Indigenous delegates visiting Vatican to demand apology from Pope Francis

Angelina Crerar hopes her painful memories from her time in residential school will help persuade Pope Francis to make a formal apology on behalf of the Catholic Church for its role in running the institutions.

Crerar, a Métis knowledge keeper and elder from Grande Prairie, Alta., is among 30 Indigenous delegates travelling to the Vatican later this month to meet privately with the Pope in a bid for reconciliation with the church.

The church must answer for its role in the tragedy, Crerar said.

She said an apology is long overdue but that she has faith it will happen, for the sake of survivors and the children who didn't make it home.

An estimated 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend Canadian residential schools between the 1870s and 1997. More than 60 per cent of the schools were run by the Catholic Church.

Calls for an apology from the church have intensified since the discovery last spring of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential school sites.

"What in the world happened to us? What happened to us?" Crerar said. "We all have the same questions." 

Crerar also plans to ask the Pope to release the names of all children who were forced to attend residential schools in Canada.

Survivors have been waiting for decades to have their stories heard and their pain acknowledged, she said.

Crerar said she is grateful to go to Rome and "bring back" some of what Indigenous people have lost. 

"Our children deserve to have peace, to have their names engraved," she said. 

"It's time. Our children have had enough. They suffered a lot."

The Vatican announced in October that Pope Francis plans to visit Canada, but Indigenous leaders have said any papal visit must come with an apology from the Catholic Church.

Previous calls for apologies have gone unanswered. When an Indigenous delegation visited Pope Benedict in 2009, he expressed sorrow and "personal anguish" but never apologized.