Pope Leo XIV spent virtually three hours on Saturday with 15 victims of clerical sexual abuse from Belgium.
The Holy See Press Office described the pope’s meeting with the survivors, every of whom was abused by a member of the clergy as a minor, as “profound and painful.” The workplace stated the meeting occurred “in a spirit of closeness, listening & dialogue.”
The Belgian Catholic Church has been rocked by a sequence of devastating clerical abuse scandals in recent times, which Pope Francis confronted immediately throughout a go to to Belgium final yr, spending greater than two hours with survivors.
During that go to, then Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo urged Francis in unusually frank phrases to take concrete action.
The appalling revelations of clerical sexual abuse in Belgium over the previous 30 years embrace the case of a former bishop who abused two of his nephews. The size of Leo’s meeting with survivors – virtually three hours is lengthy for any papal meeting – displays the dimensions of the disaster.
Since his election six months in the past, the primary American pope has known as for the church to determine a tradition that refuses to tolerate abuse in “any form,” and final month held his first meeting with survivors in the Vatican.
That meeting got here just a few days after a report from a Vatican fee stated Catholic leaders should do extra to assist survivors. Leo has private expertise dealing with claims of clergy abuse: whereas serving as a bishop in Peru, he got here face-to-face with some of the severe and far-reaching scandals in the church in Latin America.