Catholic Church’s Pope Francis will meet young student priests on Saturday on the fourth day of his visit to Panama for World Youth Day celebrations, a day after the clergy sex abuse scandal haunting his papacy returned to the spotlight.
The 82-year-old Argentine pontiff had earlier acknowledged at a general audience in August that the scandals of abuse and cover-up by Church leaders has caused a decline in vocations to the priesthood in Ireland, according to the Agence France Presse
Around the globe, there were 414,969 Catholic priests at the end of 2016, more than 800 less than in 2014, according to the Vatican. There were nearly 700 less people joining the priesthood over the same period.
Francis will visit Panama’s major seminary of San Jose, and address the ever present problem of dwindling recruitment to the priesthood, the AFP report said.
The pope and the Archbishop of Panama, Cardinal Jose Domingo Ulloa, will host a lunch at the seminary for 10 young people of different nationalities attending the WYD, a tradition at the mass gatherings, held every three years.
Francis will also preside over an evening vigil with an expected crowd of some 200,000 pilgrims at the three-kilometer long Metro Park on the outskirts of Panama.
(Agence France Presse)
