CANADA
Ottawa Citizen
MARK KENNEDY, OTTAWA CITIZEN
Prime Minister Stephen Harper is under fire for turning his back on aboriginal residential school survivors after he skipped a chance to personally urge the Pope to apologize for the Catholic Church’s role in the abusive system.
Harper met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Thursday, just nine days after the release of the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
Instead of backing that commission’s call for a papal apology, Harper merely “drew attention” to a four-paragraph letter that Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt wrote last week to the Vatican to inform it of the TRC report.
By coincidence, Harper’s meeting with the Pope came on the seventh anniversary of his own June 11, 2008, apology in the House of Commons for the federal government’s role in establishing and supervising the church-run residential school system.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.