This photo of the lecture notes taken and released by the Vatican media on January 1, 2021 shows that Pope Francis holds a private live broadcast once a week in the library of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican.
- Pope Francis thanked reporters for exposing the sex scandal in the Catholic Church.
- The Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal made headlines in 2002.
- A major investigation in October found that in the past 70 years, French clergy had sexually abused more than 200,000 children.
Pope Francis thanked reporters on Saturday for helping to expose the sexual abuse scandal of clergy that the Roman Catholic Church initially tried to cover up.
The Pope praised what he called the “mission” of journalism and said that it is vital for reporters to walk out of the newsroom and understand what is happening in the outside world to counter misinformation that is often found online.
“(I) thank you for telling us the mistake of the church, thank you for helping us not sweep it under the carpet, and thank you for your voice to the victims of abuse,” the pope said.
Francis gave a speech at a ceremony in recognition of two senior journalists-Philip Praella of Reuters and Valentina Arazilaki of Mexico News TV-for their long reporting careers in the Vatican.
The sexual abuse scandal made headlines in 2002, when the American daily “Boston Globe” wrote a series of articles exposing patterns of minor abuse by clergy and a culture of concealment prevailing in the church.
Since then, the scandal has shaken churches in countless countries. The most recent was in France. A major investigation in October found that French clergy had sexually abused more than 200,000 children in the past 70 years.
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Critics accused Francis of being too slow in responding to the scandal after becoming Pope in 2013, and believing his clergy about the abuse victims.
But in 2018, he tried to correct past mistakes, publicly admitting that he had made a mistake in a case in Chile, and vowed that the church would never try to cover up this wrong behavior again. In 2019, he called for a “full fight” against crimes that should be “erased from the earth.”
Francis said on Saturday that the mission of the reporter is to “explain the world, make it less obscure, and make people living in it less scared.”
To do this, he said that journalists need to “get rid of the tyranny that is always online.” “Not everything can be informed via email, phone or screen,” he said.
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