Pope vows to end sex abuse

ROME — Pope Francis pledged Wednesday to rid the Catholic Church of sexual abuse and offered prayers to victims of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a day after the Vatican released a detailed report into the decadeslong church coverup of his sexual misconduct.

The Vatican report blamed a host of bishops, cardinals and popes for downplaying and dismissing mountains of evidence of McCarrick’s misconduct starting in the 1990s — but largely spared Francis. Instead, it laid the lion’s share of the blame on St. John Paul II, a former pope, for having appointed McCarrick archbishop of Washington in 2000, and making him a cardinal, despite having commissioned an inquiry that found he had slept with seminarians.

Francis concluded his weekly general audience Wednesday by noting that the report into the “painful case” had been released the previous day.

“I renew my closeness to victims of any abuse and commitment of the church to eradicate this evil,” Francis said.

Francis defrocked the 90yearold McCarrick last year after a separate Vatican investigation found he sexually abused children as well as adults. Francis authorized the more indepth study into McCarrick’s rise through the hierarchy after revelations that it was an open secret in the U. S. and Vatican hierarchies that he behaved inappropriately with seminarians, sleeping with them in his bed on weekend getaways.

The report raised uncomfortable questions about John Paul and his trusted secretary, Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, who has been subject to increasing scrutiny and criticism in his native Poland over allegations he covered up other cases of clergy sexual abuse.