(Rome, Thursday, February 21, 2019) The highly anticipated meeting on child protection opened at the Vatican on Thursday morning, with powerful testimony from victims, one of whom told the bishops flatly, “You are the physicians of the soul and yet, with rare exceptions, you have been transformed - in some cases - into murderers of the soul, into murderers of the faith.” The man who spoke those words was Juan Carlos Cruz, the Chilean victim Pope Francis had once accused of calumny. Cruz also had words of praise for Pope Francis’s turnaround in addressing the crisis in his native country. “I ask you, please collaborate with justice, because you have a special care for the victims, so that what is happening in Chile, that is, what the Pope is doing in Chile, be repeated as a model in other countries of the world,” Cruz said. Not everyone takes so sanguine a view of Pope Francis’s efforts in Chile, but that is another matter. The other victims chose to remain anonymous, but their stories are no less harrowing than Cruz’s. One story that participants heard was from a victim of a priest, who was abused from the age of fifteen. “I got pregnant three times and he made me have an abortion three times, quite simply because he did not want to use condoms or contraceptives,” she said. “At first I trusted him so much that I did not know he could abuse me. I was afraid of him, and every time I refused to have sex with him, he would beat me.” The stories came from victims of different ages and sexes and states of life, from all around the world. “I was far more moved by what I heard this morning than I expected to be,” the Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, told journalists at the press briefing that followed the morning sessions. Pope Francis, for his part, presented the participants with an unexpected list of 21 “points for reflection”. Francis distributed the list to the 190 participants from all around the world at the end of his own opening remarks. “The holy People of God look to us, and expect from us not simple and predictable condemnations, but concrete and effective measures to be undertaken,” Pope Francis said. “We need to be concrete.” Though they were presented as conversation-starters, one journalist at the press briefing following the morning sessions noted that “reflection points” from the boss are rarely just that. Several of the suggestions are things that are already standard practice in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Ireland, as well as in many other places in the developed world. “[These points for reflection] are a simple point of departure that came from you and now return to you,” Pope Francis told participants on Thursday morning. “They are not meant to detract from the creativity needed in this meeting.” How they will affect the direction in which the meeting is to go, is something that remains to be seen. Day One, however, followed the programme, which included presentations during the morning sessions from the Archbishop of Manila, Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, and from the adjunct secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Archbishop Charles Scicluna. Archbishop Coleridge described Cardinal Tagle’s presentation to journalists gathered for the daily press briefing as a “meditation” and “not what I expected, but, better for that.” Archbishop Scicluna’s was “very different” more practical. “What we had from the two men,” Archbishop Coleridge explained, “was vision and tactics — and this was a way of saying that we need both.” The full texts of all the presentations are available — shortly after delivery — at the meeting’s official website: www.pbc2019.org. Below, please find the 21 points for reflection Pope Francis distributed to participants on Thursday morning.