Phil Fontaine spent decades pushing the Catholic Church to apologize for its role in Canada’s residential school system, to no avail — until Pope Francis answered the call.
Francis — known as a progressive force inside the church, and a champion for the disenfranchised — died on Easter Monday at the age of 88.
Between the 1870s and the 1990s, Canada’s federal government took more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children away from their families and forced them to attend church-run schools designed to strip them of their languages and cultures, according to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba.
Abuse and neglect were rampant at the schools and thousands of children died from disease, malnutrition, suicide and more.
In 2022, Francis delivered a landmark apology for the Catholic Church’s role in those institutions, first to a delegation of Indigenous leaders at the Vatican, and then again in Maskwacis, Alta., and several more times as he toured …