As part of Pope Francis’s high-stakes summit on clerical sexual abuse this week at the Vatican, during Thursday’s opening session he released a list of 21 “points for reflection”- including a couple that didn’t necessarily sit well with abuse survivors, who say they fall short of the Catholic Church’s pledge of zero tolerance.
Cardinal Blase Cupich defended on Thursday, Feb. 21, the “dramatic drop” in clergy sex abuse cases in the United States since the U.S. bishops enacted a zero tolerance policy against abusers in 2002.
Church leaders were warned not to blame the outside world for the Church’s abuse crisis and that “the enemy is within.”
Concrete, effective actions and courage, not merely “simple condemnations,” is what Pope Francis said he’s expecting from a Feb. 21-24 Vatican summit on clerical abuse that opened Thursday morning.
Arguably few countries in the world have faced the scope of the Catholic clerical sexual abuse crisis as has Australia. The president of the country’s bishops’ conference believes that the only way to understand the drama is to speak with survivors, whom he compared to Jesus crucified.
If a high-stakes summit this week on the clerical sexual abuse crisis is to succeed, a leading Australian prelate says, it will require a “Copernican revolution” in Catholic culture with survivors, not clergy, directing the Church’s response.
Pope Francis has appointed Bishop Borys Gudziak of the Paris-based Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of St. Volodymyr the Great, to be the seventh metropolitan-archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of Philadelphia, Pa.
Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is working to help Kenyans get enough water. Kenya is a water scarce country, and the annual renewable fresh water supply per capita is just 65 percent of the recommended global standards.
Pope Francis has lifted the canonical penalties imposed 34 years ago on Father Ernesto Cardenal, 94, a Nicaraguan poet and former member of the Sandinista government.
Catholic Relief Services operations began returning to normal following more than a week of unrest by Haitians frustrated by government corruption and high inflation. Warnings against traveling to Haiti by the governments of the United States and Canada remained in place despite a tense calm across the country.
