Pope Francis has begged forgiveness from the victims of sexual abuse by priests, at his first meeting with the victims since his election.
He condemned the Church's "complicity" in hiding the abuse and said it must "weep and make reparation" for the "grave crimes" committed by clerics.
He met the six victims, two each from Ireland, Britain and Germany, after a private morning Mass in the Vatican.
The Church has been criticised after a series of abuse scandals worldwide.
At a press conference on Monday, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said Pope Francis had spent half an hour with each of the victims who visited him. He said the Pope had also greeted the group at a dinner on Sunday evening.
'Sacrilegious cult'The Pope said the abuses had been "camouflaged with a complicity that cannot be explained".
He apologised to victims for the "sins and grave crimes of clerical sexual abuse", which he described as "a sacrilegious cult" that insulted God.
He added: "I beg your forgiveness, too, for the sins of omission on the part of Church leaders who did not respond adequately [to reports of sex abuse]."
None of the six victims made public statements after their discussions with the Pope, the BBC's Alan Johnston in Rome reports.
Analysis: David Willey, BBC News, Rome
Pope Francis' heartfelt and humble apology on behalf of his church to six European victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clerics may go some way towards meeting criticism by victims' associations in many countries that he had failed to address adequately the scandal that predator priests have caused.
As usual, Pope Francis found original words to express his deep feelings of shame and sorrow. "Someone realised that Jesus was looking," he told the three men and three women invited to a private Mass in the Vatican guesthouse where he lives.
The Pope then spent the entire morning talking individually with them about the "life-long scars" left by what he compared to a "sacrilegious cult". Victims of clerical sexual abuse in Pope Francis' native Argentina have complained that none were invited to this unprecedented meeting, to which there was no media access.
Some victims' groups have criticised Pope Francis for having failed to meet their representatives sooner.
The Pope's predecessor, Pope Benedict, met abuse victims several times on trips outside Italy.
"It seems as though this is more of a public relations event for the Vatican and for Pope Francis," said Barbara Blaine, a member of an abuse survivors' group.
She said the Pope had not done enough to protect vulnerable children.
Former envoy convictedMany survivors of abuse by priests are also angry at what they see as the Vatican's failure to punish senior officials who have been accused of covering up scandals.
Pope Francis last year strengthened the Vatican's laws against child abuse.
He has also set up a committee, whose members include a cardinal and an abuse victim, to draw up plans to tackle exploitation by priests.
The committee is expected to announce on Monday that it will expand to include more members from the developing world, Reuters news agency reports.
Last month, a Vatican tribunal convicted Josef Wesolowski, a former papal envoy to the Dominican Republic, of sex abuse and stripped him of the priesthood.
Wesolowski is the highest-ranking Vatican official to have been investigated over abuse claims.
Pope Francis has condemned the mafia's "adoration of evil" at a mass in Calabria, the southern Italian base of the 'Ndrangheta crime syndicate.
The Pope said the gangsters were effectively "excommunicated" - or banished - in the eyes of the Church.
Earlier, the Pope visited the jailed father of a three-year-old boy who had been killed in an apparent mob hit over an unpaid drug debt.
The Pope has repeatedly spoken out against organised crime and corruption.
His latest condemnation, delivered before a crowd of tens of thousands, described the 'Ndrangheta as the "adoration of evil and contempt of the common good".
"Those who in their lives follow this path of evil, as mafiosi do, are not in communion with God," the Reuters news agency quoted him as saying. "They are excommunicated."
Meeting with prisonersThe 'Ndrangheta is a network of clans in the "toe" of Italy that dominates the country's cocaine trade.
It is one of the most powerful mafia organisations in Italy, along with the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Neapolitan Camorra.
Earlier on Saturday, the Pope visited a prison to meet the jailed relatives of "Coco" Campolongo, a three-year-old boy who was killed along with his grandfather in an execution-style shooting in Calabria.
"It must never again happen that a child suffers in this way," the Pope said.
The Pope also met hundreds of other inmates at Castrovillari prison, many of whom are serving time for mafia-related crimes.
The AFP news agency reports that many of the prisoners wept as the Pope greeted them.
Like every journalist who has ever been on a trip with the pope on board Shepherd One, as his plane is known, I am in no doubt as to the significance of the in-flight press conference. Being part of the Vatican press entourage means you're up close to the pontiff, but you hardly ever get an unscripted quote – even Francis is very carefully handled by media managers.
But the traditional papal press conference in the clouds is a rare chance for him to speak off the cuff, and yesterday he did. "A priest who has sex with a child betrays God," he told assembled journalists. "A priest needs to lead children to sanctity, and children trust him. But instead he abuses them, and this is terrible. I compare it to a satanic mass."
This last comparison is significant. While Pope Francis is a man of gestures, he knows there are some issues on which words really count, and none more so than the vexed, and continuing, issue of child abuse.
The former Argentinian cardinal spelled it out in a way all clerics – however far from Rome and however out of touch with the current clean-up operation – will understand. No Catholic priest in his right mind would think of officiating at a satanic mass, a ritual that inverts the worship of God to pay homage instead to the devil. Satanic masses have their roots in medieval times, and have historically been a way of both ridiculing and undermining the authority of the church. They are also the biggest shock tactic imaginable to any Catholic cleric: they are diametrically opposed to everything the church stands for: the ultimate evil.
It is still, of course, strange indeed that any priest would think that performing a satanic mass is worse than committing child abuse, or that it's worse than covering up when another priest has committed child abuse. But, weird though it sounds, priests with that mindset do exist in the Catholic church, even in the 21st century. So although he was talking to journalists on his flight home from the Middle East, Pope Francis was really speaking to the ordained men he leads – and in the clearest possible terms, with a comparison any one of them could understand. There is no excuse any more, he was saying. Don't think you are ever, in any circumstances, protecting the church by covering up these crimes, because you aren't. "A priest who does this betrays the body of the Lord," he said.
These words show that Pope Francis means to tackle the paedophilia problem head-on. It won't be easy, and he must know that better than anyone – as the UN said in a report on the Vatican's handling of the crisis, preserving the church's reputation has been placed above the protection of children, time and again, over recent years. The attitude the UN identified is systemic: it is ingrained into many clerics that cover-ups are better than admissions of guilt for the church, and it is that mindset that Francis has to change.
Any priest who betrays the body of the Lord, like any priest who performs a satanic mass, isn't really a priest at all. As Francis said, the time has come for zero tolerance.
His wider reforms are, slowly, beginning to change the Catholic church, and in the long term there is much to hope for. But nothing is really possible until the cancer of paedophilia within it has been properly excised. Francis has picked up his scalpel and shown he means business. We all have to hope now that the operation – which won't be easy – is a success.
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