“The door is open. It is one of the normal options. Up until today, I did not use that door. I did not think it was necessary to think of this possibility but that does not mean that the day after tomorrow I don’t start thinking about it.”

He added: “This trip was a bit of a test. It is true that I can’t make trips in this condition. Maybe the style has to change, make fewer trips, make the trips I have promised to make, re-jig things. But it will be the Lord who decides. The door is open.”

During his visit to Canada, Pope Francis wore an indigenous feathered headdress before declaring that forced assimilation of native peoples into Christian society ruined their customs and severed their families.

He apologised for Christian support of the “colonising mentality” of the times” and added: “With shame and unambiguously, I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the indigenous peoples.”

From the nineteenth century through the 1970s, more than 150,000 native children in Canada were compelled to attend state-funded Christian schools in an effort to remove them from the influence of their homes and cultures in order to “Christianize” and assimilate them into mainstream society.

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