Scottish Catholic Observer

Pope Francis will ensure the Church always responds decisively to sexual abuse of children by priests and urged the Vatican to ‘promote measures that protect children’ and ‘those who have suffered.’

The Holy Father made this clear during a meeting with Archbishop Gerhard Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that deals with reports of clerical abuse of children.

During their Friday meeting, the Pope made a particular point of highlighting the CDF’s work to counter such abuse, telling Archbishop Muller he wanted the congregation to continue with the policies of retired Pope Benedict XVI ‘to act decisively concerning cases of sexual abuse.’

The Pope, in a written statement released after the meeting, asked the congregation to continue: ‘promoting measures that protect minors, above all; help for those who have suffered such violence in the past; necessary procedures against those found guilty; (and) the commitment of bishops’ conferences in formulating and implementing the necessary directives in this area that is so important for the Church’s witness and credibility.’

He also assured victims that they had a special place in his heart and prayers.

While Archbishop of Buenos Aires, the future Pope had said his archdiocese had been very attentive to the problem and was ‘rigorous’ in its screening and selection of candidates for the priesthood and religious life.

Sex abusers suffer from a ‘perversion of a psychological kind’ that is not caused by or directly linked to celibacy, he said in a book-length series of interviews.

“If a priest is a paedophile, he is so because he brought that perversion with him from before his ordination,” and not even priestly celibacy would be able to ‘cure it,’ the future Pope said in the book, Pope Francis: Conversations with Jorge Bergoglio by Sergio Rubin and Francesca Ambrogetti.

He said Buenos Aires Archdiocese had been very ‘rigorous for many years already,’ noting how only about 40 per cent of candidates were actually admitted into the priesthood.

In On Heaven and Earth, a 2010 book of conversations with a Buenos Aires rabbi, the then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio said, when it is discovered that a priest has engaged in such behaviour, it is imperative that no one ‘look the other way.’

“One cannot be in a position of power and destroy the life of another person,” he said.

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—This story was published in full in the April 12 print edition of the SCO.