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Pope Francis issued a letter to Catholics around the world condemning the crime of priestly sexual abuse and its cover-up and demanding accountability, in response to new revelations in the United States of decades of misconduct by the Catholic Church.
Francis begged forgiveness for the pain suffered by victims and said lay Catholics must be involved in any effort to root out abuse and cover-up. He blasted the clerical culture that has been blamed for the crisis, with church leaders more concerned for their reputation than the safety of children.
The Vatican issued the three-page letter ahead of Francis' trip this weekend to Ireland, a once staunchly Roman Catholic country where the church's credibility has been devastated by years of revelations that priests raped and molested children with impunity and their superiors covered up for them.
Priestly sex abuse was always expected to dominate the trip, but the issue has taken on new gravity following revelations in the US that one of Francis' trusted cardinals, the retired archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, allegedly sexually abused and harassed minors as well as adult seminarians.
In addition, a grand jury report in Pennsylvania last week reported that at least 1,000 children were victims of some 300 priests over the past 70 years, and that generations of bishops failed repeatedly to take measures to protect their flock or punish the rapists.
He said, looking 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."
Francis, several years ago, scrapped a proposed Vatican tribunal to prosecute negligent bishops, and he has refused to act on credible reports from around the world of bishops who have failed to report abusers to police or otherwise botched handling cases, and yet remain in office.
Francis also has kept on his nine-member kitchen cabinet a Chilean cardinal long accused of covering up for pedophiles, an Australian cardinal currently on trial for historic sex abuse charges and a Honduran cardinal recently implicated in a gay priest sex scandal involving his trusted deputy.
In Chile, where a church sex abuse scandal exploded earlier this year, Francis strong-armed the country's 31 active bishops to offer their resignations en masse over their handling of abuse. So far he has accepted five of their resignations.
Unlike the US bishops' conference, which has referred only to "sins and omissions" in their handling of abuse in response to the Pennsylvania report, Francis labeled the misconduct "crimes."
Let us beg forgiveness for our own sins and the sins of others. An awareness of sin helps us to acknowledge the errors, the crimes and the wounds caused in the past and allows us, in the present, to be more open and committed along a journey of renewed conversion.
Pope Francis
It was the second Vatican response in recent days to the Pennsylvania grand jury report, which has sparked a crisis in confidence in the U.S. Catholic leadership and led to calls for ordinary faithful to withhold donations.
Last week, the Vatican spokesman issued a statement calling the abuses described in the report "criminal and morally reprehensible" and said there must be accountability for those who raped children "and those who permitted abuse to occur."
Subsequently, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops said it was planning to ask Francis to authorize a Vatican investigation into the McCarrick scandal, since it was apparently an open secret in some Catholic circles that the cardinal regularly invited seminarians to his New Jersey beach house, and into his bed.
The Vatican has long been loath to investigate its own, especially since many of the Vatican officials in charge in 2000 are still alive, albeit retired.
Any investigation into McCarrick that goes to the top would likely implicate St John Paul II and his closest advisers. They have already been implicated in the decades-long cover-up of one of the 20th century's most notorious priestly pedophiles, the late founder of the Legion of Christ, the Rev Marcial Maciel, but have never been held to account.
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