LIMA (The Thursday Times) — Pope Leo XIV told Peru’s bishops on Thursday that the Catholic Church must answer abuse by members of the clergy “with truth, with justice, with forgiveness, with making amends”, on his first full day back in the country where he spent two decades as a missionary and bishop.
Speaking to the bishops in the chapel of the Archbishop’s Palace in Lima, the pope called for “an ever more resolute commitment to fostering a culture of prevention and protection for the weakest in light of such crimes”. He described clergy sexual abuse as a “reality that has caused us so much pain”.
He is expected to meet survivors of abuse during his stay in Peru. A US-based group that tracks clergy abuse cases has identified 77 priests, brothers, seminarians, and lay consecrated people in Peru who have been publicly accused of abusing minors, a figure it says is only a small fraction of the total.
Leo, who was born Robert Prevost in Chicago and holds Peruvian citizenship, served as bishop of Chiclayo in the north of the country. While there, he was the bishops’ point person for receiving abuse victims.
‘The Church does not belong to us’
The pope urged the bishops to “combine doctrinal fidelity with pastoral closeness” and to stay united. “The Church does not belong to us; it belongs to Christ,” he said. “No Bishop should feel alone on this journey.”
Earlier, outside Lima’s cathedral on the Plaza de Armas, he told a crowd estimated at about 40,000 people that the Church must be “ready to acknowledge its own infidelities and humbly ask forgiveness”.
In the same address he spoke out against violence in the home and the treatment of women. “Let us value women! Let us protect and respect girls!” he said, adding that it was sad that “machismo persists, manifested in the absence of fathers from family life”. He named abuse, domestic violence, alcoholism, gambling, and drug addiction among the wounds on Peruvian families, and called for honest hearts to “overcome corruption, violence and individualism”.
A homecoming
The Vatican estimated that about three million people lined the route of his motorcade on Wednesday, when he arrived from Argentina. Peru is the final leg of a 12-day trip to South America that began on November 6 and took him first to Uruguay and then to Argentina.
He is due to visit Chiclayo, Cusco, and the Amazon city of Pucallpa before celebrating Mass in Callao and returning to Rome on November 17.
