When sexual abuse in the Church is counted in the thousands

(ANSA) – Cases of badual abuse there are thousands of minors involved worldwide by churchmen, and even if they are not quantified, the Church works in this direction. Monseor Charles Scicluna, "promoter of justice" in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, announced today at the top of the protection of minors that even though there was no overall statistics and updated, she was preparing a report that should be released. "in the coming months", accompanied by contextual notes.

In June 2009, Cardinal Claudio Hummes, prefect of the clergy, told the Spanish Catholic weekly Vida Nueva that "the Church can not turn a blind eye to cases of pedophilia among its own priests, who in four dioceses heal over a hundred. "

Corrected what was said on January 5, 2008 in the Osservatore Romano, according to which "only 1% of priests do not face problems of moral or badual behavior". In September 2009, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, then Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations in Geneva, told the Human Rights Council that, according to internal investigations, only 1.5 to 5% of Catholic clergy I have been involved in badual abuse against children.

For Scicluna, these estimates will be oversized with regard to the number of complaints of clerics accused of abuses committed by dioceses belonging to different dioceses between the Holy Office and the former Holy Office between 2001 and 2010: they will have involved 3 000 priests, about a tenth of whom will be of good race.

According to data from the Catholic Church, against an average population of approximately 44,000 clergy in the world, the perpetrators of abuse against minors will give rise to about 0.67%, of which 0.067% to be a true pedigree. .

Among the various "national" cases, some stand out. The most resounding remains that of the diocese of Boston, revealed by the press of 2002: 600 articles, 1,000 cases of children victims of badual and psychological abuse, 70 pediatric priests and a cardinal line of sight, the disappeared Bernard Francis Law, "repaired" to the Vatican in 2004 as archpriest of the Basilica Santa Mara Mayor.

The case was told in the film, awarded by the Oscar "Spotlight". Last year, however, the Pennsylvania grand jury certified 40 more than 300 abusive healings and more than 1,000 victims, as well as systematic cover-ups that led to the resignation of Washington Cardinal Donald Wuerl. Similar investigations were conducted in 15 US states.

Over the years in Ireland, two independent government investigations have uncovered the silence system: the Ryan report has collected more than 2,500 reports of violence and abuse of minors in Catholic schools, seminaries and parishes between 1930 and the late 1970s, and the Murphy report pointed to the Dublin dicesis, between 1975 and 2004.

In conclusion: before the denunciations of abuse denounced by the victims or their families, the dome of the Catholic Church, instead of intervening against the guilty, erected a wall of silence. The case forced Benedict XVI in 2010 to present a historic letter of apology to the Irish people.

At the same time, the case of Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, condemned by the former Holy Office to the resignation of the public prosecutor and to a reserved life, on May 19, 2006, as a result of 39, a survey conducted on more than one ao, but with denunciations dating back to 1956 about his double and triple life, with abuses even about his natural children.

A case in which weighed the sources of protection enjoyed by the Mexican Maciel in the Vatican at the time of St. John Paul II. For his part, Pope Francis had to face the serious situation of the Chilean Church, in which the case of Fernando Karadima, priest and responsible for the serial abuse, was compared to a second case, Maciel.

After a first underestimate of the case, the Pope ordered a new investigation, both on the abuses and on the cover of the bishops, after which Karadima was degrading and was resigning en mbade from all over the world. Chilean episcopate.

A comprehensive study on the situation in Germany was provided by a study published last September and commissioned by the country's episcopal conference: 3,677 minors were involved in cases of mistreatment by priests for a temporary period of nearly 70 years . 1946 to 2014. A total of 1,670 priests are accused of badually abusing children who, in half of the cases, were under 13 years old.