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	Tears, Prayers As Pope Meets with Abuse Victims from Boston Local Advocates Hail Overture By Michael Paulson Boston Globe April 18, 2008 http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2008/04/18/tears_prayers_as_pope_meets_with_abuse_victims_from_boston/?p1=Well_MostPop_Emailed4 WASHINGTON - Pope Benedict XVI, in a dramatic and unprecedented move, held an emotional meeting yesterday with five people from Boston who had been sexually abused by priests. The 25-minute gathering, in a small chapel at the Embassy Row mansion that is the home of the pope's US ambassador, came toward the close of the third straight day that the 81-year-old pontiff, on his first visit to the United States, spoke out about the sexual abuse crisis that has roiled the Catholic Church in this country. The private session, described last night by several people who were present, was punctuated by frequent emotion. Many of the participants cried. They all prayed. And one by one, each of the victims spoke alone with the pope, holding his hands, whispering in his ears, and telling him their stories of wounded bodies and broken faith. Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley, who pushed for the meeting after the pope decided not to include Boston in his US itinerary, gave the pope an oversize hand-sewn book made of color-washed paper in which a calligrapher had written the names of nearly 1,500 men and women from the Boston area who have reported being sexually abused by priests over the last six decades. "I asked him to forgive me for hating his church and hating him," said Olan Horne, 48, of Lowell, who gave the pope a picture of himself as a 9-year-old boy, just before the Rev. Joseph E. Birmingham started molesting him. "He said, 'My English isn't good, but I want you to know that I can understand you, and I think I can understand your sorrow.' " The meeting between a pope and abuse victims, which was first reported yesterday by the Globe on Boston.com and later confirmed by the Vatican, is a historic development, not only in the three-year-old pontificate of Benedict, but also in the clergy sexual abuse crisis that has roiled the Catholic Church since 2002, when the Globe began publishing a series of stories about the church's handling of abuse by priests. Immediately after yesterday's meeting, the tone of the reaction to Benedict began to shift. "It certainly feels good to know that the leader of our church finally has acknowledged responsibility in such a personal way," said James E. Post, a former president of Voice of the Faithful, an organization headquartered in Newton, Mass., advocating change in the church. "Now, every bishop in America has a model to follow. There are many steps yet to be taken, and much to be done to obtain justice for every survivor, but an important step was taken today." And the Rev. Keith F. Pecklers, a professor of theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, said: "This is a huge step forward. He wants to give a clear signal to America that he gets it." But David Clohessy, the national director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said his organization is still looking for action, particularly in the form of discipline for bishops who failed to remove abusive priests from ministry. "It's a very long overdue small step forward, especially if it leads to reform," he said. "Talk can produce change or complicity. We hope it's the former. But the cold, hard reality is no child is safer tomorrow than they are today." The five victims who met with Benedict yesterday included three men and two women, all of whom were abused as minors by priests in the Archdiocese of Boston. Most are in their 40s and 50s, but one, Faith Johnston, is in her early 20s and was abused relatively recently. Two have been leading advocates for victims in eastern Massachusetts. Horne and Bernard McDaid, 52, of Peabody, who was also abused by Birmingham, helped organize a meeting of victims with Cardinal Bernard F. Law in 2002, and McDaid later traveled to Rome with another victim in an unsuccessful effort to meet with Pope John Paul II. At yesterday's meeting, McDaid said: "I shook his hand, and I said, 'Holy Father, I was an altar boy when I was abused, in the sacristy, a place where I prayed, and I want you to know I was not only sexually abused but I was spiritually abused.' And I said, 'Holy Father, you have a cancer in your flock, and you need to do something about it.' And then I gave him an Irish bread from my mother." Horne and McDaid both said that they were moved by the pope's attentiveness, and that they were confident that their visit made a difference. McDaid said he first began to feel a twinge of hope yesterday morning, when he brought his mother to the papal Mass at Nationals Park, and the pope spoke about the abuse crisis. "It hit me that this man might mean something," McDaid said. As the meeting began the pope entered the room - clad in a white cassock, a white skullcap, and his trademark red shoes - and knelt to pray at a kneeler called a Prie Dieu. O'Malley, who has himself met with several hundred victims of clergy sexual abuse, led the small group in prayer, including the Our Father and a Hail Mary. He then introduced the victims; told the pope about the impact of the abuse crisis, including the suicides and drug overdoses that killed some victims; then quoted from his own installation homily, saying that sexual abuse, "is a wound on the body of Christ." The pope, after speaking a few words to the group, then sat as each victim approached him and spoke or cried, often while clasping the pope's hands. Most of the victims offered some kind of gift to the pope. He gave each of them a rosary, as is his custom, and blessed the group. "I think the Holy Father has been horrified at the thought of priests abusing their ministry and harming these children, and he said he came to the US with sorrow in his heart over this, and has been praying for all of those who have suffered this abuse," O'Malley said later in an interview. "In the morning, in his homily, he said the American church must be about pastoral care and solicitude for those who have been abused, and I think that by this meeting he was giving us an example." Although there was much anticipatory discussion about whether and how the pontiff might acknowledge the abuse crisis during his trip this week, Benedict has surprised observers by returning to the subject daily, and he is expected to talk about it at least once more, during a Mass for priests and nuns at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York tomorrow. Yesterday, during a sun-drenched morning Mass for 46,000 at Washington's new Nationals Park baseball stadium, Benedict addressed his comments to lay people, urging them "to assist those who have been hurt" due to sexual abuse by priests. "I acknowledge the pain which the church in America has experienced as a result of the sexual abuse of minors," he said. "No words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse." The scale of the abuse is still the subject of some uncertainty, but the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which did a study for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, found that 4,392 priests had been accused of abusing 10,667 individuals between 1950 and 2002. The crisis led in December 2002 to the resignation of Law, who was criticized for failing to remove abusive priests from ministry. John Paul II named Law to oversee a prominent basilica in Rome and appointed O'Malley to replace him as archbishop of Boston. Benedict has a long and complex history with the abuse crisis. He also has a deep familiarity with the crisis, because in his previous post as prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, he was in charge of the office that oversaw the abuse cases that were referred to Rome by dioceses around the world. Early in the crisis, when Benedict was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he appeared to minimize its scope and seriousness. But just before he was elected pope, he referred to abusive behavior as "filth." And after being elected pope, he removed from ministry a prominent Mexican priest, the Rev. Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, who was repeatedly accused of sexual abuse but was not disciplined by John Paul II. Michael Paulson can be reached at mpaulson@globe.com
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