Five pivotal moments in Pope Francis’ relations with Native communities in the Americas

Apr. 29, 2025, 1:23 AM ET

Here are five pivotal moments in Pope Francis’ relations with Native communities.

Santa Cruz, Bolivia, July 9, 2015

At a world summit of activists against social inequality, Francis asked “forgiveness, not only for the offenses of the church herself, but also for crimes committed against the Native peoples during the so-called conquest of America.”

Going off script, he added that many priests “strongly opposed the logic of the sword with the power of the cross.” But, he acknowledged, “we never apologized, so I now ask for forgiveness.”

Washington, Sept. 23, 2015

Before a sunbaked crowd outside the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in his only U.S. visit, Francis officially declared the 18th-century missionary priest Junipero Serra to be a saint.

Serra “was the embodiment of a church which goes forth, a church which sets out to bring everywhere the reconciling tenderness of God,” Francis said.

But some Native activists denounced the decision. They said Serra was a prime culprit in church complicity with destructive colonization and that California’s Native people suffered mistreatment and devastating disease outbreaks in the series of missions he founded.

San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, Feb. 15, 2016

Francis celebrated a Mass for Mexican Indians that featured readings in the Native languages of Chiapas, a traditional dance of prayer and other blending of Catholicism and Indigenous culture.

“Long live the pope of the poor!” the crowd chanted. Francis presented an official Vatican decree approving another Native language to be used at Mass.

Maskwacis, Alberta, July 25, 2022

Francis traveled to a Cree community in the Canadian province of Alberta to deliver a long-sought apology for Catholic complicity in the 19th- and 20th-century residential school system for Canada’s Indigenous population of First Nations, Metis and Inuit people.

“Although Christian charity was not absent,” he said, the overall effect was “catastrophic.”

Vatican City, March 30, 2023

Building on years of appeals from Native people to Francis, the Vatican formally repudiated the “Doctrine of Discovery,” the legal theories backed by 15th-century papal bulls decrees that legitimized colonial-era seizure of Native lands by Spain and Portugal and that form the basis of some property laws today in the United States.

The Vatican said the decrees, or papal bulls, “did not adequately reflect the equal dignity and rights of Indigenous peoples” and have never been considered expressions of the Catholic faith.

Critics said the pope failed to take a needed step — to rescind the papal bulls.

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