Pope Francis met yesterday with five adults who were abused by Catholic clergy when they were children and vowed to hold responsible all involved in the crime or cover-ups.

While the Pope has met with victims of sexual abuse in Rome, this was his first meeting with them on a foreign tour. Of the cities visited by Pope Francis, who was ending his six-day US tour early today, Philadelphia has been the most publicly scarred in the US clergy abuse scandal.

“I have in my heart these stories of suffering of those youth that were sexually abused,” Pope Francis said.

“The people who had the responsibility to take care of these tender ones violated that trust and caused them great pain. God weeps for the sexual abuse of children.”

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said that at the morning meeting in Philadelphia’s seminary, the Pope “expressed participation in their suffering and pain and shame.”

“He renewed the Church’s commitment to listen to victims and treat them with justice, to punish the guilty and that crimes of abuse would be fought with an effective program of prevention in the Church and in society,” the spokesman said.

Reports that priests had sexually abused children and bishops had covered up their actions emerged in 2002, growing into a scandal that rocked the Roman Catholic Church in the US and many other countries.

Victims’ groups say the Church has not done enough. As many as 100,000 US children may have been the victims of clerical sex abuse, insurance experts said in a paper presented at a Vatican conference in 2012.

The people responsible for these tender ones violated that trust

Pope Francis spoke to his bishops before heading on to visit a group of inmates at a Pennsylvania prison and saying Mass for a crowd of about 1.5 million people. The first Latin American pope has focused his US trip on immigration, urging Americans to lay aside any hostility to newcomers and addressing adoring crowds of Latino Catholics in his native Spanish.

Pope Francis, who has emphasised humility and service over pomp and circumstance since being elected pope two years ago, also travelled to Philadelphia’s Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility, where inmates made the hand-carved wooden chair he will use during the day’s closing Mass.

Pope Francis talks with prisoners at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in Philadelphia, yesterday.

That open-air Mass was taking place under tight security. There was a heavy police presence around Philadelphia, with large stretches of downtown closed to vehicle traffic and pedestrians entering a 2.6 km corridor being subject to search.

The leader of the world’s 1.2 billion-member Roman Catholic Church has met crowds at each step of his six-day visit, which included the first-ever papal address to Congress and a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York, before his arrival in Philadelphia on Saturday.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia has been the subject of multiple damaging grand jury reports relating to the abuse scandal, which by the Church’s own estimate has involved 6,400 clergy credibly accused between 1950 and 2013 nationwide. Some 12 US dioceses have filed for bankruptcy in part due to hefty settlements – over $3 billion nationwide – paid out to victims.

Clergy sex abuse victims and their advocates welcomed the Pope’s more direct approach yesterday .