SCOTLAND
Scotsman
by STEPHEN McGINTY
Published on the 04 August 2013
ONE of Scotland’s most senior Catholics will apologise today on behalf of the Church for almost three decades of abuse of pupils at a boarding school.
Hugh Gilbert, the Bishop of Aberdeen, will tell parishioners at Fort Augustus church in the Highlands of his “horror and shame” over the revelations that monks raped and sexually abused children at the school in the village.
In a further attempt to repair a reputation tarnished by a series of scandals, the Church is also planning to publish for the first time annual audits dealing with sex abuse allegations against the clergy in each of Scotland’s eight dioceses.
Publication of the audits – compiled by its National Office of Child Safety – this autumn are intended to show that the Church takes all allegations against priests seriously and details will be provided back to 2006, when co-ordinated procedures were first put in place across the whole country. The exercise will then be repeated annually.
The Church is also preparing a more detailed report for publication next year that deals with all historical cases stretching across all dioceses in Scotland in an attempt to end the stream of damaging revelations, many of them dating back to the 1950s.
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