Attacks over abuse are ‘unfair’

The Catholic Church’s handling of clergy sex abuse of minors has been publicly defended by Pope Francis, who lamented that the Church has been unfairly “attacked” over the way it has dealt with the troubling issue, writes Robert Mickens.

“The Catholic Church is probably the only public institution to act with transparency and responsibility,” the Pope claimed in a wide-ranging interview published on Wednesday in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. “No one has done more. And yet the Church is the only one to be attacked,” he said.

It was the first time an interviewer has pressed him on the sex-abuse issue.

“I want to say two things,” Pope Francis told the paper’s chief editor, Ferruccio de Bortoli. “Cases of abuse are terrible because they leave very, very deep wounds,” he said. He went on to praise his predecessor, Benedict XVI, for being “very courageous” in how he had “opened a way” to deal effectively with such cases. “The Church in this way has done a lot, maybe more than anyone else,” Francis insisted.

“The statistics on the violence against children are disturbing, but they also show clearly that the great majority of abuse happens in the family and in the neighbourhood,” he said.