STORY: The pope made the comments as he flew to Rome after a week-long trip to Canada, where he made a historic apology for the Church’s role in politics.
He was asked by an Indigenous Canadian reporter on the plane why he did not use the word genocide during the trip and whether he would accept that members of the Church participated in genocide.
“It’s true that I didn’t use the word because I didn’t think about it. But I described genocide. I apologized, I apologized for this activity, which was genocide,” Francis said.
“I condemned this, taking the children away and trying to change their culture, their minds, to change their traditions, a race and a whole culture,” the Pope added.
Between 1881 and 1996 more than 150,000 Indigenous children were separated from their families and brought to residential schools. Many children were starved, beaten and sexually abused in a system Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called “cultural genocide”.
Schools were run for the government by religious groups, most of them Catholic priests and nuns.
