Pope opens summit on abuse

Lack of forceful action disgusted many victims

VATICAN CITY— Pope Francis convened a meeting of Roman Catholic leaders worldwide on Thursday to grapple directly with clerical child sexual abuse, a scourge that has for decades devastated some corners of his vast church while being utterly ignored and denied in others.

The meeting was a potentially defining moment for Francis’ papacy and the most visible step taken by the Vatican to impress upon bishops and other church leaders, some of them still skeptical, the enormity of a crisis that has shaken the faithful. Expectations for action were amplified by victims and victim advocates, who converged in Rome to apply pressure from outside the Vatican walls on the meeting in a Holy See conference hall.

Scandals have repeatedly emerged around the world even decades after the problem first came to light in the United States, where the systemic shuffling of predatory priests from parish to parish spread abuse like a virus.

A lack of forceful action by the Vatican has disheartened and disgusted many victims and their advocates, who are demanding a policy of zero tolerance with a dismissal from the clerical state for abusive priests and the bishops who protect them. The issue has drastically devalued the moral authority that is the currency of the clergy and their pope, who is often a lonely voice in support of migrants and the poor. As the abuse crisis has festered, critics have asked why anyone should listen to a moral leader unable, or unwilling, to clean up his own house.

On Thursday, addressing the 190 global church leaders, Francis sought to reassure his flock that “we hear the cry of the little ones asking for justice.”

Instead, Francis — who intends the meeting to be a “catechesis,” educating bishops and religious leaders so they could undergo a conversion of spirit on the severity of the crisis — provided those assembled with 21 “reflection points.”

“They are a road map for our discussion,” Archbishop Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s leading sex crimes investigator, said at a news conference. They included weighing whether priests and bishops found guilty of abuse should be dismissed from ministry, but fell short of what most advocates consider zero tolerance: the automatic dismissal from the clerical state.