‘Spare no effort to avoid future abuse’

DUBLIN: Pope Francis said in a letter released yesterday by the Vatican that the Catholic Church had not dealt properly with “crimes” against children and needed to prevent sexual abuses from being “covered up and perpetuated”.

“We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them,” Francis wrote.

The 2 000-word letter addressed to the “People of God” marks one of Francis’s most direct attempts to address the painful abuse cases that have eroded the Roman Catholic Church’s credibility.

Francis did not lay out any concrete steps the Vatican would take, but acknowledged that systemic change was needed.

“Looking ahead to the future, no effort must be spared to create a culture able to prevent such abuses from happening, but also to prevent the possibility of their being covered up and perpetuated,” Francis wrote.

The letter was issued after the release of a Pennsylvania grand jury report that documented alleged abuse in the state by more than 300 priests against 1 000 children over seven decades. This weekend, Francis will travel to Ireland, a country scarred by decades of sexual abuse in parishes. In Dublin, many have demanded that Francis acknowledge during his trip the role that church higher-ups played in silencing victims and helping to keep paedophile priests on the job.

Though the Catholic Church has been dealing for more than three decades with publicly known cases of abuse, new cases in recent months have caused a wave of anger among Catholics, who say the Vatican has been slow to make meaningful reforms.