Tens of thousands gather as pope leads mass in Canada

TRENTON, Canada

A crowd of about 65,000 packed Edmonton's Commonwealth Stadium on Tuesday as Pope Francis led a mass, continuing his "penitential pilgrimage" to help heal the breach between the Church with Canada's Indigenous peoples.

Prior to the mass, the pontiff was driven around the football stadium filed in the popemobile as he blessed children and babies.

In attendance were survivors of the notorious Indian Residential School system and families who had lost friends and loved ones, as well as Indigenous elders.

About 150,000 Indigenous children were forced into the residential schools beginning in the 1820s. The goal was to stamp out Indigenous culture in the state-sponsored schools.

The Catholic Church administered about 60% of the 139 schools and it is estimated that in total, as many as 6,000 children died from disease and a significant number were subjected to physical, mental and sexual abuse.

The dead were often buried in unmarked graves that are now being uncovered with ground-penetrating radar at former residential school sites across Canada.

The pope arrived Sunday for a six-day visit. He delivered a much-overdue apology Monday for the church's role in the residential schools. The Metis, Inuit and First Nations tribes had asked for the apology to be made on Canadian soil, where the atrocities took place.

"I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples," Francis said Monday at the site of the former Ermineskin Indian Residential School.

Tuesday's mass continued the healing, with Francis intoning: "let us move forward together."

Francis’ journey continues later with a pilgrimage to Lac Ste. Anne. The lake has been considered sacred as a place of healing since a chief from the Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation followed a vision, leading his people to the lake.

A priest who established a mission at the Alberta lake in the late 1800s named it after a saint. It is a national historic site.