ROME (ITALY)
Catholic News Service
Feb. 23, 2019
By Cindy Wooden
In an opulent Vatican room designed in the 16th century for papal meetings with kings, a cardinal read, “We confess that we have shielded the guilty and have silenced those who have been harmed.”
“Kyrie, eleison,” (Lord, have mercy) responded Pope Francis and some 190 cardinals, bishops and religious superiors from around the world to the confessions read on their behalf by Cardinal John Dew of Wellington, New Zealand.
After three days of meetings, nine major speeches and heartbreaking testimony from survivors of clerical sexual abuse, participants at the Vatican summit on child protection and the abuse crisis gathered in the Sala Regia (literally, “royal room”) of the Apostolic Palace Feb. 23 for a penitential liturgy.
The centerpiece of the liturgy was the reading of the story of the prodigal son or, as the Vatican termed it, “the merciful father” from Luke 15:11-32 and a long “examination of conscience” that asked the bishops as individuals and as presidents of bishops’ conferences to be honest about what they have done and what they have failed to do to protect children, support survivors and deal with abusive priests.
While Pope Francis presided at the penitential service as part of the Vatican summit on child protection and ending clerical sexual abuse, Archbishop Philip Naameh of Tamale, Ghana, gave the homily.
He told the pope and his brother bishops that they all preach often about the parable of the prodigal son, encouraging their people to return to God and seek forgiveness.
But, he said, “we readily forget to apply this Scripture to ourselves, to see ourselves as we are, namely as prodigal sons. Just like the prodigal son in the Gospel, we have also demanded our inheritance, got it, and now we are busy squandering it.”
“The current abuse crisis is an expression of this,” Archbishop Naameh said.
“Too often we have kept quiet, looked the other way, avoided conflicts,” he said, adding that the bishops were often “too smug” to confront “the dark sides of our church.”
Failing to act, he said, they “squandered the trust placed in us.”
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.