VATICAN CITY
7 News
AFP
Vatican City (AFP) – Pope Francis has defended the Catholic Church’s record on tackling the sexual abuse of children by priests, saying “no-one else has done more” to root out paedophilia.
The comments, in an interview published Wednesday, were the pope’s first response to a scathing UN report that denounced the Vatican for failing to stamp out child abuse and allowing systematic cover-ups.
“The Catholic Church is perhaps the only public institution to have acted with transparency and responsibility. No-one else has done more. Yet the Church is the only one to have been attacked,” he said in an interview with Il Corriere della Sera daily.
Last month’s hard-hitting UN report called on the Church to remove clergy suspected of raping or molesting children.
It accused the Vatican of systematically placing the “preservation of the reputation of the Church and the alleged offender over the protection of child victims” — an accusation the Church heatedly rebuffed.
The Argentine pontiff, who will celebrate the one-year anniversary of his election on March 13, said in the interview that the abuse cases “leave very deep wounds.”
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