Pope Francis vows to end sexual abuse after McCarrick report
Pope Francis pledged Wednesday to rid the Catholic Church of sexual abuse and offered prayers to victims of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a day after the Vatican released a detailed report into the decadeslong church cover-up of his sexual misconduct.
The Vatican report blamed a host of bishops, cardinals and popes for downplaying and dismissing 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 Wednesday 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 commitment of the church to eradicate this evil," Francis said. He then paused silently for nearly a minute, apparently in prayer.
In his remarks Wednesday, Francis held up for praise John Paul, who was beloved in his native Poland and by many Catholics elsewhere but has come under criticism for his failure to take action against pedophile priests
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