{"id":48,"date":"2008-07-21T09:11:45","date_gmt":"2008-07-21T09:11:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/07\/pope-meets-sex-abuse-victims-i.html"},"modified":"2008-07-21T09:11:45","modified_gmt":"2008-07-21T09:11:45","slug":"pope-meets-sex-abuse-victims-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/07\/pope-meets-sex-abuse-victims-i.html","title":{"rendered":"Pope meets sex abuse victims: Is it enough?"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to the latest AP report<\/a>, Benedict XVI celebrated a private mass with four hand-picked sexual abuse victims on his last day in Australia:<\/p>\n

“He listened to their stories and offered them consolation,” the Vatican said in a statement. “Assuring them of his spiritual closeness, he promised to continue to pray for them, their families and all victims. Through this paternal gesture, the Holy Father wished to demonstrate again his deep concern for all those who have suffered sexual abuse.” The pope made a similar gesture in a service with abuse victims in the United States when he visited there in April.
\nThe head of the Catholic Church in Australia, Cardinal George Pell, who attended the Mass on Monday, said the four victims had requested anonymity and no details were released. During his six-day visit to Australia for World Youth Day, the pope addressed the subject of sexual abuse, a controversy that has dogged the church for years, and alleged attempts by the Catholic hierarchy to cover it up.
\nSpeaking to a congregation of priests, seminarians and others contemplating religious life on Saturday, the pope departed from his prepared remarks to apologize to the victims. “I am deeply sorry for the pain and suffering the victims have endured and I assure them that, as their pastor, I, too, share in their suffering,” he said.
\nBut victims’ groups criticized him for not meeting the victims face to face. Cardinal Pell, speaking to the media after the left, said that Monday’s Mass was not a response to the criticism.
\n“This had been organized over a number of weeks,” he said, adding that the group had been chosen by the Professional Standards Office, which was set up to coordinate the Australian Catholic Church’s Towards Healing program, which is addressing the issue of sexual abuse.
\nChris MacIsaac, the president of Broken Rites, a support group for victims of sexual abuse said the victims were still not satisfied. “I rejoice with these victims to got to go to Mass with the pope, but I feel heartfelt sorrow for all those others who still feel they are outside the church,” she said in a telephone interview.
\nShe said she was suspicious that the group that attended Mass with the pope had been selected because they had not spoken out publicly and added that she believed the church was unwilling to engage with those who went public with their complaints.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is it enough? Or are words and actions required? And what of Pell and others?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to the latest AP report, Benedict XVI celebrated a private mass with four hand-picked sexual abuse victims on his last day in Australia: “He listened to their stories and offered them consolation,” the Vatican said in a statement. “Assuring them of his spiritual closeness, he promised to continue to pray for them, their families…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,2,6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bishops","category-catholic","category-church","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nPope meets sex abuse victims: Is it enough? - Pontifications<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/07\/pope-meets-sex-abuse-victims-i.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pope meets sex abuse victims: Is it enough? 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}