Much of Pope Francis’s tenure has involved redressing wrongs committed by the Church, and he has done so by striking a note of penitence that’s relatively new to the papacy—but that he has now established as an essential part of the office.
Twenty years ago, Pope John Paul II went to Canada for World Youth Day, an event held every few years to encourage young Catholics in their faith and to spark “the hope that springs eternal in the hearts of the young,” as he put it. Thousands of people joined an elaborate Way of the Cross procession through downtown Toronto, and then John Paul, who was eighty-two, presided over an open-air prayer vigil and celebrated a Sunday-morning Mass at a former airfield near the city.
Canada was colonized, in part, by French Catholic missionaries, who, beginning in the seventeenth century, built churches, schools, hospitals, and orphanages, and converted many Indigenous people to Catholicism, often with grotesquely mixed motives, forcing them to abandon their traditional ways of life as a condition of participation in a putatively Christian society. Canada subsequently became a British colony and then, in 1867, a self-governing state.
This trip, and the attention being paid to it, signal a real shift in the sense of what the job of a Pope should be. In the past, Popes didn’t even acknowledge transgressions of the Church , much less apologize for them. That tradition began to change only in recent decades. In March, 2000, John Paul led a “Day of Pardon” service at St. Peter’s in Rome.
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