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This last case forced his predecessor, Benedict 16, to dissolve an entire congregation in which priests were abusing nuns.
This is the first time that the Pope recognizes such cases – a problem that he says "persists" within the institution and that the Church is trying to fight.
Rocío Figueroa and Doris Wagner-Resinger are two religious victims of abuse committed by ecclesiastical members.
The two thank the pope for recognizing the bad scandals, pointing out that for a long time there was a "culture of silence and secrecy within the hierarchy" of the Church.
In an interview with the BBC, they gave details of what happened.
Theologian Rocío Figueroa is a professor in Auckland, New Zealand, and was attacked by a priest in Lima, Peru, she told the BBC.
Figueroa says he joined the society of apostolic life in the Catholic Church while he was a teenager, because he lived in a "very poor part of the world" and felt " have to do something ".
" I was 15 when the founder or m? asked to seek spiritual direction with a pastor, who became my spiritual guide. "
According to her, after a few months, the priest would have asked her to wear sportswear to practice yoga.
" After a few group sessions, individual sessions started and he said that he would teach me exercises to develop self-control over my baduality. "
" I was very innocent, I had no prior badual experience. "He started to touch me everywhere, I thought – wrongly – that he was good and that I was bad.
The victim thought it was his fault. "I felt very guilty and disoriented. "
" He never raped me, but he certainly committed badual abuse, in my opinion. The first time I realized that I was a victim of badual abuse, I was 40 years old. "
" The people I trusted, those who represented God, were false. "
Figueroa says that he decided to speak after the death of the man who mistreated her.
She says she felt that it was important to denounce him because at that time he was still considered a very good man by members of the congregation.
"I lost confidence in myself"
"Before to badually abuse me, they mistreated me spiritually: they would not allow me to read books or talk to anyone about personal problems, "said Doris Wagner Reisinger, a congregation in Germany, at the BBC.
"I lost confidence in myself and I became very fragile."
"After five years in this situation, [un membre de la communauté religieuse] began to approach me while I was alone."
"He would go to my room, stop by me and talk to me."
"One day he started to hug me and at one point he went to my room at night, undressed me and raped me."
"It was a shock, I understood what was going on, but I could not believe it, I knew it was not good, I absolutely did not want that to happen. But I was totally convinced: it's a priest, it's a sacred community, it's impossible. "
" I could not understand that there was abuse in this world, in the perfect world I lived in. It took me years to realize that what was happening was a rape and that I could talk about it. "
"I had a serious crisis of faith: my first instinct was to think that if I said that I would do harm to the Church, then God wanted me to be quiet." It was unacceptable.
"I do not want to think of that kind of God."
"I ended up finding another priest in the community with whom I could talk and I slowly fell in love.I knew that if God existed … he would send me this person, someone One who loved me. "
Doris Wagner-Resinger left the congregation and left religious life in 2011.
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