Francis invited the survivors, Juan Carlos Cruz, James Hamilton and Andres Murillo, to stay in the Santa Marta residence where he lives.

In a series of meetings that began in the Vatican on Friday, continued over the weekend and finished on Monday, Francis and the three survivors spoke privately.

One of the three survivors, Hamilton, tweeted that his more than two hours of conversation with Francis were "enormously constructive".

Murillo also tweeted about his meeting, saying he stressed the importance of understanding sexual abuse as "abuse of power" when he met with Francis.

The third man, Cruz, has not yet commented about his meeting, which was on Sunday.

However, he said in a tweet he was happy his friends were "calm and in peace and feeling very welcome by the Holy Father" after their visits with Francis.

Before the meetings, Francis vowed to ask for the men's forgiveness for not believing Bishop Juan Barros covered up the abuse meted out to them by Fr Fernando Karadima who is held to be the Chilean church's most notorious sex predator.

Francis initially believed Barros and, while in Chile at the beginning of the year, defended him publicly several times.

He even said the accusations against Barros were "calumnies."

However shortly after returning to Rome, Francis decided to send Archbishop Charles Scicluna - a former top prosecutor on sex abuse crimes - to investigate the allegations.

After reading Scicluna's 2,300-page report, he invited the three survivors to the Vatican to meet with him.

The Vatican says Francis hopes to use the meetings with the three survivors as a "fundamental step forward" in ridding the church of abuse.

Source

• ABC News
• Crux
• The Salt Lake Tribune
• Image: The Telegraph

Scicluna will travel to New York next week to interview the victim, Juan Carlos Cruz. The victim is at the centre of a scandal involving Pope Francis.

Cruz says a letter he wrote in 2015 asking Pope Francis to listen to his testimony about clergy abuse and its subsequent cover-up has been ignored.

The Associated Press (AP) claims Francis received the victim's letter in 2015, which detailed how a priest sexually abused him and how other Chilean clergy ignored it.

The AP statements contradict Francis's insistence that no victims had come forward to denounce the coverup.

If the APs statements are true, they could undermine Francis's assertions of "zero tolerance" for sexual abuse and those who seek to cover it up.

The accusations against Francis emerged last month during his trip to South America.

Francis said he had not heard from any victims about Bishop Juan Barros, who is accused of witnessing and ignoring abuse perpetrated by Fr. Fernando Karadima.

His response that the accusations were slanderous sparked an outcry in Chile.

Marie Collins, who was a founding member of Pope Francis's Commission for the Protection of Minors but who resigned in early 2017, says his handling of the Chilean abuse survivor's letter has "definitely undermined credibility, trust and hope" in Francis.

"He has said all the right things and he has expressed all the right views on abuse, and the harm and the hurt, but in this case at least it would seem his actions have not matched the words, and that is sad," she says.

Collins says she personally handed the letter from Cruz to Cardinal Sean O'Malley, who heads the Commission for the Protection of Minors.

"Cardinal O'Malley said he would hand it to the pope, and he told us later he had done so and that he had discussed the concerns with the pope himself," Collins says.

Francis told reporters on a flight back from South America that no victims had come forward to him about the case.

Source

• The Spec
• Crux Now
• The Star
• Image: Duna