During his General Audience, Pope Francis recounted details of his recent trip to Canada. He stressed the Church's duty to listen to those who suffer and insisted on the importance of maintaining a relationship between the young and the elderly.
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Dear brothers and sisters:
My recent pastoral visit to Canada was prompted by my deep desire to express my closeness to the native peoples and to ask forgiveness for the wrongs perpetrated by those Christians who, in the past, collaborated in the policies of forced assimilation and enfranchisement promoted by the governments of the time. As a penitential pilgrimage, it began in Edmonton with honest and sorrowful remembrance of the past, continued in Quebec with a plea for reconciliation born of hope in the redemption won for us by the cross of Christ, and concluded, in Iqaluit, with confident trust in the healing made possible by the power of the risen Lord to make all things new.
The theme of my Visit – Walking Together – expresses the Church’s desire, in acknowledging the wrongs of the past, to reject the mindset of colonization, to esteem and promote the indigenous cultures, and to work for a future marked by a sound and harmonious balance between modernity and ancestral cultures, secularization and spiritual values, in the service of justice and authentic human fraternity.
RM
TR: KG
