An invitation is normally an offer of hospitality.  It's supposed to be something pleasant for the recipient.  But then there's Canada's callow princeling prime minister, Justin Trudeau, 45, whose invitations to Canada are for apology tours.  Hear the tears and flapdoodle.

Yes, he issued an invitation to an apology tour for Pope Francis, figuring that the leader of the billion-strong, two-thousand-year-old Roman Catholic Church would like nothing better than to fly 4,179 miles to prostrate himself before His Punkitude and grovel apologies to his favored interest group constituencies for supposed past wrongs.

The real game here, of course, is Trudeau's politics.  The Canadian prime minister is attempting to bolster his political power by making the pope his dancing bear and to reinforce Canada's choking smog of political correctness, by erasing the particulars of history through the pope's apology.  Instead of a nuanced view of missionary activity in Canada in all its good and bad aspects, Trudeau wants the pope to make it a done deal for him that the white man's entry to Canada was an unadulterated horror show and Native Americans would be living in peace and harmony were it not so.

Ignore the part about Trudeau being one of these white men, and a princeling of privilege while he's at it.

At first glance, I was thinking the pope was just dumb (or maybe humble) enough and politically correct enough to take him up on it.  After all, he's already apologized for numerous things.  But a look at Vatican Radio's report suggests a more circumspect perspective:

[T]he good bilateral relations between the Holy See and Canada were evoked, along with the contribution of the Catholic Church to the social life of the country. The parties then focused on the themes of integration and reconciliation, as well as religious freedom and current ethical issues.

Maybe Pope Francis is aware that Trudeau has made a ham-fisted, insolent effort to use the pope for his political aggrandizement.  Popes in general are often aware of such machinations.  If so, Trudeau's gambit would be more amateur-hour than most.  All the same, it's perfectly logical in the eyes of the left to think the pope, especially this one, would jump up at an invitation to an apology tour to disavow the role of the Catholic Church in Canada and assert the wonderful glory of the state instead.  It's what made Europe eurotrash – why not Canada, too?

The silver lining is the hope that the pope might just not buy it.