A huge child abuse scandal in Australia implicates senior Vatican officials | The World Weekly

A new report has highlighted the large scale of alleged child sexual abuse in the Australian Catholic Church. Figures released this week by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse implicated 7% of all priests.

Launched in 2013 to investigate child abuse in Australian schools, government organisations and religious institutions, the commission revealed that as many as 4,444 people reported instances of child sexual abuse in over 1,000 different institutions between 1980 and 2015. The average age was 10.5 for female victims and 11.5 for male victims.

“It is highly likely that there are many people who have not come forward; some research suggests only one in six victims of child sexual abuse report it,” Francis Sullivan, chief executive of the Australian Truth Justice and Healing Council - set up by the Catholic Church in 2013 to address these allegations - told The World Weekly.

The most high-profile figure involved in the scandal is Cardinal George Pell, Australia’s most senior Roman Catholic official and Pope Francis’ finance chief in the Vatican. Cardinal Pell stands accused of molesting up to 10 boys between 1978 and 2001. He denies wrongdoing and said the Greens, an opposition party, had pulled an “obvious political stunt” in calling for his return to Australia.

The cardinal’s close proximity to the Vatican’s highest strata is a source of embarrassment for the pope, particularly as he had previously expressed “doubts” over other child abuse allegations made against the cardinal.

Concerns that the Vatican’s response to child abuse claims is insufficiently firm are long-running. In February 2016 it came to light that a training document for newly named bishops advised that it was “not necessarily” their duty to report accusations of child sexual abuse to the police. Similarly, Pope Francis’ treatment of convicted Italian priest Fr. Mauro Inzoli raised doubts over his commitment to cracking down on abusers in the Catholic Church.

Despite a letter to bishops in early January in which he called for a “zero tolerance” approach to clergy members who have committed child abuse, the pope has so far stayed silent on this scandal and Cardinal Pell’s alleged crimes, likely inviting more criticism from his detractors.