ROME
Vatican Radio
From darkness to light. From pain and hurt, to healing and hope. That was the symbolic sense of the penitential liturgy led by Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, as a central part of the four day symposium. Appropriately since it is the Jesuit run Gregorian University that has been a driving force behind this conference, the liturgy was held in the great baroque church of St Ignatius, dedicated to the founder of the Society of Jesus. Beneath the masterly ceiling fresco by Andrea del Pozzo, a small procession of bishops, priests, and lay people entered the dark and silent church as images were projected onto a screen beside a simple wooden crucifix. They showed the beauty of God’s creation, images of nature and new life, children of different countries and cultures. But then a dramatic change of tone as the slides showed man’s destruction of the environment, our greed and violence, racism and conflicts that remind us all of our need for forgiveness.
In his homily Cardinal Ouellet spoke of the scandal and shame of sexual abuse, a crime he said which causes a sense of death for the innocent victims. He spoke too of the sins of church leaders who often knew what their priests were doing but failed to stop the abuse. He said, “Sometimes the violence was committed by deeply disturbed persons, or by those who had themselves been abused. It was necessary to take action concerning them and to prevent them from continuing any form of ministry for which they were obviously not suitable. This was not always done properly, and once again we apologise to the victims.”
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