Headline: Pope Francis Ends Landmark Meeting by Calling for ‘All-Out Battle’ to Fight Sexual Abuse

In the article from The New York Times, Jason Horowitz and Elizabeth Dias analyze Pope Francis’s meeting with the Vatican and the public statements he released after the fact. The meeting was specifically designed to focus on the issue of clerical sex abuse in the Catholic church. At the end of the conference, the pope offered some words to member of the Catholic church. Horowitz and Dias examine the fact that while he designed a meeting to address sex abuse, he offered no concrete solutions that came out of the meeting. The article criticizes that fact. 

I thought that this article did good job of giving background information of the situation. While I know about Catholic abuse scandals, I thought that they did a really good job of integrating information of the event with background information. For example, the article states “Pope Francis had sought to get the church’s leaders on the same page for the first time, summoning them to the meeting in September, decades after the sexual abuse crisis first exploded in the United States.” I thought that this sentence worked to incorporate facts about the Catholic church while putting in the context of today’s actions. 

I also wanted to look at this article because I thought it was interesting that it was written by two people. I read through looking for inconsistencies in writing styles, not the small details but in the large issues that would pull me out of the story. I think they did a good job of merging their two styles. That being said some co-authored stories are written by one but researched by two and that could have also been the case here. In that case, I would be really interested to see how that worked and the dynamics of a working relationship like that. Moreover, I chose this article, because I find the pope’s responsibility very interesting in a case like this. I always used to think about the pope as just the leader of a church, but it is interesting to see all of the responsibility that comes along with that. He is responsible for people in countries that he doesn’t live in and rarely visits and I think that is interesting. I also think that the issue is of utmost importance. 

One of the things that I think the article could have been stronger at was getting a quote that talked more about what people wished would have come out of the meeting. People get upset because of the lack of action and yet the article does not specify the kind of action that people wished they had taken.