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| Pope Francis acknowledged failings in the Catholic Church over the child abuse scandal |
Pope
Francis condemned Monday the "atrocities" revealed by a far-reaching
US report into clerical child sex abuse in the state of Pennsylvania issued
last week.
"In
recent days, a report was made public which detailed the experiences of at
least a thousand survivors... the abuse of power and of conscience at the hands
of priests," the pope said in a letter made public by the Vatican.
"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," he
said.
"We
have realised that these wounds never disappear and that they require us
forcefully to condemn these atrocities and join forces in uprooting this
culture of death," he added.
A
devastating US grand jury report published last week decried a systematic
cover-up by the Catholic Church.
The grand
jury said that more than 1,000 child victims were identifiable, but that the actual
number was "in the thousands".
The report
is thought to be the most comprehensive to date into abuse in the US church
since The Boston Globe first exposed paedophile priests in Massachusetts in
2002.
Calling for
"solidarity" with the victims and a fight against "spiritual
corruption", Pope Francis said "no effort to beg pardon and to seek
to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient".
"With
shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not
where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realising
the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives," he
said.
The Vatican
had already expressed its "shame and sorrow" after the publication of
the US report, but Pope Francis's letter on Monday went further.
"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," he said.
Pope
Francis ended the letter by exhorting Catholics to "fasting and
prayer", in order to "open our ears to the hushed pain felt by
children, young people and the disabled".
It's not
the first time that Francis, who became pope in 2013, has had to react to the
scandal of child abuse within the Church.
At the end
of July he accepted the resignation of prominent US cardinal Theodore
McCarrick, who has been accused of sexually abusing a teenager nearly five
decades ago.
Among
senior church members in the US forced to resign for protecting paedophile
priests were the late cardinal Bernard Law in Boston and cardinal Roger Mahony
in Los Angeles.
The case of
cardinal Law was the subject of a huge investigation by the Boston Globe, which
won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize and was subsequently turned into an
Oscar-winning film, "Spotlight".
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