Pope Francis blesses the water, pilgrims at Lac Ste. Anne in Canada

Pope Francis concluded his second full day in Canada with a visit to Lac Ste. Anne, the site of one of Canada’s most famous Catholic pilgrimages and a place of spiritual significance for the nation’s indigenous people.

The pope celebrated a Liturgy of the Word at the Shrine of Ste. Anne, with a crowd of mostly indigenous people in attendance, estimated at around 10,000.

The large, shallow, and muddy lake — about an hour’s drive from Edmonton — has been revered as a place of spiritual significance, and of healing, for centuries. Known as Wakamne, “Lake of God,” by the Nakota Sioux and “Lake of the Spirit” by the Cree people, it received the name “Lac Ste. Anne” from Father Jean-Baptiste Thibault, the first priest to establish a permanent Catholic mission in Alberta, in 1842.

Before the liturgy, making the Sign of the Cross towards the four cardinal points — according to indigenous custom — the pope blessed a bowl of the lake’s water, which was brought up to a small wooden structure, shaped like a teepee, overlooking the lake. The pope, after spending a moment in prayer sitting at the water's edge in his wheelchair, later sprinkled the crowds with the blessed water.

In his homily during the Liturgy of the Word, the pope noted that much of Jesus’ ministry took place by a lake — the Sea of Galilee — a place where “various peoples who then, as today, flocked from different places; in a natural theater such as this, [Jesus] preached to everyone.”

“God chose that richly diverse context to announce to the world something revolutionary: ‘Turn the other cheek, love your enemies, live as brothers and sisters so as to be children of God, the Father who makes his sun shine on both good and bad and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous’ (Matthew 5:38-48). This lake, with all its diversity, thus became the site of an unprecedented proclamation of fraternity; not a revolution bringing death and injury in its wake, but a revolution of love.”

Lac Ste. Anne, in 2022, provides a similar context.

“Here, on the shores of this lake, the sound of drums, spanning the centuries and uniting different peoples, brings us back to that time. It reminds us that fraternity is genuine if it unites those who are far apart, that the message of unity that heaven sends down to earth does not fear differences, but invites us to fellowship, in order to start afresh together, because we are all pilgrims on a journey.”