Pope acknowledges "bad fish" in Church
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VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict urged lapsed and lukewarm Roman Catholics on Thursday to rediscover their faith but acknowledged there are "bad fish" in the Church itself.
The pope made his comments at two large events before thousands of people in St. Peter's Square on the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, a far-reaching event in the Church's 2,000-year history.
"Recent decades have seen the advance of a spiritual desertification," he said in his sermon of a morning Mass, opening a worldwide "Year of Faith".
"We see it all around us ... the void has spread," he said.
"In these years, we have seen that there is discord in the vineyard of the Lord, we have seen that in the net of Peter (St Peter, the first apostle) there are bad fish, that human fragility exists even in the Church," he said.
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