While he may not have acknowledged the Church’s role in it, the Pope has acknowledged the residential school tragedy as a genocide.
He did so on a flight departing Iqaluit on Friday after spending the previous week on self-titled Pilgrimage of Penance across Canada.
Over the course of the trip, Pope Francis apologized for the role individual Christians played in perpetuating the tragedy multiple times, but never for the Catholic Church directly.
Similarly, while the Pontiff did not directly reference the Church’s culpability in it, he did say the acts of forced assimilation and cultural destruction he described during his trip amounted to genocide.
He says that he hadn’t used the word to refer to the tragedy beforehand because it simply hadn’t come to mind.
But, when asked again about rescinding the Doctrine of Discovery, the Pope again avoided answering the question, though he did refer to it as bad and unjust.
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