Pope ‘shamed’ by church’s failures over child abuse in France

Pope ‘shamed’ by church’s failures over child abuse in France

Pope Francis has said he is “shamed” by the Catholic church’s failure to deal with paedophile priests in France, as one of his closest advisers pushed for an inquiry into the sexual abuse of children by clergy in Italy.

A landmark report on Tuesday found that at least 330,000 children were sexually abused by clergy and lay members of church institutions in France over the past 70 years.

The pope conceded that the church had failed to put the needs of victims first in what was considered to be one of his strongest condemnations of child sexual abuse in the Catholic church to date.

“There is, unfortunately, a considerable number,” he said during his weekly audience at the Vatican on Wednesday. “I would like to express to the victims my sadness and pain for the trauma that they suffered. It is also my shame, our shame, for the incapacity of the church for too long to put them at the centre of its concerns.”

Francis urged all bishops to take action to ensure “similar dramas are not repeated” while calling on Catholics in France to work towards ensuring that the church is “a safe place for all”.

The independent inquiry was France’s first major reckoning with clerical child sexual abuse. It found an estimated 216,000 children were victims of sexual violence by French Catholic priests, deacons and other clergy from 1950 to 2020. When considering lay members of the church, such as teachers at Catholic schools, the figure rose to at least 330,000.

In the wake of the damning findings, Hans Zollner, a German priest and close adviser to Pope Francis, urged Italian bishops to “find the courage to investigate” clerical child abuse.

“The Catholic church in other countries must now find the same courage as in France. I hope in Italy too,” Zollner said in an interview with La Repubblica. “The church is not immaculate, unfortunately it is also made up of sin and crimes.”

Zollner was on the organising committee of a Vatican summit, held in February 2019, to address paedophilia within the Catholic church. It was the first time presidents of episcopal conferences had come together to discuss the issue, although the closing speech by Pope Francis was criticised by abuse victims for failing to strike the tone of taking strong action against paedophile priests.

Although the scandal of wide-ranging abuse and cover-up allegations has dealt a severe blow to the reputation of the Catholic church in the US, Ireland, Chile, Australia, and now France, there are many countries, including Italy, where the issue has been mostly buried.

In January 2019, a UN commission condemned Italy for being complicit in protecting paedophile priests from criminal charges and called for the country to devise a national plan to prevent the sexual abuse of children.

“We want an inquiry here too, but the pope has never asked for one,” said Francesco Zanardi, who set up Rete l’Abuso, Italy’s only network of clerical abuse victims.

“The numbers in France are frightening but here we could have up to 1 million victims. Simply hearing ‘I’m sorry’ is laughable.”

On Wednesday, a Vatican tribunal absolved a former altar boy of charges that he molested a younger boy in the Vatican’s youth seminary, in the first clergy sexual abuse trial to be heard by the pope’s criminal court.

The three-judge panel acquitted Rev Gabriele Martinelli of some charges and ruled others could not be punished. The former rector of the seminary, the Rev Enrico Radice, was similarly absolved.

The scandal over alleged abuses in the residence erupted in 2017 when former altar boys went public with allegations of misconduct by Martinelli and a cover-up by the seminary superiors. Their accusations greatly undermined Francis’s pledge of “zero tolerance” for abuse since the acts allegedly occurred on Vatican territory.

Martinelli had denied he molested the presumed victim, LG, saying the allegations were unfounded, implausible and the fruit of “jealousy” by other seminarians because he was eventually ordained a priest. Radice denied knowing anything about abuse or of impeding the investigation.