Pope Francis, in a historic gesture of reconciliation, on Thursday sought forgiveness from Bolivia’s predominantly indigenous inhabitants for crimes committed centuries earlier in the name of the Catholic Church.
The Argentine-born pope, who has never been afraid to weigh into delicate issues both religious and political, made the comments on the second stop of a three-nation Latin America homecoming tour.
“I want to tell you, and I want to be very clear: I humbly ask your forgiveness, not only for the offenses committed by our own church, but for the crimes committed by original inhabitants during the so-called conquest of America,” Francis told a gathering of social activists, to sustained and enthusiastic applause.
Photo: EPA
“There have been many, very serious crimes committed again the native peoples of America in the name of God,” the pontiff said, in what was, to date, one of the most powerful and moving moments of his week-long South America visit.
His apology for colonial-era crimes against the indigenous people of the Americas was offered at a so-called World Meeting of the Popular Movements in the city of Santa Cruz.
All three of the countries Francis is visiting during this tour — Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay — are predominantly Catholic and have been marked by a long history of poverty and inequality mostly afflicting indigenous populations.
Beginning in the 1500s, Spanish conquerors, with the blessing of the Catholic Church, subjugated and enslaved indigenous peoples in the Americas, annihilating native cultures and forcing their conversion to Christianity.
Earlier on Thursday, Francis called on a million faithful to reject today’s consumer society, at an open-air mass in the vast Christ the Redeemer Plaza in Santa Cruz, where many people had camped out overnight to see him.
He also urged Bolivians against discarding the weakest and most vulnerable members of society, including the poor, voiceless and the disenfranchised.
He denounced what he called a “mentality in which everything has a price, everything can be bought, everything is negotiable.
“This way of thinking has room only for a select few,” he told the crowd, estimated by authorities at 1 million, including President Evo Morales, the nation’s first indigenous leader.
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