Participants in Church sexual abuse conference attend penitential liturgy
From darkness to light. From pain and hurt, to healing and hope. That was the symbolic
sense of the penitential liturgy led by Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, head of the
Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops, as a central part of the four day symposium. Appropriately
since it is the Jesuit run Gregorian University that has been a driving force behind
this conference, the liturgy was held in the great baroque church of St Ignatius,
dedicated to the founder of the Society of Jesus. Beneath the masterly ceiling fresco
by Andrea del Pozzo, a small procession of bishops, priests, and lay people entered
the dark and silent church as images were projected onto a screen beside a simple
wooden crucifix. They showed the beauty of God’s creation, images of nature and new
life, children of different countries and cultures. But then a dramatic change of
tone as the slides showed man’s destruction of the environment, our greed and violence,
racism and conflicts that remind us all of our need for forgiveness.
In his
homily Cardinal Ouellet spoke of the scandal and shame of sexual abuse, a crime he
said which causes a sense of death for the innocent victims. He spoke too of the sins
of church leaders who often knew what their priests were doing but failed to stop
the abuse. He said, “Sometimes the violence was committed by deeply disturbed persons,
or by those who had themselves been abused. It was necessary to take action concerning
them and to prevent them from continuing any form of ministry for which they were
obviously not suitable. This was not always done properly, and once again we apologise
to the victims."
One by one a representative of seven groups then came forward
to ask for forgiveness – a teacher, a religious superior, a parent and a lay person,
a priest, the Cardinal and finally one of the abuse victims who’s been speaking at
this conference. Irish survivor Marie Collins acknowledged how hard it is to forgive
and asked for God’s strength to pardon those who have sinned.
One by one, each
speaker lit a candle and placed it at the foot of the cross as the congregration of
bishops and religious from Marie’s own country and from the Churches around the world
prayed together for mercy, for healing, for the hope that the scourge of sexual abuse
may never happen again