'Time has come' for Pope to apologize over residential schools, says Phil Fontaine
CBC
WARNING: This story contains details some readers may find distressing.
When Phil Fontaine spoke decades ago about the sexual and physical abuse he suffered at Manitoba residential schools, he risked shame and shocked Canadians.
Fontaine, an Ojibway and former chief of the Sagkeeng First Nation, was one of the first Indigenous leaders to speak to the public about the physical and psychological abuse at Canada's residential schools, during a ground-breaking 1990 interview with CBC's Barbara Frum.
Now, 32 years later, the former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations is part of a 30-member delegation that will be at the Vatican starting on Monday to talk about the Roman Catholic Church's role in the horrors that played out in Canadian residential schools.
Fontaine said the "time has come" for a full apology from the pontiff.
"It's an important opportunity, in my view, for the country to finally get this right. And to get it right means a full apology from Pope Francis," Fontaine told CBC's Piya Chattopadhyay of The Sunday Magazine.
He and other delegates will meet Pope Francis and talk to him about the legacy of pain that residential schools left behind.
Fontaine said he wants to see the Pope apologize in person in Canada someday.
He thinks the discovery of unmarked graves, believed to be of missing children, on residential school grounds over the past year will add pressure for the Pope to fully address the shameful history.
"It's been percolating and it's now getting to the top, and there's no getting away from it," Fontaine said. "It has to be dealt with."
Back in the spring of 2009, Fontaine travelled to Rome with a delegation from the Assembly of First Nations.
There he met the previous pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI, who expressed "sorrow" over the "deplorable" treatment that Indigenous students suffered in government-funded, Roman Catholic-run residential schools.
But Benedict did not apologize.
"It would have been a great accomplishment if we had convinced Benedict XVI to apologize," Fontaine said.
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