Pope Francis has acknowledged “with shame and repentance” the Catholic Church’s failure to act over sexual abuse by clerics against minors, writing “we showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.”
In a letter released by the Vatican on Monday, the Pope wrote, “I acknowledge once more the suffering endured by many minors due to sexual abuse, the abuse of power and the abuse of conscience perpetrated by a significant number of clerics and consecrated persons”.
“Looking back to the past, no effort to beg pardon and to seek to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient. Looking ahead to the future, no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such situations from happening, but also to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated.”
His letter comes in the wake of a Pennsylvania grand jury report that detailed decades of sexual abuses by priests and cover-ups by bishops. Pope Francis’s letter, which was addressed to all the world’s Catholics, directly referred to the Pennsylvania report which “detailed the experiences of at least 1,000 survivors, victims of sexual abuse, the abuse of power and of conscience at the hands of priests over a period of approximately 70 years.”Even though it can be said that most of these cases belong to the past, nonetheless as time goes on we have come to know the pain of many of the victims. We have realized that these wounds never disappear and that they require us forcefully to condemn these atrocities and join forces in uprooting this culture of death; these wounds never go away,” the Pope wrote.
