CALIFORNIA
Santa Cruz Sentinel
By Sentinel Editorial Board
Posted: 03/09/2013
The voting begins Tuesday.
That’s when the cardinals in the Roman Catholic Church will file into the Sistine Chapel and begin secret balloting to select a new pope.
It will be an opportunity to finally end decades, if not centuries, of secrecy.
Writing about a religious organization is a dicey matter. But the church has been badly shaken, damaged, by many years of reports regarding sexual abuse by priests, bishops and, most recently, a cardinal.
And so the church stands upon a precipice. On one side are the scandals and abuses committed under its watch. On the other is the faith and devotion of hundreds of millions of people. And there is a Dante-esque divide between them that can only be bridged by repentance and renewal. Repentance is a taking of responsibility, without casting blame on others, for personal, or in this case corporate, misdeeds — followed by a changing of the mind, a resolve to be guided on a new, moral and spiritual, path.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.