ROME
New York Times
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
MAY 2, 2018
ROME — The first thing Pope Francis said, when he met privately on Sunday with Juan Carlos Cruz, a victim of sexual abuse, was: “Juan Carlos, I want to say sorry for what happened to you, as the pope and also for the universal church.”
The second thing he said, Mr. Cruz recounted on Wednesday, was, “I was part of the problem, and that’s why I am saying sorry.”
“To me, that was very telling,” Mr. Cruz said. The pope, he said, “had called me a liar, and he apologized for that.”
Mr. Cruz joined James Hamilton and José Andrés Murillo, also victims in their youth of a notorious Chilean pedophile priest, at a new conference in Rome on Wednesday to discuss their intense and emotional sojourn this past week as guests of the pope in the Vatican.
But even as the three men expressed gratitude for the meeting — “I have never seen anyone so contrite,” Mr. Cruz said of Francis — they urged the pope to transform “his loving words” of apology into “exemplary actions” to end sexual abuse and its cover-up in the Roman Catholic Church.
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