Catholic Church apologizes to Canada indigenous peoples for school abuses

The Catholic Church apologized "unequivocally" on Friday to Canada's indigenous peoples for a century of abuses at church-run residential schools set up by the government to assimilate them into the mainstream.

"We, the Catholic Bishops of Canada, express our profound remorse and apologize unequivocally," said a statement.

The move follows the recent discoveries of hundreds of unmarked graves of indigenous children at schools where students were physically and sexually abused by headmasters and teachers who stripped them of their language and culture from the late 1800s to the 1990s.