How does the Catholic Church reconcile the holy Catholic Church with (the) Pope(s) asking for forgiveness? In the Creed, the profession of Christian Faith, an article of Faith is I believe in [...], the holy catholic Church/We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

How does the Catholic Church reconcile the holiness of the Church, with the Pope apologising and the clerical sex abuse scandal?




  cf. Ephesians 5:27
  (RSVCE)
  27 that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without
  spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without
  blemish.


Note: An article of Faith is not optional. It is belongs to the deposit of Faith that one must believe in order to be saved.



'[The Church] is a Mother, through whom we are born to a new life in God. A mother should be loved. She is holy with regard to her Founder, her works and her doctrine, but she is, nevertheless, composed of sinful men. It is our duty to make a positive contribution to the life of the Church, to help her progress along the way of faithful renewal. This is not accomplished by negative criticisms.' - Pope St. John Paul II [the Great], Homily in Barcelona, 7 November 1982.



'If we love the Church, there will never arise in us a morbid interest in airing, as faults of the Mother, the weaknesses of some of her children. The Church, the spouse of Christ, does not have to intone any 'mea culpa'. But we do: 'mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa'. The only true 'mea culpa' is a personal one, not the one which attacks the Church, pointing out and exaggerating the human defects which, in this holy mother, result from the presence in her men whose actions can go far astray, but which can never destroy - nor even touch - that which we call the original and constitutive holiness of the Church' - St. Josemaría Escrivá, In Love with the Church, quoted in In Conversations with God, 4/37.2 | Francis Fernandez
The Church is holy, but it is an institution which is populated by human beings, who can and do sin. This can be seen in the first few chapters of the book of Revelation where the Angel catalogs the sins of the seven churches.

In his apology, the Bishop of Rome is merely acknowledging the sinfulness, individually and collectively, of members of the church, even though the Church itself, as the Body of Christ is preserved Holy by the Spirit of God.

Perhaps this is a novel analogy. In my "day job", I work with shipping pallets, those devices constructed of wood (and other materials) which are used to unitize freight to make for easier handling. Now, some constituent parts of some wood pallets are defective: incomplete, broken, or rotten. But a Master Carpenter can take broken, defective, incomplete, and rotten members, and construct a pallet which, notwithstanding the apparent inadequacy of the parts, still performs the function it is intended to perform. So it is with the Church. The Master Carpenter takes the materials at hand, and combines and attaches them in a way to make a creation that admirably performs the mission to which it is called because the strong parts of one member compensate for the weak parts of another. Or, to put it another way, a fully functional pallet is made from less than functional parts. 

In just the same manner, the Master Carpenter takes human sinners, and uses them to make a Holy Church.