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Grant Gallicho
July 28, 2014
The Italian journalist Vittorio Messori has made a career of interviewing popes. So it’s no surprise that he was recently asked to comment on another one of Eugenio Scalfari’s controversial “interviews” with Pope Francis. Once again, Scalfari has reconstructed a conversation he had with the pope without the benefit of a recording or notes. And once again the Vatican has had to offer a clarification of the pope’s alleged remarks–because, according to Scalfari, Francis told him that 2 percent of the world’s priests, including bishops and cardinals, are pedophiles.
That’s a lot of pedophile priests–about one in fifty. If the pope really said that (and it’s not clear that he did), where did he get that figure? The traditionalist Catholic blog Rorate Caeli recently translated a report claiming that about .08 percent of abuse cases handled by the Vatican involve pedophile priests. The piece cites a couple of Vatican insiders who note that of all the abuse cases that make it to Rome only about 10 percent involve pedophilia.
About a week later the blog translated another Italian news item–this time an interview with Messori. In that conversation, the veteran Italian journalist was asked whether relaxing the celibacy rule would address the abuse crisis. His response makes you wonder whether he’s been paying much attention to the scandal:
Nearly all of the cases of sexual abuse that have been investigated as having been committed by those in consecrated life were not committed on prepubescent children but on adolescents. All of these were male.
Bishop Charles Scicluna used to serve as the Vatican’s chief prosecutor of abuse cases. He has said that 30 percent of the cases forwarded to Rome–and it’s important to note that not all cases of accused clerics have been adjudicated by the Vatican–involved heterosexual abuse. I haven’t seen it reported that every single postpubescent victim was male. In fact, there is no data on the pubescence of victims of clerical sexual abuse.
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