ROME
Inquirer (Philippines)
VATICAN CITY—The Catholic Church in Asia has a “pressing need” for rules against child abuse by priests as the issue has been hidden by “a culture of shame,” the archbishop of Manila said on Thursday.
“There is a pressing need to formulate national pastoral guidelines for handling such cases,” Archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle said on the final day of a summit on the clergy abuse scandals at the Vatican’s Gregorian University.
“The relative silence with which the victims and Asian Catholics face the scandal is partly due to the culture of shame that holds dearly one’s humanity, honor and dignity,” Tagle told bishops and cardinals from around the world.
Tagle said Asian Catholics had initially looked on the scandals as a problem “mainly tied to Western cultures.”
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