Pope John Paul II visited Canada on three separate occasions. Or, rather, on two and a half occasions, it was only the last leg of the trip to the United States since 1987, as we shall see later.
In September 1984, Karol Wojtyla, in the full maturity of her pontificate, traveled the vast country on one of her longest journeys – eleven days – with successive stages in Quebec, Montreal, Halifax, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver and the capital Ottawa. On Tuesday the 18th he was supposed to travel to Fort Simpson to meet the Aboriginal population, but bad weather conditions prevented him from doing so.
respect for traditions
Devastated by this despair, the Polish Pope addressed a radio-television message from Yellow Knife Airport to his beloved Canadian indigenous people. In this lesson, he renewed “The Church’s respect for your ancient heritage, your many ancestral traditions, worthy of great praise”. But, at the same time, he acknowledged that “history clearly documents how over the centuries your people have repeatedly been victims of injustice because of newcomers who, in their blindness, often considered your culture inferior.”
At the time, the boarding school scandals, where tens of thousands of children died, did not spark public opinion, but John Paul II made this presentational statement: “The missionaries, whatever their faults and imperfections, No matter how many mistakes have been made, no matter how much damage has been done unknowingly, now we are trying to rectify it.
kept promise
Before leaving Canada, he publicly and solemnly promised that he would return with the sole purpose of finding the native population of the American country. The promise was fulfilled three years later, when, at the end of an extensive tour of the United States, he moved from downtown Detroit to Fort Simpson on September 19, where a large crowd of natives had gathered. “From the cold Arctic, from the valleys, from the forests, from all parts of this vast and beautiful country that is Canada”, He said in his own words of greeting before celebrating the holy mass with them.
In his speech to the native people, mestizo and Eskimo dignitaries and governments, along with some representatives of the federal government, he vehemently affirmed that “The Church upholds the equal dignity of all people and protects their right to safetycultural character with its own traditions and its own peculiar customs”.
authentic value
But in another passage he was even more clear: “He said—there are other values that are essential to life and society. Each person has a civilization inherited from their ancestors, which has the necessary institutions for their way of life, With its artistic, cultural and religious expressions. Authentic values rooted in these realities should not be sacrificed to the idea of material order”.
And at the end of his talk, he issued this challenge to confront the tensions that were already starting to surface: “it’s time to reconcileof new relations of mutual respect and cooperation, in order to achieve a truly just solution to problems that have not yet been solved”. – adorned with suggestive feather headdresses and multicolored dresses.
The already very battered Karol Wojtyla happened on her last Canadian trip Toronto in July 2002 to celebrate World Youth Day. At one point during the ceremony he greeted a group of Indian youth representatives.
