Pittsburgh Bishop David Zubik declares “year of repentance,”
Bishop David Zubik has called for a “Year of Repentance” beginning later this month in response to the “sinful actions of the members of our own ranks of the clergy” in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh.
The call comes nearly a month after the release of a report by a statewide grand jury identifying more than 90 priests in the Pittsburgh Diocese who have been accused of sexual abuse over the past seven decades. The report, which spanned six Pennsylvania dioceses, also accused bishops of enabling abusers by covering up their crimes.
The report has roiled the Catholic Church in the United States, combined with the revelations of long-running sexual misconduct by a former cardinal, retired Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of Washington, D.C. On Thursday, Pope Francis will have his first meeting with top U.S. clerics since the crisis broke this summer. He will meet with a group including Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, president of U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
In Pittsburgh, the first main event of the Year of Repentance will be a solemn prayer service Sept. 23 at St. Paul Cathedral in Oakland.
Other parishes can follow suit, Bishop Zubik said in a letter sent Monday to priests and others.
“We have been taught from our earliest years as Catholic Christians to ask forgiveness from both God and neighbor,” Bishop Zubik wrote. “Faced with the sinful actions of the members of our own ranks of the clergy, who are called to manifest the example of Christ, we feel both shame and sorrow, and are reminded of our own sinfulness and the need for mercy.”
Bishop Zubik based his call on an appeal by Pope Francis, in an Aug. 20 letter responding to the Pennsylvania grand jury report, to respond with penitential acts of prayer and fasting.
The bishop is asking for clergy and other participants to fast and pray particularly on “ember days,” or four sets of three days throughout the church calendar that are typically set aside for such penitential acts.
Bishop Zubik also asked the clergy to consider restoring the practice of reciting the Prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel after all Masses, a prayer that calls on Saint Michael to protect the faithful against all evil.
The year will officially draw to a close next Aug. 15, the feast day of the Assumption of Mary, “as a sign of hope and healing for victims and for renewal of the church through the intercession of Mary.” This year’s services commemorating that feast day occurred just after the Aug. 14 release of the report, when priests and parishioners were first absorbing its impact.
Thursday’s meeting at the Vatican is reminiscent of a similar meeting in 2002 in which Pope John Paul II met with cardinals and other top U.S. bishops amid the cascading crisis set off by revelations that year by The Boston Globe of cover-ups of rampant sexual abuse by priests.
It was in that setting that John Paul pronounced there is “no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young,” setting the stage for a U.S. zero-tolerance policy that has yet to be adopted worldwide in the church.
This time, the delegation is smaller, consisting of Cardinal DiNardo, who began his clerical career in his native Pittsburgh; the U.S. bishops conference vice president, Archbishop Jose Horacio Gomez of Los Angeles; and Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley of Boston, president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.