ROME (ITALY)
Daily Mail
February 18, 2019
By the Associated Press and Sara Malm
Victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy have descended on Rome to protest the Church’s response to the crisis ahead of Pope Francis’ summit on the issue this week.
The organizers of Pope Francis’ summit will meet this week with a dozen abuse victims later this week, officials said Monday.
Revelations in many countries about priests raping and committing other kinds of sexual abuse against children and a pattern of bishops hiding the crimes have shaken the faith of many Catholics.
Abuse survivors will not be addressing the summit of church leaders directly, but will meet with the four-member organizing committee to convey their complaints.
The larger summit of some 190 presidents of bishops’ conferences from around the world, plus key Vatican officials, begins Thursday.
Peter Isely, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, addressed reports that Pope Francis is ‘facing resistance’ from top Vatican officials ahead of the meeting.
‘Let me tell you what it was like to try and have to resist that priest when I was a boy who was sexually assaulting me,’ Isely, a founding member of the advocacy group Ending Clergy Abuse, said.
‘So whatever difficulty for him or discomfort this is for anybody in the papal palace, it is nothing compared to what survivors have had to undergo.’
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