The victims will speak of their experiences during evening prayers.

Details: The meeting begins on Thursday, bringing together 190 participants from around the world, including 114 presidents of bishops’ conferences or their delegates and representatives from 14 Eastern churches.

At a Vatican news conference on Monday, bishops reiterated the themes of the meeting — accountability and transparency — and its focus on the abuse of minors.

Context: The meeting comes as more cases of sexual abuse emerge from the shadows, including the long-overshadowed abuse of nuns by priests.

A Times investigation found that the crisis even goes beyond abuse to the suppression and shaming of homosexual priests.

Over the weekend: Pope Francis expelled a former cardinal and archbishop of Washington from the priesthood after the church found him guilty of sexually abusing minors and adult seminarians. The former cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, was the first Catholic leader at that level to be defrocked for sexual abuse, a turning point in the Vatican’s approach toward the scandal.