ROME (ITALY)
NBC News
February 24, 2019
By Claudio Lavanga, Yuliya Talmazan and Anne Thompson
Pope Francis strongly condemned clerical sexual abuse during a speech ending a landmark Vatican conference on the subject Sunday, but stopped short of proposing new policies to combat the crisis engulfing the Catholic Church.
“No abuse should ever be covered up as was often the case in the past or not taken sufficiently seriously, since the covering up of abuses favors the spread of evil and adds a further level of scandal,” he said.
At the end of the four-day summit — the Vatican’s latest attempt to come to grips with the issue — Francis promised that guidelines used by bishops’ conferences to prevent abuse and punish perpetrators will be reviewed and strengthened.
Speaking to some 190 senior Catholic bishops and religious superiors, the pope called abuse involving children a “universal problem.”
“The church has now become increasingly aware of the need not only to curb the gravest cases of abuse by disciplinary measures and civil and canonical processes, but also to decisively confront the phenomenon both inside and outside,” Francis said. “She feels called to combat this evil that strikes at the very heart of her mission, which is to preach the Gospel to the little ones and to protect them from ravenous wolves.”
“The church will never seek to hush up or not take seriously any case,” he added at the end of Mass celebrated in the Sala Regia, one of the grand, frescoed reception rooms of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace.
The Jesuit pope added that the vast majority of sexual abuse occurs within the family, and in a bid to contextualize what he said was once a taboo subject, offered a global review of the wider problem of sexual tourism and online pornography.
But while he acknowledged the grief of victims and offered a list of measures to combat abuse, Francis offered little in the way of new approaches during the speech.
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