Senior Catholic clergy address sexual abuse crisis

Senior Catholic clergy from Europe convened in Rome to address the problem of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Vatican News reported Thursday.

The conference, organized by the Vatican Commission for the Protection of Minors, focuses on preventing abuse and supporting victims and survivors, the agency noted.

Highlighting the widespread nature of abuse in Catholic countries, with reports from Spain, Ireland, Britain, and France, the agency emphasized the importance of sharing experiences to tackle the issue.

"I think the better we are at sharing good practice, learning from our successes and failures, is better for all of us," said Bishop Paul Mason of the Catholic Church in England and Wales.

Mason cautioned against turning safeguarding victims into a bureaucratic process, adding: "As we stop seeing the question of safeguarding from a victim survivor's perspective, it's almost as if the heart goes out of the whole thing."

In October, the Vatican's safeguarding commission released its first annual report assessing church policies and measures to prevent abuse.

The report identified gaps in data on abuse prevalence, frustration over case handling in the canonical system, and disparities in child-sensitive counseling and care between Western and Eastern Europe.

The Catholic Church has faced numerous abuse scandals over the last three decades.

An independent inquiry in October 2021 revealed that French Catholic clergy carried out 216,000 instances of sexual abuse between 1950 and 2020.

In Germany, a 2018 report from the Bishops' Conference documented the abuse of 3,677 minors, mostly boys under 13, by 1,670 clergy members between 1946 and 2014.

In Ireland, the 2009 Ryan Commission found widespread child abuse in Catholic-run institutions from the 1930s to the 1970s.

More recently, a September 2023 University of Zurich study revealed over 1,000 cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests and religious order members in Switzerland since 1950, with many likely unreported.