Abuse scandal painful, but penance leads to grace, Pope says

(April 16, 2010) By recognizing the sins of priests who have sexually abused children, performing penance and asking for forgiveness, the Catholic Church trusts that God will purify and transform His Church, Pope Benedict XVI said on Thursday. "I must say that we Christians, even in recent times, have often avoided the word 'penance,' which seemed too harsh to us.” “Now, under the attacks of the world that speaks to us of our sins, we see that being able to do penance is a grace," the Pope said in a homily during a Mass with members of the Vatican’s Pontifical Biblical Commission. "We see how it is necessary to do penance, that is, to recognize what is mistaken in our life," he said during the morning Mass in the Vatican. The pope said Christians know that "to open oneself to forgiveness, to prepare oneself for forgiveness, to allow oneself to be transformed, the pain of penance - that is to say of purification and of transformation - this pain is grace, because it is renewal, and it is the work of divine mercy."