In the scandal surrounding decades of abuse of indigenous people’s children in church boarding schools in Canada, the Catholic Church has promised financial aid to victims.

The Bishops’ Conference of Canada announced yesterday that a substantial amount of €20 million will be provided over the next five years to ease the suffering of survivors.

The funds will be used to support projects across Canada to improve the lives of victims and to combat the “historic and ongoing trauma” caused by the boarding system.

bishops apologize

In the past few weeks, bishops have officially apologized to indigenous peoples for misbehavior at boarding schools. He recognized the “suffering experienced in boarding schools” and “serious mistreatment suffered by some members” of the Catholic community.

In Canada, by 1874, about 150,000 native and mixed couple children had been separated from their families and their culture and placed in church homes to force them to adapt to white majority society . Many of them were abused or sexually abused in homes.

According to previous information, at least 3,200 of these children died, most of them from tuberculosis. The last of these schools did not close until the 1990s. Over the past few months, more than a thousand anonymous graves were discovered near former Catholic boarding schools.