Pontiff meets with sex abuse victims

In an unprecedented gesture, Pope Benedict XVI met privately Thursday with a small group of men and women who were sexually abused as youths by their clergy, an emotional encounter of prayer and tears.

Participants said later that they had experienced a long-overdue sense of “fulfillment.”

Inside the chapel of the Apostolic Nunciature, the pope spoke to the victims individually and as a group, and they prayed together, said Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman.

Each of the victims told his or her personal story to the pope, who offered them “words of encouragement and hope.” Some wept.

“His Holiness assured them of his prayers for their intentions, for their families and for all victims of sexual abuse,” Lombardi said in a statement.

Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, who organized and attended the meeting, called it a moving experience.

“It was very positive, healing, I think, and very prayerful,” O’Malley said.

The meeting was the most public papal acknowledgment to date of the victims’ pain.

The meeting came on the third day of Benedict’s pilgrimage to the United States, which the pontiff has used to repeatedly confront the sexual abuse scandal that devastated the Roman Catholic Church in America. After years of what victims viewed as inattention and indifference by the Vatican, the pope has expressed “deep shame” over the abuse and vowed to heal the wounds.

The victims who took part in Thursday’s encounter, five or six men and women mostly in their 40s, were from the Boston area, the site of thousands of cases of rape and molestation by priests that eventually led to the forced retirement of the local archbishop, Cardinal Bernard Law.

O’Malley presented the pope with a notebook containing more than 1,000 names of alleged victims, all from the Boston area and spanning several decades, Lombardi told reporters. O’Malley asked the pontiff to pray for them.

This was the first time the Vatican has revealed that a pope met with victims in the burgeoning crisis that first exploded in Boston and spread throughout the nation. Victims groups have long sought a direct contact with the pontiff to discuss the trauma.

Lombardi said the victims who attended the meeting did not want their names released nor the exact number of attendees revealed.

However, a person who said he attended told National Public Radio that the meeting gave him a “sense of fulfillment.”

“For eight years, I’ve been asking to hear the words from the top, and from no one else,” Olan Horne said. “And we heard them today. And we heard them face to face, without a filter, without a proxy. It wasn’t symbolic. It was from him to me.”

Bernie McDaid told NPR that he complained to the pope of a “cancer in your flock” and urged him to do more to eradicate it.

A third victim, Faith Johnston, said she believed Benedict was moved.

“I had so much to say and nothing came out,” Johnston, who says she was repeatedly molested by her priest when she was 14, told CNN. “I just burst into tears. . . . I think my tears alone spoke.”

A prominent victims organization, the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said Thursday’s meeting was a “long overdue step forward on a very long road.”

Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles, speaking before the meeting took place, praised the pope’s determination in confronting the issue of abuse.

“We’ve got to face it head on and deal with it,” Mahony said.

“He’s spoken of reconciliation and healing, and asked us to set a better tone in the church.”

The scandal has cost the church in the United States more than $2 billion in legal settlements since it became public in 2002; the largest single settlement, $660 million, was paid in Los Angeles.

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wilkinson@latimes.com

rebecca.trounson@latimes.com