Canadians remember Pope Francis for historic apology for residential schools

TORONTO — Pope Francis will be remembered by Canadian Catholics as a progressive leader whose approach to the papacy helped usher in a new era of Indigenous relations and make the church more responsive to its rank and file.

The Vatican says the pontiff died Monday at age 88.

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Francis was the global leader of Canada’s most popular organized religion. Nearly 11 million Canadians identified as Catholic in the 2021 census, second only to those without a religious affiliation.

His most lasting impact in Canada is likely to be his response to one of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action: that he apologize for the legacy of residential schools on Canadian soil.

He did so on a tour of Canada in 2022, months after meeting with a delegation of Indigenous Canadians who went to Rome.

The pope said he was sorry that some members of the Church participated in the abuse, cultural destruction and forced assimilation of Indigenous Peoples.

Roughly 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools over a century, and the Catholic Church ran about 60 per cent of the institutions.

Many Indigenous people said the apology was necessary, but some said he didn’t go far enough because Francis didn’t name the crimes and abuses that happened in the facilities.

Among those reacting to his death was Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who said in a post on X that the pope’s “humility, compassion, and steadfast faith had a profound impact on millions of Canadians and others around the world from every faith background.”

Francis, who was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, was named head of the Catholic Church in 2013. He was the first pontiff from the Americas and the global south.

He was seen as a progressive pope, responsive to the needs of rank-and-file Catholics, whose policies opened the Church to more of the world.

For instance, he took a more nuanced view on LGBTQ+ Catholics than some other religious leaders, allowing clergy to bless same-gender romantic relationships, so long as that blessing in no way resembled a marriage ceremony.

In December, Francis created 21 new cardinals, many of whom are key figures in his reform agenda. Some have spoken out against conservative movements in the church, while others were involved in a years-long process aimed to make the church more inclusive.

That process — and the philosophy behind it — will be one of the hallmarks of Francis’s legacy.

Erin Kinsella sees it every time she attends Sunday night mass at her Ottawa church.

It’s in the incense that burns during the religious ceremony and the orientation of the worship space itself, to bring attention to a representation of Jesus. The parish made the changes because of conversations they had during the pope’s “Synod on Synodality,” a three-year dialogue between the Church and its membership about the institution’s path forward.

“There’s a lot of young people at the parish, and there’s something very beautiful that they’re attracted to in terms of reverence and tradition,” Kinsella, a consecrated virgin, from Ottawa, said in a recent interview. “And not in a way that kind of takes us back in time or anything like that, but just in a way that really appreciates the beauty of Catholic tradition over the centuries.”

Some of the younger members asked that the church play more traditional organ music and burn incense, which used to be far more common during services. The church also rearranged the room to put the box that contains the unleavened wafers used in Communion — a representation of the body of Jesus — at its centre.

“So that when everybody comes into the church, he’s the central focus,” she said.

These changes, small things that came directly from the membership, are symbolic of Francis’s approach to leading the Catholic Church, said Kinsella.

“He has this line that ‘pastors should smell like the sheep,'” she said.

It’s a lesson she carries with her in her work as a consecrated virgin, a woman who gives herself fully to serving God.

“I know that I live my own vocation the best when I’m with the people that I’m praying for, when I’m with the people that I’m supposed to be serving,” she said.

Randy Boyagoda, an author and English professor at the University of Toronto, said Francis’s hands-on approach and frequent engagement in public dialogue were “unorthodox” but in many ways effective.

Recently, for example, Francis responded directly to the U.S. vice-president J.D. Vance’s interpretation of a Christian principle about love.

“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis wrote, disputing Vance’s position that Christians should love their families the most, and those farthest away from them the least.

“His willingness to conduct spontaneous and off-the-cuff interviews, for example, combines the gravity of the office with the intensity of our by-the-minute news culture, and that has created levels of attention (to) his words that I don’t think his predecessors necessarily enjoyed,” said Boyagoda.

But not all religious scholars interpret his words the same, and that could sometimes cause confusion, Boyagoda said.

“Within Catholicism itself — within that subset of 1.4 billion people who follow Church politics, which, let’s be clear, is a very small subset — there has been probably more confusion and debate than there had been in the past,” said Boyagoda.

One notable example came late last year, when Francis said “all religions are a path to God.”

“They are like different languages to arrive there. But God is God for all,” he said on a trip to Singapore last year.

The comment, meant to promote interfaith dialogue, sparked debate among Catholic theologians, with some calling the statement heretical.

Francis spent much of his papacy meeting with Catholics, including Boyagoda, who met the pope twice over the years.

His first encounter with the pope was in 2014 at a Vatican conference on religion and technology. Nearly a decade later, Boyagoda was invited to a conference on Catholic writing, and was among a delegation that included director Martin Scorsese who briefly met with the pontiff.

Photos from those meetings hang on Boyagoda’s parents’ walls, he said.

While Boyagoda has spent hours interpreting Francis’s words and considering his legacy, both as an author of novels related to the Catholic experience and as a columnist who writes about the Church, he said most of the 10 million Canadian Catholics won’t sense a difference at mass, once a new pope is named.

It’s the broader image of the Church that could be affected.

“Pope Francis doesn’t correspond to a kind of cliché version of an authoritarian leader of a high-bound regressive institution, which is often what non-Catholics in the public might want to depict the Church as,” said Boyagoda. “Certainly that happened during the papacy of Benedict, and to some degree under John Paul.

“Francis doesn’t allow for that.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 21, 2025.

Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press