WASHINGTON – Pope Benedict XVI prayed with tearful victims of clergy sex abuse in a chapel Thursday, an extraordinary gesture from a pontiff who has made atoning for the great shame of the U.S. church the cornerstone of his first papal trip to America.

Benedict’s third day in the U.S. began with a packed open-air Mass celebrated in 10 languages at a baseball stadium, and it included a speech to Roman Catholic college and university presidents.

But the real drama happened privately, in the chapel of the papal embassy between events.

The Rev. Federico Lombardi, a papal spokesman, said that Benedict and Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley met with a group of five or six clergy sex abuse victims for about 25 minutes, offering them encouragement and hope.

“They prayed together. Also, each of them had their own individual time with the Holy Father,” Lombardi said. “Some were in tears.”

Many more than 4,000 priests have been accused of molesting minors in the U.S. since 1950, and the church has paid out more than $2 billion, much of it in just the last six years, after the case of a serial molester in Boston gained national attention and inspired many victims to step forward. Six dioceses have been forced into bankruptcy because of abuse costs.

Expected to address the problem only once during his six-day trip – at a Mass with priests in New York City on Saturday – Benedict has instead returned to the issue repeatedly, beginning in a news conference on the flight from Rome to the U.S.

He has called the crisis a cause of “deep shame,” pledged to keep pedophiles out of the priesthood and decried the “enormous pain” that communities have suffered from such “gravely immoral behavior” by priests.

On Wednesday, he told bishops the problem has sometimes been very “badly handled” and said it was their God-given duty to heal the wounds caused by abuse. He asked each parishioner at Mass on Thursday “to do what you can to foster healing and reconciliation, and to assist those who have been hurt.”