Vatican

Pope Francis joined Indigenous pilgrims at a lake known for miraculous healings and encouraged them to lay their burdens on the shore.

Celebrating the feast day of Jesus’ grandparents, Pope Francis not only urged people to honor their elders, but he asked them to think about what they will hand on to future generations.

While presented as missionary work, the operation of residential schools by Catholics in Canada was actually an attempt to impose European culture on Canada’s Indigenous people, Pope Francis said.

On the treaty land of the Ermineskin Cree Nation, Samson Cree Nation, Louis Bull Tribe and the Montana First Nation, near the former site of one of Canada’s largest residential schools, Pope Francis said, “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples.”

Pope Francis’ July trip to Canada was born out of his meetings with the nations’ Indigenous people and was planned around encounters with them, and if the pope’s words “have value elsewhere,” like throughout the Americas, all the better, said the director of the Vatican press office.

Pope Francis interrupted his traditional July break to meet with Prince Albert II of Monaco and his wife, Princess Charlene, at the Vatican.