Pope Francis has asked for forgiveness for scandals at the Vatican and in Rome, an apparent reference to two cases of priests and same-sex relations revealed this month during a major meeting of bishops.
“Today … in the name of the church, I ask you for forgiveness for the scandals that have occurred recently either in Rome or in the Vatican,” the pontiff said in unprepared remarks during his weekly general audience in St Peter’s Square on Wednesday.
“I ask you for forgiveness,” Francis said before tens of thousands of people, who broke into applause. The pope then read his prepared address and did not elaborate.
Asked about the comments, the Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi could not say which scandals the pope had in mind but said Francis wanted to reach out to ordinary people who are “disturbed or pained” when they read about scandals caused by “the church or men of the church”.
There have been two scandals involving the Vatican and the Roman Catholic church in Rome in the past two weeks.
On 3 October, a Polish priest working in the Vatican’s doctrinal office since 2003 held a packed news conference in which he disclosed that he was gay and had been living with another man for years.
The Vatican dismissed Monsignor Krzysztof Charamsa, a theologian, from his job there as well as from teaching assignments in pontifical universities in Rome.
A spokesman said at the time that Charamsa’s disclosure on the eve of a meeting of world bishops at the Vatican was “grave and irresponsible”. It accused him of trying to exert “undue media pressure” on the bishops’ debate on family issues, including the church’s position on same-sex relations.
After he was fired, Charamsa gave interviews to Spanish and Italian media in which he criticised the church’s rule on celibacy for the clergy.
The pope also appeared to be referring to a scandal exposed in the Italian media last week about an order of priests who run a parish in an upmarket area in Rome.
Parishioners in the Santa Teresa d’Avila parish wrote to local church officials alleging that a clergyman there had had encounters with “vulnerable adults”. Newspapers said these took place in an adjacent park often frequented by male sex workers.
According to the letter published in the media, parishioners said they had assembled evidence about the clergyman’s illicit activities and were furious to discover he had been transferred to another part of Italy instead of being disciplined.
Since his election in 2013, the pope has asked forgiveness for sexual abuse of the children by the clergy and for the church’s treatment of Protestants and indigenous people in the course of its history.
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