Pope travels to Canada on 'pilgrimage of penance' for indigenous abuse

Organizers said a final bloc of tickets was made available on Friday

Pope Francis is scheduled to land in Canada on Sunday on what he has called a "pilgrimage of penance" to apologize for the abuse indigenous children endured at hands of largely Catholic-run residential schools, Qazet.az reports.

He is expected to touch down in Edmonton in the western province of Alberta at 11:20 a.m. MDT Sunday morning - the first of three stops across the country. He is also visiting Quebec City and Iqaluit, the capital of the territory of Nunavut, and departing on Friday.

Initial blocs of free tickets for the public were spoken for within 10 or 20 minutes of being made available, a spokesperson for the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB), which is organizing the trip, told Reuters.

Thousands of tickets are being set aside for indigenous survivors of residential schools, according to the CCCB spokesperson. Indigenous leaders in Treaty 6, the Pope's Alberta stop, have said they were overwhelmed with queries from survivors wanting to attend.

Between 1881 and 1996 more than 150,000 indigenous children were separated from their families and brought to residential schools. Many children were starved, beaten and sexually abused in a system Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission called "cultural genocide."