In this photo of June 29, 2017, clouds cover St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.(Photo: Gregorio Borgia, AP)

VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis on Wednesday opened a monthly meeting of bishops on the engagement of young Catholics, while his church is again criticized for hiding priests who raped and abused young adolescents.

An American bishop suggested postponing or canceling the synod, given the weak optics of the church hierarchy to discuss a demographic group wronged by the culture of concealment as the same hierarchy has been accused of favoring.

A Dutch bishop, scandalized by the fact that the Vatican did not respond to accusations that Francis himself had rehabilitated an American cardinal preacher, announced that he boycotted the meeting. Another American bishop asked Francis to let him stay at home to deal with the fallout of the scandal in his diocese.

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Despite the dark cloud that hangs over the synod, the organizers said they thought the rebirth of the scandal could still give the Vatican an opportunity to show that the Catholic Church is not limited to sexual abuse and concealment.

"The church is not represented by those who make mistakes. The church is more important and more fundamental than that, "said Cardinal Lorenzo Baldisseri, who is organizing the meeting from October 3 to 28.

The synod brings together 266 bishops from five continents to help young people find their vocation in life, whether secular or religious, at a time when religious marriages and religious vocations are plummeting in a large part of the world. l & # 39; West.

It is a synod following Francis' 2014 and 2015 meetings on family life, which inspired his controversial opening to the communion of divorced and civilly remarried Catholics.

This time, the bishops do not face an urgent problem, although the way they approach homosexuality will be the most closely watched topic. The Vatican's preparatory document made what is believed to be the very first reference in an official Vatican text to "LGBT".

In addition, the role of women in the church will be monitored, although no woman has the right to vote on the final document. Only a handful of women attend as experts or among the 34 young people selected, which constitutes a structural imbalance in the Vatican synodal process.

On the eve of the synod, a parallel conference was held in Rome by Catholic women's groups, who have long lobbied for better decision-making by the Church.

Students from Ursuline High School in Wimbledon, Great Britain, opened the lecture by reading the letter that they wrote to Francis to complain about the prejudices they feel as children. as young women in the church. They even criticized Francis' frequent use of the term "female genius" to describe the qualities he says are so necessary to the Church today.

"In the beginning," the feminine genius "sounded complementary, but then we wondered what it really meant," the girls wrote. "We think of the qualities that it evokes that are supposed to be inherent to the feminine condition, such as attention, education and receptivity. We believe that motherhood is really important, but for a number of reasons, only focusing on it has nothing to do with our woman's ambitions. "

The Synod's working paper indicates that young people in many secularized areas of the world simply do not want to have anything to do with the Catholic Church, because they find it not only uninteresting for their lives, but quite irritating.

"This demand does not arise from a non-critical or impulsive disregard, but is deeply rooted in serious and respectable reasons: sexual and economic scandals", for which they demand that the church apply a policy of tolerance zero.

But at the same time, the Vatican itself fueled the latest scandal by refusing to respond to the claims of a retired ambassador, Bishop Carlo Maria Vigano, that Francis and a long list of Vatican officials in front of him were concealed under cover of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. the former Archbishop of Washington.

In July, Francis removed McCarrick from his post as a cardinal after an investigation by the American church found that a claim that he had fondled a boy altar in the 1970s was credible. But it was common knowledge in the Vatican and the United States that McCarrick was putting pressure on the seminarians to go to bed with him.

The highlight of the meeting is that, for the first time, two bishops from mainland China are participating in a synod, the first tangible result of last month's landmark agreement between the Vatican and Beijing on bishops' appointments.

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