Agreed, the fabric of sorry isn’t curative in character, but the word is invaluable because it is an unquestionable darn. True, sorry can’t undo losses, but it can make them bearable. Or swallowable.  

I feel, and strongly so, that the world revolves around two five-letter words—sorry and thank—and two four-letter words—love and hate.

We are either working towards them or working away from them.

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“I think we have to forgive, too, at some point,” she said.

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My experience with one of the four words—sorry—is extremely rich. If the word hadn’t been sincerely employed to assuage my hurt feelings at the end of an emotional journey I would have been left wallowing forever in self-pity, become an incorrigible relationship sceptic and would have been dumped dangerously close to the world of addicts, where relief is sought in designer drags, which in reality drags one to ruin.

Therefore, Pope Francis’s decision recently to say sorry on behalf of the wrongdoers of the church in Canada should be wholeheartedly appreciated because he had used the irreplaceable word to console a suffering people. Nothing else could have done the job.

The Pontiff apologised for the “evil” inflicted on the Indigenous peoples of Canada on the first day of a visit focused on addressing decades of abuse committed at Catholic institutions. The plea from the leader of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics was met with applause by a crowd of First Nations, Metis and Inuit people in Maskwacis, in western Alberta province — some of whom were taken from their families as children in what has been branded a “cultural genocide.”

“I am sorry,” the 85-year-old Pontiff said. “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the indigenous peoples,” said the Pope, as he formally acknowledged “many members of the Church” had cooperated in “cultural destruction and forced assimilation.” “The place where we are gathered renews within me the deep sense of pain and remorse that I have felt in these past months,” Francis said, citing the “physical, verbal, psychological and spiritual abuse” of children over the course of decades.

As he spoke the emotion was palpable in Maskwacis, an Indigenous community south of provincial capital Edmonton, which was the site of the Ermineskin residential school until it closed in 1975.

“It means a lot to me” that he came, said Deborah Greyeyes, 71, a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, the largest Indigenous group in Canada. “I think we have to forgive, too, at some point,” she said.

With the word sorry he achieved what he couldn’t have with the world’s most powerful gun.