ROME
U.S. News
By Philip Pullella
ROME (Reuters) – Catholic leaders must come down “from the pulpit” to acknowledge that clergy sexual abuse of children and cover-ups had broken the Church’s heart and to do more to prevent it, speakers at a conference said on Thursday.
The gathering at a pontifical university in Rome took place as the Vatican was still stinging from the shock resignation on March 1 of Marie Collins from a commission advising Pope Francis on how to root out sexual abuse.
Collins, who as a teenager was abused by a priest in Ireland, quit in frustration, citing “shameful” resistance to change within the Vatican.
“Child sexual abuse has broken the heart of the Catholic Church,” Francis Sullivan of Australia said in his address to the conference, held by the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors – the group Collins left – and attended by top Vatican officials.
“We have never really appreciated that the decisions our leaders made in order to facilitate and cover up actually broke the heart of what it meant to be Catholic. And we need to go back and fully confront that,” Sullivan said.
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