Francis has decided to tackle the thorniest issue of his six-day visit to Portugal in the first hours of the trip. On Wednesday, at the end of the official agenda for his first day, the Pope received at the headquarters of the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See in Lisbon, where he is staying this week, 13 people who suffered sexual abuse when they were minors by representatives of the Portuguese Catholic Church. The meeting, which had been requested by the Pontiff, was organized discreetly and was only broadcast at night, when it had already concluded.
According to what Paula Margarido, president of the national team for coordinating the diocesan commissions, present at the meeting, told the SIC television channel, Francisco “asked for their forgiveness in his own name and in the name of the Church” after listening to their personal testimonies. Margarido pointed out that it was a “difficult” but comforting meeting for the participants. “It was deeply repairing, the victims had the opportunity to have the holy father in front of them, who looked them in the eye, that he was moved and that he opened up to the heart of each one of them,” she said. The meeting, she added, reveals that the Portuguese Church knows that “there is a wound” and that it is willing “to try to heal it”, in addition to “applying policies so that these realities do not happen again.” “The 13 who went represent the victims who survived, but we know that there are many who have not survived,” Margarido said.
At least 4,815 minors suffered sexual abuse in institutions or during activities linked to the Catholic Church between 1950 and 2022, according to an estimate made by the independent commission that investigated pedophilia and which presented its report in February of this year. The creation of this commission was an initiative of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, which thus aligned itself with the guidelines sent by Francis since he arrived at the Holy See in 2013 to try to find out the scope of sexual abuse in the Church and adopt measures to prevent them. Pedro Strecht, who chaired this commission, was one of the people who accompanied the victims during his meeting with Francisco.
Shortly before the meeting, when few were aware of it, the Pontiff indirectly referred to the impact of sexual abuse on the advance of the secularization of society and the rejection of the Church during a speech at the Jerónimos Monastery. . The choice of the moment was not accidental either. The audience that attended the vespers ceremony was made up of bishops, priests, deacons and seminarians, to whom he reminded that their distance from society had also been accentuated by “the disillusionment and aversion that some have towards the Church, sometimes due to our bad testimony and the scandals that disfigured it”. Francis invited them to “a humble and constant purification based on the cry of suffering of the victims who must always be welcomed and listened to.”
On his second day in Portugal, the Pontiff participated this Thursday morning in an act at the Catholic University of Lisbon, where he encouraged the students who were listening to him to “be brave” and “replace fears with dreams.” He again showed his concern for world conflicts (“we are in a Third World War in pieces”) and the deterioration of the climate. Francisco considered “a democratic urgency” to take seriously the fight against the deterioration of the planet. “We cannot settle for palliative measures,” he stressed.
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It was also the first speech in which he dedicated special attention to women to denounce their marginalization: “The female contribution is essential. In the collective unconscious, it is often thought that women are second-rate, substitutes, not regulars”.
On the campus of the Catholic University, the Pope listened, among other students, to the speech of Mahoor Kaffashian, a 25-year-old Ukrainian refugee, who shared her experience: “After everything I have been through, after the constant suffering, the Without a home, a family, friends, after being homeless, without a university and without money, I know that the concept of strength does not mean that I do not feel tired and dejected with pain and loss. It means that I have the strength, the faith and the courage to keep going.” She later traveled to Cascais to visit the facilities of the Scholas Occurrentes center, which develops an educational program promoted by the Pope when he was bishop of Buenos Aires.
This afternoon the first contact of the Pontiff with the pilgrims attending World Youth Day will take place in a welcome ceremony to be held in Eduardo VII Park. The event has caused major traffic restrictions throughout the center of Lisbon, where more than a million people are expected to arrive throughout the week.
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