“The rite of the imposition of ashes serves as the beginning of this return journey. It exhorts us to do two things: to return to the truth about ourselves and to return to God and to our brothers and sisters.”

Cardinal O’Malley thanked the commission members and the Portuguese bishops who launched the study, but mostly the victims and survivors who came forward, many telling their stories for the first time.

There is a new willingness in the Catholic Church, modeled by Pope Francis, to hold its disagreements in fruitful tension, allowing the Spirit to show new paths forward that transcend those divisions.

The history of the church was nothing close to a steady, if interrupted, march to eliminate slavery.

In a sense, the pope’s messages all amount to the same thing: Hello and God bless you. But there is a care in the language that is striking.

Pope Francis hit out strongly against the way people have sought to manipulate Benedict’s death. “People who instrumentalize such a good person, [a man] of God, almost I would say a holy father of the church, have no ethics,” he said. “They are of a party, not of the church.”