The Vatican opened a three-day conference Thursday on rebooting the Catholic priesthood amid a drop in vocations and a credibility crisis over the “depraved" clergy sex abuse and cover-up scandal.
The conference's organizer, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, said the symposium's aim is to break down a “clericalized” concept of the priesthood that is at the root of the scandal. He denounced that priests had assumed a perverted place of power over their flock, when the church is really the “People of God.”
