One year after the historic papal visit to Canada, positive signs abound.

Pope Francis is getting personally involved in making sure sacred items and cultural artifacts held in the Vatican Museums are returned to Canadian Indigenous communities.

Close to nine months after Pope Francis’ penitential pilgrimage to apologize to Canada’s Indigenous peoples, Catholics from across the country gathered in-person and online to reflect on the historic visit and to consider the way forward.

Repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery, endorsing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, confessing the sin of a colonizing mentality, promising to stand with Indigenous peoples when they struggle for their land and their rights and committing the Church to reconciliation with Indigenous people world-wide — all this arrived in a two-page statement issued jointly by two Vatican dicasteries as another step in the pilgrimage of penance Pope Francis undertook in Canada last summer.

Winnipeg is close to saying goodbye to Bishop Grandin. Soon, the streets, and anything else that bears his name, will be erased from Manitoba’s history. 

Indigenous Catholics, along with U.S. and Canadian bishops, are welcoming the Vatican's repudiation of a legal and political doctrine by which European colonial powers and North American governments historically seized lands from Indigenous peoples -- while stressing there is more work to be done in healing Catholic-Indigenous relations.

The Catholic Church formally "repudiates those concepts that fail to recognize the inherent human rights of Indigenous peoples, including what has become known as the legal and political 'doctrine of discovery,'" a Vatican statement said.

The $30 million Indigenous Reconciliation Fund has achieved its first-year goal of raising $9.4 million and the fund’s board has greenlit 17 projects.

A presentation to the Regis-St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology Graduate Pro-Seminar by Kyle Ferguson, a second-year PhD student at the University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto School of Theology, on March 1.

Rising from the dead, Our Lord was able to quickly arrange a meeting, and even a fish fry, with the Apostles.

Representatives of the Catholic Church were not present at any meetings or consultations with him, and his initial report did not include any input from the Church, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples said at the end of his 10-day assessment visit to Canada. 

Canada’s relationship with Indigenous people is getting a check-up and Canada’s Catholic bishops want to be part of it. Whether or not they get the chance is still up in the air.

Four letters and 26 promises from Canada’s bishops to Indigenous Canadians set an agenda for reconciliation that bishops like Calgary’s Bishop Bill McGrattan intend to act on before February turns into March.

Canada's Catholics are not done with reconciliation. Four pastoral letters from Canada’s bishops released today urge Indigenous and non-Indigenous Catholics to seek ways to journey together, build relationships, know and understand their history and end the two solitudes in the country and in the Church of Indigenous and settler societies.

Boring, pro-forma, rote recitations of land acknowledgements before every school board meeting, at the start of every school day and at every event just annoy Arriane Chua.