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For four days in February 2019, the Church and the whole world watched as bishops from all over the globe, representatives of male and female religious orders, and some lay people all came together with Pope Francis. Their purpose: to face head-on the tragedy of clergy sexual abuse, and to work together on responsibility, accountability, and transparency.
This book brings you the full texts of that meeting. Here are the searing testimonies of victims. Here are the bishops calling on the whole episcopacy to recognize this not as a regional problem but a global one. Here is the Church struggling to take real first steps to come up with practical ways, in a canonical structure, to hold bishops and other leaders responsible. Full of clear, forceful language, this book is a must-have resource for every parish team to begin the process of moving forward.
“One of the problems in the Catholic Church’s handling of sexual abuse has been the almost exclusive focus on the legal and juridical aspects of the crisis. The volume Awareness and Purification represents a major landmark in the literature on the crisis and a decisive step on the path of addressing other dimensions of the crisis: theological, spiritual, ecclesiological. This book is a key part of the second phase of the institutional response to the crisis, as well as the testimony to a groundbreaking moment in the history of the pontificate of Pope Francis, with the extraordinary summit on abuse of February 2019 in the Vatican.”
Dr. Massimo Faggioli, Professor of Historical Theology, Villanova University
