(Gerard O’Connell - America) Pope Francis visited Quebec City for the second stage of his penitential pilgrimage to the Indigenous Peoples in Canada, July 27 to July 29. Quebec has traditionally been the heartland of Catholicism in this vast country—second only to Russia in terms of surface area—with 38 million inhabitants, 44 percent of whom are Catholic. The welcome he received here was visibly warmer than that in Edmonton, where there were no crowds to greet him. From the moment he left Quebec’s international airport to drive to the archbishop’s residence in this city of some 800,000, thousands of people lined much of the route to greet him and receive his blessing. That same evening around a thousand people, including many tourists, gathered in the Plains of Abraham (...)
