Pope Francis will visit Canada to help efforts at reconciliation with indigenous peoples.
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PRINCE GEORGE- This will be the fourth papal visit to Canada, but the first since 2002, when Pope John Paul II came to Toronto.
The announcement of Pope Francis’s trip to Canada came just a little more than a month after a delegation of thirty Canadians visited Vatican City to attend an official apology for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in residential schools in Canada.
The Pope will be visiting three different Canadian cities from July 24 to July 29 – Edmonton, Quebec City and Iqaluit. British Columbia has been excluded, despite the discovery of unmarked graves at former residential schools in BC, including in Kamloops and Williams Lake.
“Following up on the apology is a good thing,” says BCAFN Regional Chief Terry Teegee. “It is a good thing to come to Canada on Indigenous soil to make an apology here, but I think for myself as part of the Assembly of First Nations, we were not involved in regards to which places they would visit in Canada, which is disappointing.”
