Vatican City - Pope John Paul II offered Australia's Aboriginal and other indigenous peoples of Oceania an apology for past "shameful injustices" of the Roman Catholic Church, in a message posted on the Internet yesterday.
He wrote that the church "apologised unreservedly" for the part played by its members "especially where children were forcibly separated from their families".
The apology to Australia's so-called "stolen generation" came in a report by the special Synod on Oceania held in the Vatican in 1998, and follows a papal apology to China last month for the historic wrongs committed by its representatives in that country.