Pope aims to heal sex abuse wounds on U.S. trip
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“The pope will talk about it — talk about it in a specific way,” Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, told Fox News in an interview to be broadcast on Wednesday.
“The pope, along with the Church’s priests, will naturally seek the path toward healing and toward reconciliation.”
The sexual abuse scandal started in Boston in 2002, when Catholic leaders were discovered to have moved priests who abused minors to new parishes instead of defrocking or reporting them to police.
The scandal later spread to almost every U.S. Catholic diocese.
Last July the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles agreed to pay $660 million to 500 victims of sexual abuse dating back as far as the 1940s.
The German-born pope, who visits Washington, New York and will address the United Nations during the April 15-20 trip, will raise the sexual abuse of minors in an address at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on April 17, Bertone said.
Before his election as pontiff in 2005, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger went out on a limb to decry the “filth” in the Church.
He also has taken a tougher stand on sexual abuse in the Church as pontiff than his predecessor, John Paul II, who was old and frail when the scandals broke. Continued…
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