Pope Francis expressed “sadness and pain” at the findings of an investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in France, calling it a “moment of shame” for the whole church.
The pope called for prayers in response to Tuesday’s findings, which revealed the sexual abuse of over 200,000 minors by French clergy since 1950.
“To the victims, I wish to express my sadness and my pain for the traumas they have endured and my shame, our shame, my shame that for so long the Church has been incapable of putting this at the center of its concerns, assuring them of my prayers,” the pope said at this week’s Wednesday General Audience at the Vatican.
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Francis also called on the French faithful to “do everything possible so that similar tragedies might not be repeated.
“I express my closeness and fatherly support to the priests in France in the face of this trial which is difficult but beneficial, and I invite the Catholics in France to assume their responsibility to guarantee that the church might be a safe home for everyone,” Francis continued.
On Tuesday, the findings of a report commissioned by the French bishops detailed that the Catholic Church had shown “deep, total and even cruel indifference” as an estimated 216,000 victims, most of whom were boys aged 10 to 13, were abused by the clergy.
“Faced with this scourge, for a very long time the Catholic Church’s immediate reaction was to protect itself as an institution and it has shown complete, even cruel, indifference to those having suffered abuse,” the report said.
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Those connected to the church have been hit with similar allegations before, with former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick being charged in July with sexually assaulting a teenager during a wedding reception in 1974.
The Catholic Church has attracted scrutiny in recent months for both internal protocol shifts, such as allowing women to assume larger roles at Mass, and for Pope Francis’s socially liberal views in political issues, including same-sex unions, climate change, and the death penalty.
