More than 1 million
attend Pope Francis’ Mass in Peru, giving him a warm farewell that contrasts with the outcry he caused in Chile by accusing sexabuse victims of slandering a bishop.
LIMA, Peru — More than 1 million people turned out Sunday for Pope Francis’ final Mass in Peru, giving him a warm farewell that contrasted sharply with the outcry he caused in neighboring Chile by accusing sex abuse victims of slandering a bishop.
Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, who publicly rebuked the pope Saturday for those remarks, joined the pontiff and dozens of fellow bishops on a tented altar at a Lima airfield to celebrate the Mass. The crowd of 1.3 million people reported by the Vatican was the largest of Francis’ weeklong, two-nation visit.
Francis was greeted by cheering crowds at nearly every stop of his Peru trip, but the cloud of sex abuse scandal trailed him during what has become the most contested and violent trip of his papacy.
A day after he was rebuked for his Chile remarks, Francis was reminded that the Vatican has faced years of criticism for its inaction over a similar sex abuse scandal in Peru.
“Francis, here there IS proof,” read a banner hanging from a Lima building along his motorcade route Sunday.
The message was a reference to Francis’ comments Thursday in Iquique, Chile, that there was not “one shred of proof ” that a protege of Chile’s most notorious pedophile priest, the Rev. Fernando Karadima, knew of Karadima’s abuse and did nothing to stop it. Karadima’s victims have accused the bishop, Juan Barros, of complicity in the cover-up. Barros has denied the accusations, and Francis backed him by saying the victims’ claims were “all calumny.”
During his trip in Chile and Peru, Francis personally apologized to survivors of priests who sexually abused them and decried the scourges of corruption and violence against women in Latin America. But the pope also attracted rejection: At least a dozen churches in Chile were torched, and riot police arrested protesters in Santiago.