It was genocide, plain and simple.

If Canadian Catholics were looking for a roadmap to reconciliation, Pope Francis laid it out for them at a vespers prayer service in Quebec City’s exquisite Notre Dame Basilica Cathedral on a rainy Thursday evening.

For Vaughan Nicholas there were tears well before Pope Francis began to speak. Waiting for Mass at the National Shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupre east of Quebec City to begin, he said, “I’m hoping I will actually feel something.”

Pope Francis has arrived in Quebec with the same message he has tried to share with Indigenous Canadians in the West — that Christ wants to be incarnate in every culture, in Indigenous cultures, Quebecois culture, Canadian culture.

Like generations of pilgrims before him, Pope Francis came to the water’s edge at Lac Ste. Anne seeking healing — not his healing, ours.

At a Mass celebrating the feast of Jesus’ grandparents, Pope Francis urged those filling Edmonton’s Commonwealth to ground their understanding of history in the reality of those to whom they owed life itself.

At Sacred Heart Church of the First Peoples in downtown Edmonton, Pope Francis made an impassioned plea for the Catholic Church to realize its destiny as the Church of reconciliation.

The words “I am sorry” are powerful. For Tammy Ward of the Samson First Nation, those words from Pope Francis brought tears as she listened on the Maskawacis powwow grounds. 

Pope Francis has landed in Canada and begun the work of his penitential pilgrimage from the moment he was wheeled off the papal plane and into a hangar at Edmonton International Airport.

A smiling, jovial Pope Francis greeted journalists on the plane to Edmonton, but first reminded them of the penitential nature of his pilgrimage to Canada.