My students at a Catholic women's college have taught me—and can teach the rest of the church—a great deal about living in a church marred by the scandal of sexual abuse by clergy.

A Vatican tribunal absolved a former altar boy of charges that he molested a younger boy in the Vatican’s youth seminary, ruling Wednesday in the first clergy sexual abuse trial to be heard by the pope’s criminal court.

The Catholic Church’s inability to make victims of abuse their top concern is a cause for intense shame, Pope Francis said.

You would think that “sex abuse” could not become commonplace, but in our petitions, it has—until something like France happens.

Pope Francis prayed for the tens of thousands of victims of clerical sexual abuse in France and urged the Catholic Church in the country to “undertake a path of redemption.”

The 2,500-page document was issued as the Catholic Church in France, like in other countries, seeks to face up to shameful secrets that were long covered up.