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"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,"
Francis said in unprepared remarks during his weekly general
audience in St. Peter's Square.
"I ask you for forgiveness," he said before tens of thousands of
people, who broke into applause.
The pope then read his prepared address and did not elaborate,
but there have been two scandals involving the Vatican and the
Church in Rome in the past two weeks.
On Oct. 3, a Polish monsignor 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 high-profile coming
out 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 gays.
After he was fired, Charamsa gave interviews to Spanish and
Italian media in which he criticized 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 a well-to-do neighborhood 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 prostitutes.
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.
(Reporting by Philip Pullella; Editing by Tom Heneghan)
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