Sex abuse files destroyed
A leading Roman Catholic cardinal admitted yesterday that files on priests who had sexually abused children had been destroyed as it emerged that more than 2000 ‘‘credible’’ cases had been reported to Rome since the accession of Pope Francis in 2013.
Speaking on the third day of a Vatican summit on paedophilia in the clergy, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, one of nine advisers to the Pope, expressed regret about the cover-up.
‘‘Files that could have documented the terrible deeds and named those responsible were destroyed or not even created,’’ Marx told 200 senior church officials convened by Francis. ‘‘Instead of the perpetrators, the victims were regulated and silence imposed on them.’’
Marx, head of the German bishops’ conference, called for changes to the legal code of secrecy imposed by the Vatican on sex abuse cases and for the publication of statistics about them to try to restore trust in the Catholic hierarchy.
The Vatican has been reluctant to quantify the extent of abuse, which came to light three decades ago in Ireland and Australia and has since emerged as a problem in many other countries.
Yet an Italian journalist has now found relevant figures on the Vatican’s website. They show that more than 2200 reports of abuse were received by the Vatican from March 2013, when Francis became pope, until the end of last year.
They include 518 cases in 2015, 415 in 2016 and 410 in 2017 – the majority involving alleged sex with minors – that were termed credible by local bishops, who were obliged to pass them to Rome.
The numbers were almost double the annual level during 2005-9, although it was not clear whether this meant there was more abuse or that people had become readier to report it.
The four-day summit, which will end today with a speech by the Pope, has brought to a head long-running anger about the Vatican’s failure over decades to acknowledge the extent of sex abuse within the clergy, let alone stamp it out.
Francis himself was strongly criticised after accusing victims of slandering their bishops during a trip to Chile early last year. He later admitted he was wrong.
In a sign that he is taking the issue seriously, he removed two top cardinals from his advisory council after they were implicated in sexual abuse. Last weekend he defrocked Theodore McCarrick, the former US cardinal who had been found guilty of sexually abusing minors and adult seminarians.
The summit began with prerecorded video testimony from five victims of abuse – including one woman who was made pregnant three times by a priest who began to abuse her when she was 15, beat her and forced her to have abortions. – The Times