Michael Czerny, a Canadian Jesuit who is a top papal adviser, recalled that early on in his papacy, Francis asserted that no single culture can claim a hold on Christianity, and the church cannot demand people on other continents imitate the European way of expressing the faith.
“If this conviction had been accepted by everyone involved in the centuries after the ‘discovery’ of the Americas, much suffering would have been avoided, great developments would have occurred and the Americas would be all-around better,” he told the Associated Press in an email.