During his visit to Canada, Pope Francis asked the country's indigenous people for forgiveness for the injustice they had suffered.
He asked for forgiveness for "the evil that so many Christians have done to indigenous people," the pope said on Monday during a visit to the village of Maskwacis.
The Catholic Church leader regretted the Church's involvement in the "cultural destruction" of indigenous societies.
He expressed dismay at "the manner in which many members of the Church and religious communities have engaged, not least through indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation."
He feels pain and regret, said the 85-year-old.
In Maskwacis, about a hundred kilometers south of Edmonton, the pope met with representatives of the indigenous population, who had been preparing for the visit of the Catholic Church leader for a long time.
From 1895 to 1975 Ermineskin boarding school, one of the largest boarding schools in the country, was located in Maskwacis.
In Canada, since 1874, some 150,000 children of Aboriginal and mixed-race couples had been separated from their families and culture and placed in church homes in order to force them to assimilate into the white majority society.
Many of them were mistreated or sexually abused there, and thousands died of disease or malnutrition.