IRELAND
RTE News
By Joe Little, Religious and Social Affairs Correspondent
This day last year, the Argentinean Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected the first non-European Pontiff in 1,300 years.
Since then the 77-year-old has frequently broken with precedent, most notably by choosing to live in a Vatican guest-house instead of the Apostolic Palace overlooking Saint Peter’s Square.
Gestures like paying his own hotel bill and using a saloon car have set the tone of his Pontificate, but what else is new about Pope Francis’s first 12 months?
From the word go, he was “Francis The Informal”. …
Children and Families
To confront the most damaging scandal to erode the Church in modern times, Francis is setting up a Commission on Child Abuse. Last month the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child criticised Church cover-ups of clerical child sexual abuse. But in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Serra, Francis hit back saying no institution had done more to root out paedophilia.
Mr Vallely says it’s an area where the new Pope will have to do something. “Otherwise the honeymoon will be over because that’s the area where the secular world is most disgusted with the Catholic Church.”
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