Pope Francis vowed justice for victims of clerical sex abuse on Monday, describing paedophilia as one of the \u201cvilest\u201d crimes ahead of a historic global meet on the crisis roiling the church.<\/p>\n
\u201cI cannot refrain from speaking of one of the plagues of our time, which sadly has also involved some members of the clergy,\u201d he said in his annual address to ambassadors to the Holy See.<\/p>\n
Francis swore to \u201crender justice to minors\u201d, and said a meeting of the world\u2019s bishops in February was \u201cmeant to be a further step in the church\u2019s efforts to shed full light on the facts and to alleviate the wounds caused by such crimes\u201d. A litany of child sexual abuse scandals has rocked the Catholic church, which has 1.3 billion followers around the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe abuse of minors is one of the vilest and most heinous crimes conceivable. Such abuse inexorably sweeps away the best of what human life holds out for innocent children, and causes irreparable and lifelong damage,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
In December the pontiff had vowed the church would never again treat abuse allegations without \u201cseriousness and promptness\u201d, calling on abusers to hand themselves in to police.<\/p>\n
The Argentine has struggled to resolve the problem as the steady drip of scandal corrodes the church\u2019s authority amid sharp divisions in Rome over how to handle the fallout, and an apparently endless stream of bad news.<\/p>\n
In the latest case to shake the Catholic church, the highest-profile Catholic cleric to be caught up in a paedophile scandal in France went on trial on Monday charged with failing to report a priest who abused boy scouts in the 1980s and 90s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pope Francis vowed justice for victims of clerical sex abuse on Monday, describing paedophilia as one of the \u201cvilest\u201d crimes ahead of a historic global meet on the crisis roiling the church. \u201cI cannot refrain from speaking of one of the plagues of our time, which sadly has also involved some members of the clergy,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52083,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52084,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52082\/revisions\/52084"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}