Pope Francis has issued a public apology for the role that the Catholic Church played in Canada’s residential school system, calling it a

“deplorable evil” following his visit to the former site of the Ermineskin Indian Residential School in Maskwacis, Alta.

Speaking to a crowd of Indigenous community members and residential school survivors on Monday at the community’s powwow

grounds, he decried colonial “policies of assimilation and enfranchisement” and urged formal investigations to follow the first step of this apology.

“I am here because the first step of my penitential pilgrimage among you is that of again asking forgiveness, of telling you once more that “I am

deeply sorry,” he said in his official apology on Monday. “Sorry for the ways in which, regrettably, many Christians supported the colonizing

mentality of the powers that oppressed the Indigenous peoples. I am sorry.”