ROME
NPR
[with audio]
by Sylvia Poggioli
A decade after the clerical sex abuse scandal erupted in the United Sates, Catholic religious officials from all over the world met in Rome this week to tackle the painful topic.
The Vatican endorsed the symposium — called “Toward Healing and Renewal” — the aim of which was changing the culture of how the church deals with cases of pedophile priests.
One of the highlights was a late-afternoon penitential mass on Feb. 7 — apparently the first time a senior Vatican official conducted a service to ask the forgiveness of abuse victims.
In his homily, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, who runs the Vatican’s congregation for bishops, called the crisis “a source of great shame and enormous scandal.”
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