The words “I am sorry” are powerful.
For Tammy Ward of the Samson First Nation, those words from Pope Francis brought tears as she listened on the Muskwa, or Bear Park, Powwow Grounds.
“It’s just very powerful,” Ward told The Catholic Register, Toronto-based newspaper, after Pope Francis finished delivering his historic apology on Indigenous land for the Catholic Church’s role in residential schools and other wrongs done on the church’s behalf. “For me, it’s the healing.”
Ward leaned into her 21-year-old daughter, Aleea Foureyes, for comfort as Pope Francis confessed the sins Catholics committed against Indigenous Canadians in residential schools.
“In the face of this deplorable evil, the church kneels before God and implores His forgiveness for the sins of her children,” Pope Francis said, invoking St. John Paul II’s 1998 bull, “Incarnationis Mysterium.” “I myself wish to reaffirm this, with shame and unambiguously. I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples.”
Pope Francis delivered his apology on the treaty land of the Ermineskin and Samson Cree Nations, the Louis Bull Tribe and the Montana First Nation, as part of his “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada. The site was near one of Canada’s largest residential schools. For 49-year-old Ward, it brought memories of her relationship with her parents.
“I always thought my parents didn’t love me. I was always wondering why they were silent,” she said. Years later she understood how a childhood spent institutionalized in residential schools had left her parents unprepared for family life.