After celebrating Mass last Sunday on a visit to the northwestern city of Asti in Piedmont where his father was born, Pope Francis described the time in which we are living as “a famine of peace”. He encouraged all those present to think of the many places in the world which are scourged by war, paying particular attention to Ukraine. He also mentioned the tragic fire last week in a refugee camp in Gaza, Palestine, which killed at least 21 people.
In his homily at the Mass in the city’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption, he began: “From these lands, my father set out as an immigrant to Argentina, and to these lands … I have now returned to rediscover and savour my roots.” After the Angelus he urged young people in particular to “change the world like Mary, bearing Jesus to others, taking care of others, building fraternal communities with others, realising dreams of peace.”
Meanwhile Italy’s Catholic bishops provided their first accounting of clergy sexual abuse. The report of the bishops’ conference only covered complaints that local Italian church authorities had received over the last two years, identifying 89 presumed victims and some 68 people accused.
But responding to a question during a press conference at the Vatican on Thursday, secretary-general of the bishops’ conference Bishop Giuseppe Baturi of Cagliari revealed that the conference was researching 613 files held at the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The Italian bishops limited the scope of their first report to evaluate the work of “listening centres” that were set up in dioceses since 2019 to receive complaints from victims. The numbers mentioned in the report paled in comparison to the tally of cases kept by Italy’s main survivors’ group, Rete L’Abuso, which estimates some 1 million victims .
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