Reuters/Philadelphia

Pope Francis took time out from the crowds in Philadelphia on Sunday to visit a prison, telling inmates that all people need to be “cleansed” and they should not view their confinement as exclusion from society.
Meeting 60 men and 11 women prisoners in a drab room at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, the Argentine-born pope stressed their time behind bars was meant to rehabilitate them. He then shook hands with each inmate, blessing all and hugging some who rose to greet him.
Francis has emphasised outreach to the poor, to immigrants and those on the margins of society throughout his first visit to the United States. He lunched with homeless people in Washington on Thursday after addressing the US congress.
“All of us need to be cleansed, to be washed, all of us, and me in the first place,” the Argentina-born pope said in his native Spanish at the prison, which houses some 2,800 inmates.
“This time in your life can only have one purpose: to give you a hand in getting back on the right road,” he told the inmates and assembled family members. “All of us are part of that effort.”
When he entered the hall, prison officials led Francis to an upholstered wooden chair that inmates had made for his visit. He pointed to the seat, gave the waiting inmates a thumbs-up sign and then blew them a kiss after he sat in it.
“The chair is very beautiful,” he told them. “Thank you very much for the hard work.”
Mildred Nawa, 51, a nurse from Reading, Pennsylvania, said she was glad the pope was meeting with prisoners.
“I think that is what he should be doing, reaching out to the people who really need him. I think he is more about living by like Jesus than focusing on dogma,” she said in downtown Philadelphia while waiting for a papal Mass later on Sunday. “I think it’s a great example for priests, for all of us.”
Francis, who has called for the global abolition of the death penalty and also has spoken against lengthy prison terms, has made prison visits a regular part of his travels. He has counseled teenagers in juvenile detention in Brazil and in Bolivia, he kissed inmates in the country’s most violent prison.
Maria Lazar, a 70-year-old Catholic from Harleysville, Pennsylvania, also on her way to the Mass, said the visit underlined the pope’s message of tolerance.
“It’s about forgiveness, it reminds people that no matter what you have done on your life you can always turn back,” Lazar said. “And it helps remind us not to judge, that we all have our issues.”
 Pope Francis met yesterday with five adults who were abused by Catholic clergy when they were children and vowed to hold responsible all involved in the crime or cover-ups.
While the pope has met with victims of sexual abuse in Rome, this was his first meeting with them on a foreign tour.
“I have in my heart these stories of suffering of those youth that were sexually abused,” Francis told bishops.
“The people who had the responsibility to take care of these tender ones violated that trust and caused them great pain. God weeps for the sexual abuse of children.”
Vatican spokesman father Federico Lombardi said that at the morning meeting in Philadelphia’s seminary the pope “expressed participation in their suffering and pain and shame.”
“He renewed the Church’s commitment to listen to victims and treat them with justice, to punish the guilty and that crimes of abuse would be fought with an effective programme of prevention in the Church and in society,” the spokesman said.
Reports that priests had sexually abused children and bishops had covered up their actions emerged in 2002, growing into a scandal that has rocked the Roman Catholic Church.
Victims’ groups say the church has not done enough. As many as 100,000 US children may have been the victims of clerical sex abuse, insurance experts said in a paper presented at a Vatican conference in 2012.
Francis spoke to his bishops, before heading on to visit a group of inmates at a Pennsylvania prison and saying Mass for an expected crowd of 1.5mn people.
The first Latin American pope has focused his US trip on immigration, urging Americans to lay aside any hostility to newcomers and addressing adoring crowds of Latino Catholics in Spanish.
The leader of the world’s 1.2bn-member Roman Catholic Church has met crowds at each step of his six-day visit, which included the first-ever papal address to Congress and a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, before his arrival in Philadelphia on Saturday.
The archdiocese of Philadelphia has been the subject of multiple damaging grand jury reports relating to the abuse scandal, which by the Church’s own estimate has had 6,400 credibly accused clergy between 1950 and 2013 nationwide.
Some 12 US dioceses have filed for bankruptcy in part due to hefty settlements paid out to victims, which have topped $3bn nationwide.