VATICAN CITY
IBN Live
Rome: Pope Benedict leaves office having failed to stamp out the sexual abuse of children by priests and with the culture of secrecy that fostered the scandal still in place, groups representing some of the victims said on Monday. Bishops Accountability, a US pressure group, said the pope had apologised frequently for the harm done by priests but had never taken effective action to rectify the “incalculable harm” done to hundreds of thousands of children by predatory clergy.
“Benedict’s words rang hollow. He spoke as a shocked bystander, as if he had just stumbled upon the abuse crisis,” Anne Barrett Doyle, the group’s co-director said in a statement. The festering child abuse scandal broke out well before the then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger took office in 2005 but it overshadowed his papacy from the beginning, as more and more cases came to light in dioceses across the world.
Hundreds of victims came forward with devastating accounts of abuse suffered at the hands of priests sometimes over years that left them with deep psychological wounds. The scandal broke in Boston in 2002 when reports emerged of the systematic cover-up of sexual abuse, with guilty priests being quietly transferred between dioceses instead of being stripped of their office and handed over to civil authorities.
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