Australian Cardinal George Pell who helped elect popes and ran the Vatican's finances, has been found guilty of sexually assaulting two choirboys, becoming the most senior Catholic cleric ever convicted of child sex crimes.
Pope Francis has ended his conference on the sexual abuse of children by clergy by calling for an “all-out battle” against a crime that should be “erased from the face of the earth”. But victims and their advocates expressed deep disappointment, saying Francis had merely repeated old promises and offered few new concrete proposals.
Pope Francis on Thursday opened a landmark Vatican summit on fighting child sex abuse, calling for “concrete measures” and handing top Catholic bishops a roadmap to tackling paedophilia in the church.
Victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy demanded on Wednesday to meet Pope Francis to press their call for the Church to apply a zero-tolerance policy including the dismissal of bishops who covered up such offences.
Pope Francis has admitted that clerics have sexually abused nuns, and in one case they were kept as sex slaves. He said in that case his predecessor, Pope Benedict, was forced to shut down an entire congregation of nuns who were being abused by priests.
Pope Francis wasted no time wading in on the standoff over funding for a U.S.-Mexico border wall on Wednesday as he started his trip to Panama, saying on the plane from Rome that hostility to immigrants was driven by irrational fear. In a brief conversation between the pope and journalists on the flight, one reporter described the barrier that juts out into the Pacific Ocean between the two countries in San Diego, California, as a “folly”.
The Pope has used his annual Christmas message to appeal for peace in conflict zones including Yemen and Syria. The two countries have both been ravaged by civil war for years, pushing their people into humanitarian crises. Francis also called for political reconciliation in Nicaragua and Venezuela.
Pope Francis has vowed that the Catholic Church will “never again” cover up clergy sex abuse and demanded that priests who have raped and molested children turn themselves in. Francis dedicated his annual Christmas speech to the Vatican bureaucracy to abuse, evidence that a year of devastating revelations of sexual misconduct and cover-up has shaken his papacy and caused a crisis of confidence in the Catholic hierarchy.
A young boy upstaged Pope Francis on Wednesday, escaping from his mother and running onto the papal podium at a general audience, tugging on the hand of a Swiss guardsman and playing behind the pontiff’s chair.
Argentina's Security Minister Patricia Bullrich has criticized Pope Francis, the leader of the Catholic Church, saying he has not taken the necessary distance from Argentine politics.