By Francis X. Rocca
Plain Dealer
April 10, 2008
http://blog.cleveland.com/lifestyles/2008/04/pope_hopes_to_help_healing_of.html
VATICAN CITY — During his visit to the United States next week, Pope Benedict XVI "will try to open the path of healing and reconciliation" with the victims of clergy sex abuse, the Vatican's second highest official said Tuesday (April 8).
Sex abuse by priests has caused "so much suffering for the victims, for the families of the victims and above all to the church because it was a contradiction with the great educational mission of the church," Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's secretary of state, told the Associated Press.
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| Pope Benedict XVI Photo by AP |
Bertone said the pope will bring a message of "trust and hope" when he celebrates Mass before priests in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral on April 19.
Benedict's visit to Washington, D.C., and New York April 15-20 will be the first papal visit to the U.S. since 1999, three years before the main sex abuse scandal broke out, beginning in Boston.
Some victims' advocates have complained that the pope's itinerary will not include Boston, and that his schedule so far does not include a meeting with sex abuse victims.
The top Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told reporters on Tuesday that the papal trip had been organized in response to an invitation from the United Nations in New York, and that Washington had been added to the itinerary because it is the nation's capital and seat of the U.S. bishops' conference.
In answer to a reporter's question, Lombardi said he didn't know if Cardinal Bernard Law, who resigned as archbishop of Boston as a result of the sex abuse crisis and has been working in Rome since, would accompany Benedict in Washington and New York.
Leaders of one victims' group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), predicted that Benedict's visit would feature a "small, closed-door meeting with a few victims who are still Catholic," and that the pope would "make brief, vague statements expressing remorse and blasting pedophile priests."
"Neither of these measures," SNAP's statement said, "will help protect the vulnerable or heal the wounded."
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