Pope Preaches About America’s Hope and Pain
Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass Thursday in a venue different from his customary surroundings, leading a service at the Washington Nationals baseball stadium on the latest stop of his American tour.
Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass Thursday in a venue slightly different from his customary surroundings, leading a service at the Washington Nationals baseball stadium on the latest stop of his American tour. The pope took the opportunity during his Washington, D.C., visit to address some of the blights on the U.S. historical record with regard to Americans’ past failures to love their neighbors as themselves.
WAIT BEFORE YOU GO...AP via Breitbart.com:
The pope, wearing scarlet vestments, led the service from an altar erected in centerfield of the recently inaugurated baseball stadium.
“Americans have always been a people of hope,” he said. “Your ancestors came to this country with the experience of finding new freedom and opportunity,” Benedict said.
“To be sure, this promise was not experienced by all the inhabitants of this land; one thinks of the injustices endured by the native American peoples and by those brought here forcibly from Africa as slaves.”
He turned for a third day to the clergy sex abuse scandal that rocked the American church, saying “no words of mine could describe the pain and harm inflicted by such abuse.”
He called for healing and reconciliation and assistance to the victims.
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