Pope begins ‘pilgrimage of penitence.’ How does Indigenous Canada feel?

Congregants filter through the doors for Sunday mass at St. Kateri Tekakwitha Aboriginal Catholic Parish in Winnipeg. Instead of holy water, they place their hands atop smoking cedar and sage to smudge before entering the church.

The Rev. François Paradis, wearing a moosehide stole, welcomes them in English, dotted with Ojibwe. Later, the priest leads them as they turn to face the four cardinal points and recite the Lord’s Prayer.

Blending elements of ceremony with Catholic mass is a natural expression of faith for many Indigenous Catholics across Canada. But it’s not without ambivalence, after more than a century of Canada’s violent assimilation policies – carried out by the Roman Catholic Church, among others – which cast Indigenous spirituality as “work of the devil,” says Father Paradis.

As Pope Francis visits First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples across Canada this week in penance for the worst of those polices – the abuse of Indigenous children at Catholic-run residential schools that didn’t close down completely until the 1990s – he has elicited a range of emotion. Some view the trip as too little and far too late; others say they’ve waited their entire lives to hear “I’m sorry.”

His trip here resonates widely, for non-faithful and non-Indigenous too, as Canada comes to terms with the injustices of violent colonialism, particularly after hundreds of potential unmarked graves of children have been found in the past year on or near former residential school grounds. But for many Indigenous Catholics, an acknowledgement of that historic suffering is a crucial step in the path toward forgiveness and acceptance.

“For some people ... they need to hear the words ‘I’m sorry,’ ” says Father Paradis, who was the parish priest at St. Kateri from 2003 to 2007 and whose main ministry today is Returning to Spirit, a nonprofit that runs Reconciliation workshops. “While there cannot be healing without the pain being acknowledged, first of all, by the victim who has to be able to voice it, clarify it, and name it, when it is acknowledged by the perpetrators, it is a double blessing.”

Pope Francis arrived in the western province of Alberta on Sunday, and is scheduled to travel eastward to Quebec on Wednesday and north to Iqaluit, the capital of the Arctic territory of Nunavut, on Friday. He has described it as “a pilgrimage of penitence” for the residential schools system, which Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) concluded in 2015 amounted to “cultural genocide.” About 150,000 Indigenous children attended the boarding schools. Some 60% of them were run by the Catholic Church.  

The visit follows a historic meeting in the Vatican between the pope and delegations of Indigenous survivors of residential schools in the spring where he apologized. But his words today were more sweeping. The TRC had also called for an apology on Canadian soil. 

“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” the pope told thousands who gathered in Maskwacis, Alberta, near the former Ermineskin Indian Residential School Monday. “I ... recognize that, looking to the past, no effort to beg pardon and to seek to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient,” he said as he addressed the crowd in a powwow circle, “and that, looking ahead to the future, no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening.”

Andrew Carrier, the minister for residential schools with the Manitoba Métis Federation, was part of the first delegation in Rome. He says he hopes this week’s visit brings solace to Catholic survivors, as it did for him as he shared his story with the pope this spring. “I am a survivor of being sexually molested by a priest when I was 7 years old,” says Mr. Carrier. He says he spent most of his life suffering in silence, after the nuns at his day school in Winnipeg failed to address the assault and his parents failed to acknowledge it.

“Speaking to the pope, I felt relief after years of pain,” he says. “People don’t realize the trauma of an incident like that, how it impacts your whole life, how it makes you wary about who you are and why you’re a victim. Speaking with the pope, I finally felt that I was heard. This apology meant everything.”

For pope watchers like Annie Selak, an expert in feminist ecclesiology who has studied papal apologies at Georgetown University, the visit is “hugely significant” because it is centered around listening, she says: an important step in restorative justice and Reconciliation. “When you truly listen to someone else, there is the opportunity for conversion. And I think we’ve seen mercy animate Pope Francis’s pontificate,” she says. “I think the potential for healing and changes is as high as the potential will ever be in the Catholic Church.”

The visit has sparked anger and backlash, too. Demands have grown alongside the visit for reparations, for more transparency, for perpetrators to be held accountable, and for the pope to go much farther and denounce the church’s 15th century “doctrine of discovery,” which justified the colonization and conversion of Indigenous lands and people across the Americas. 

Mr. Carrier says he hopes the apology helps revive the church among Indigenous people in Canada. According to Canadian census figures from a 2011 household survey, 36% of Indigenous people identify as Catholic. 

But for Chantal Fiola, a University of Winnipeg associate professor who authored “Returning to Ceremony: Spirituality in Manitoba Métis Communities,” one of the most important things the Catholic Church could do is counter the shame – that continues to this day – that keeps Indigenous people disconnected from traditional spirituality.

Like many Métis, Dr. Fiola grew up Catholic. She sang in the choir at her church and was an altar girl. But she says as a woman, as an Indigenous person, and identifying as queer, she didn’t feel supported in Catholicism and left faith – until she found her way to Indigenous spirituality. “When I grew up faith was such a big part of my life ... and so that was missing for a long time,” she says. But too many are afraid to explore sacred ceremony like the sun dance because for years they practiced covertly in the “backyard.”

It’s not a zero-sum game, though. “Métis spirituality exists on a continuum with Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, on one end and traditional Indigenous spirituality on the other,” she says. “And then there’s the infinite, beautiful, syncretic blends in the middle.”

That’s a fusion Beatrice Chartrand, a congregant at St. Kateri, found only later in her life. She was born Métis in small town Manitoba and always felt Indigenous, she says, but was told to hide and deny it at the same time she was raised a devout Catholic. Today she is proudly Métis; at church she joined the drumming circle. “They asked me to join, even though I’m not musically inclined at all,” she says.

The pope’s apology, she says, is without a doubt too late. “We’ve been waiting for this moment a long, long time,” she says. “But it’s a start.”