Pope Francis pledged November 11 to rid the Catholic Church of sexual abuse and offered prayers to victims of former Cardinal Theodore Mc-Carrick, a day after the Vatican released a detailed report into the decades-long church cover-up of his sexual misconduct.
The Vatican report blamed a host of bishops, cardinals and popes for downplaying and dis-missing 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 by recalling that the report into the “painful case” of the former high-ranking American cardinal had been released the previous day.
“I renew my closeness to victims of any abuse and commit-ment of the church to eradicate this evil,” Francis said. He then paused silently for nearly a minute, apparently in prayer.