Catholic clergy in Portugal have reportedly abused nearly 5,000 children since 1950, an independent commission on Monday revealed after hearing hundreds of victims’ accounts.
Pope Francis is under pressure to tackle the scandal after thousands of reports of pedophilia within the Catholic Church surfaced around the world.
Africa Today News, New York reports that the Portuguese inquiry, commissioned by the Church in the staunchly Catholic country, published its findings after hearing from more than 500 victims last year.
‘This testimony allows us to establish a much larger network of victims, at least 4,815,’ commission head Pedro Strecht told a press conference in Lisbon that was attended by several senior Church officials.
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Strecht, a child psychiatrist, said it would be difficult now for Portugal to ignore the existence of child sex abuse or the trauma it caused.
‘The report published today expresses a hard and tragic reality. We however believe that change is under way,’ said the head of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference (CEP), Bishop Jose Ornelas.
‘We ask forgiveness from all the victims,’ the bishop said, adding it is ‘an open wound that it hurts us and shames us.’
The country’s bishops will convene in March to draw conclusions from the report and ‘rid the Church of this scourge as much as possible’, Father Manuel Barbosa, a senior CEP member, said in January.
Faced with a multitude of clergy sex abuse cases that have come to light worldwide and the accusations of cover-ups, Pope Francis promised in 2019 to root out paedophilia within the Catholic Church.
Inquiries have been launched in several countries in addition to Portugal, including Australia, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands.
Hans Zollner, a member of the pope’s commission to protect minors, hoped for real change.
‘Unfortunately, the scale of the numbers and stories is very familiar to us because we have already heard them from the four corners of the world,’ Zollner said.
But the independent Portuguese panel’s work is also “the sign that the Church is capable of facing up to this deep wound,” he said after attending the report’s presentation.
The pontiff may meet some of the Portuguese victims when he visits Lisbon in August, the capital’s auxiliary bishop, Americo Aguiar, said recently.