UNITED STATES
Crux

By John L. Allen Jr.
Associate editor March 7, 2016

Recently two different constituencies in the Catholic Church have complained of feeling misunderstood or let down by Pope Francis, and it’s instructive to compare the pontiff’s responses in each case.

One group is made up of Eastern Catholics, especially the 5 million-strong Greek Catholic Church in Ukraine, while the other is composed of survivors of clerical sexual abuse. In a nutshell, the pope’s reaction to the former seems a textbook example of effective outreach, while the latter so far appears largely a tale of missed opportunities.

To begin with Greek Catholics, many felt that Francis’ historic Feb. 12 meeting with Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church in Havana, Cuba, was a propaganda coup for Moscow, and that the joint declaration the two men issued was even worse — mostly a series of Catholic concessions…