Vatican unveils figures on its punishment of child abusers

UNITED KINGDOM
National Secular Society

The Vatican has, for the first time, revealed how it has disciplined priests accused of raping and molesting children.

According to the Holy See’s UN ambassador in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, over the past decade, the Vatican has defrocked 848 priests who were believed to have raped or molested children, and sanctioned a further 2,572 priests for lesser offences. Sanctions included “a life of prayer and penitence.”

Overall all, according to its officials, the Vatican handled more than 3,400 cases of sexual abuse since 2004.

The figures were revealed during the Vatican’s examination by the UN Committee Against Torture this week.

During the examination, Archbishop Tomasi admitted that it was only in 2010 that the Vatican explicitly told bishops and religious superiors to report to police any credible cases of abuse, where local reporting laws required them to do so. According to an Associated Press report, previously, bishops and religious superiors had been “shuffling paedophile priests from diocese to diocese rather than subjecting them to church trials.”

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