Deo gratias, and thank you, Benedict

I had to sit back and read this three times for its full impact to sink in, and to deal with the emotions it brings forth. From the Boston Globe:

"I asked him to forgive me for hating his church and hating him," said Olan Horne, 48, of Lowell, who gave the pope a picture of himself as a 9-year-old boy, just before the Rev. Joseph E. Birmingham started molesting him. "He said, 'My English isn't good, but I want you to know that I can understand you, and I think I can understand your sorrow.' "

This is what so many have been waiting for, for so long. Not even John Paul, for all his courage and charity, could bring himself to do this. Benedict did it, God bless him. I can tell you from personal experience that you can read tens of thousands of words in the newspaper and in books about the clerical sex abuse scandal, but nothing, nothing, can match talking personally to human beings who suffered abuse, and their family members. I have faith that Benedict understands that now.

Thank you, Cardinal O'Malley, for making this happen. I pray that the seeds those victims planted in his heart bear good fruit. Soon.

UPDATE: Though as Ross Douthat, a Catholic, reminds us, let's not get too carried away about Benedict's meeting with victims. Excerpt:

But a meeting like yesterday's should have happened much, much sooner, and that it did not speaks to a fundamental problem facing the Catholic Church today -- the extent to which the Vatican aspires to remain above the grubby, frenetic fray of modern life, even as its local representatives adopt the worst habits of modern business executives and politicians. ... [The U.S. bishops] didn't need direction or wise counsel or even fraternal correction: They needed to be to be taken to the woodshed by an outraged, scandalized and engaged Papacy, and the discipline needed to happen swiftly and above all publicly. And because it didn't -- because in most cases bishops were allowed to get away with sacrificing the Body of Christ's most innocent members to protect, though of course only temporarily, their finances and prerogatives and reputation -- the Roman Catholic Church ended up looking like an institution prone to all of the evils of a modern government or corporation, but with none of the accountability.

Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and innocent as doves, Christ told his followers. But the Church during the sex scandals has often seemed like a company of serpents -- the American bishops, and the perverts they protected -- presided over by a company of otherworldly, out-of-touch doves. The Pope's words and actions this week are an important step toward changing that perception. But only a step.