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In the past three years, the Catholic Church has been repeatedly hit by child sexual abuse scandals.
Independent investigation on Tuesday Said it’s over Between 1950 and 2020, approximately 216,000 French Catholic clergy were sexually abused.
This is the latest in a series of landmark reports and investigations that have helped lift the “veil of silence” surrounding crime.
Australia
After a series of scandals, the Australian government established the Royal Commission in 2013 to conduct the highest-level investigation of institutional child sexual abuse.
The committee stated in February 2017 that most of the abuse occurred in churches and that 7% of Catholic priests were accused of child abuse in Australia between 1950 and 2010. It stated that these allegations have almost never been investigated.
It found that 4,444 incidents of suspected child sexual abuse had been reported to church authorities. In some dioceses, more than 15% of priests are the perpetrators.
The committee also heard the testimony of Cardinal George Pell, the former treasurer of the Vatican, who was found guilty in 2018 for sexually abusing a choir boy in Melbourne in the 1990s.
Pell-the former anti-corruption czar of Pope Francis-was released in 2020 after the court dropped his conviction.
Germany
In June, Pope Francis rejected a request for resignation from Reinhard Marx, the Supreme Bishop of Germany, because the church had an “institutional and systemic failure” in dealing with child sexual abuse in the western city of Cologne.
The report shows that between 1975 and 2018, 314 minors were sexually abused there, most of them boys under 14 years of age.
A study by the German Conference of Bishops in 2018 previously disclosed the prevalence of sexual abuse among German clergy.
The investigation found that between 1946 and 2014, 1,670 clergymen carried out some type of sexual assault on 3,677 minors, most of them boys under 13 years of age, while stating that this is almost certainly an underestimation.
Most of the perpetrators were not punished, and the church paid compensation on a case-by-case basis without transparency.
America
In 2002, the “Boston Globe” disclosed the large-scale sexual abuse of children in the diocese of Boston and the efforts of the Catholic hierarchy to cover it up. The newspaper’s investigation was the subject of the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight.”
In 2004, a church committee issued a report requesting clergy to report suspected sexual assaults.
According to lawyers, the pastor’s victims have filed more than 11,000 complaints in the United States. The diocese has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in out-of-court settlements.
The Victims’ Association stated that these compensations allowed the church to escape justice.
The 2018 grand jury investigation of the Pennsylvania diocese revealed that the church systematically covered up the abuse of “more than 300 predatory priests.” More than 1,000 child victims were cited.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl, accused of covering up the facts, resigned.
In 2019, Pope Francis dismissed Theodore McCarrick, the former cardinal of the United States, for the first time for the church.
After that, several dioceses opened the files and discovered that hundreds of priests were suspected of abusing minors.
Ireland
Allegations of large-scale sexual crimes against Irish Catholic institutions can be traced back decades. Between 1970 and 1990 alone, the number of underage victims is estimated to be close to 15,000. Several bishops and priests accused of covering up the abuse were punished.
The official report of the Ryan Commission in 2009 found that from the 1930s to the 1970s, there was widespread child abuse in institutions run by Catholics.
It said the orphanages and industrial schools run by the church are places of fear, neglect and local sexual abuse.
Murphy’s 2009 report to the Archdiocese of Dublin stated that between 1975 and 2004, the church “excessively” concealed abuse.
Following another highly critical report on the Diocese of Cloyne in 2011, the Vatican recalled its ambassador after the then-Irish Prime Minister accused him of obstructing investigations into the sexual abuse of priests.
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