Portugal’s Catholic sex abuse: Over 4,800 children

LISBON, Portugal — More than 4,800 individuals may have been victims of child sex abuse in the Portuguese Catholic Church and 512 alleged victims have already come forward with their stories, an expert panel looking into historic abuse in the church said Monday.

Senior Portuguese church officials had previously claimed that only a handful of cases had occurred.

Senior clergymen sat in the front row of the auditorium where panel members read out some of the harrowing accounts of alleged abuse included in their final report. There were vivid and shocking descriptions.

The Independent Committee for the Study of Child Abuse in the Catholic Church, set up by Portuguese bishops just over a year ago, looked into alleged cases from 1950 onward. Portuguese bishops are due to discuss the report at an extraordinary meeting on March 3.

The statute of limitations has expired on most of the alleged cases. Only 25 allegations were passed to prosecutors, the panel said.

The report, criticized by some as long overdue, came four years after Pope Francis gathered church leaders from around the world at the Vatican to address the sex abuse crisis in the church.

That meeting was held more than 30 years after the scandal first erupted in Ireland and Australia and 20 years after it hit the United States.

The head of the Portuguese Bishops Conference, Bishop José Ornelas, asked the victims for forgiveness and apologized for the church having failed to grasp the scale of the problem.

Child sex abuse is a “heinous crime,” Ornelas said in a statement he read out later Monday, adding: “It is an open wound which pains and embarrasses us.”