VATICAN CITY, May 13 (Reuters) – Pope Francis will visit Canada from July 24-30, where he is expected to apologize for the Catholic Church’s controversial role in residential schools, where many Native American children were victims of abuse, the Vatican announced on Friday.
The sovereign pontiff is expected in the cities of Edmonton, Quebec and Iqaluit, he said in a press release.
The pope, who suffers from knee pain, is currently in a wheelchair. He postponed his trip to Lebanon, scheduled for June, so he could get treatment.
He is still scheduled to visit South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo in early July.
The pope had already apologized in April to delegations of indigenous Canadians for the violence suffered for decades by indigenous children forcibly placed in boarding schools administered by the Catholic and Anglican Church, between 1831 and 1896.
Some 150,000 children have thus been uprooted from their homes for the purpose of their “assimilation”. Many were victims of abuse, rape and malnutrition. A system that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission described in 2015 as “cultural genocide”. (Report Philip Pullella, French version Augustin Turpin, edited by Sophie Louet)
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