MAINE
Bangor Daily News
Maine advocates for those abused by priests say pope’s request for forgiveness ‘positive’ but not enough
By Julia Bayly, BDN Staff
Posted July 07, 2014
FORT KENT, Maine — Pope Francis on Monday said the Roman Catholic Church should “weep and make reparation” for the victims of sexual abuse at the hands of clergy, but for at least one advocacy group in Maine, that does not go far enough.
“For some time now, I have felt in my heart deep pain and suffering,” Pope Francis said in his strongest comments yet on the crimes, delivered in the homily of a Mass with adult victims on Monday. “So much time hidden, camouflaged with a complicity that cannot be explained until someone realized that Jesus was looking.”
In Maine, where at least 15 allegations of sexual abuse by a priest against a minor have been made over the years against the Diocese of Portland, an official with a group supporting those victims is looking for more from the church hierarchy.
“The pope’s meetings with these six victims may have helped those particular six,” Paul Kendrick of the Ignatius Group in Maine, an advocate for minors abused by church clergy, said Monday. “But kids are not safer today because of that meeting.”
Robert Gossart, the Maine representative to Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, and himself a survivor of childhood abuse at the hands of a priest, agrees.
“I think the pope meeting with those victims was something positive,” Gossart said Monday from his Mount Desert Island home. “But there has been so much negative in the past, and we have not seen much progress in the year or two Francis has been pope.”
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.