Vatican City, 06 October, 2021 / 8:30 pm (ACI Africa).
Pope Francis expressed sadness and shame on Wednesday in response to a report estimating that hundreds of thousands of children were abused in the Catholic Church in France over the past 70 years.
“This is a moment of shame,” Pope Francis said during his general audience on Oct. 6.
“To the victims, I wish to express my sadness and my pain for the traumas they have endured and my shame, our shame, my shame that for so long the Church has been incapable of putting this at the center of its concerns, assuring them of my prayers,” he said.
The pope’s comments came a day after the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE) published a nearly 2,500-page final report estimating that 216,000 children were abused by priests, deacons, monks, or nuns in France from 1950 to 2020.
It suggested that there were “between 2,900 and 3,200” abusers out of 115,000 clergy and monks, which it noted “would imply a very high number of victims per aggressor.”