According to the Associated Press, Pope Francis, the world’s Catholic leader, on Wednesday expressed “shame” for himself and the Roman Catholic Church over the extent of child sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church.
He also acknowledged failures to prioritize the needs of victims.
“Unfortunately, the number of these cases is significant,” the pope said in a routine speech at the Vatican. I would like to express my sorrow and pain in this regard to the victims of the damage they have suffered.
He continued: “It also shames me, our shame, my shame at the inability of the church for a long time to put them at the center of their worries and concerns.”
The pope went on to urge all bishops and clergy of the church to take all necessary measures to prevent a recurrence of such dramatic events.
Earlier, Reuters reported that a study on corruption in the French Catholic Church showed that over the past 70 years, some 216,000 children had been sexually abused by church leaders. Since 1950, at least 3,000 abused children have worked in these places.
Of course, this is not the first time the Catholic Church has been involved in such scandals, and stories like this have been told many times in the last 20 years.
Even in the years 2000 to 2010, the Catholic Church was indifferent to the scandals that occasionally became public.
Other recent scandals involving the Catholic Church, including Canada, have exposed the deaths of hundreds of Indigenous children in church boarding schools and the discovery of mass graves.
