Pope’s plea to child abusers is ‘a non-runner’

By Catherine Shanahan, Philip Pullella, and Nicole Winfield

A call by Pope Francis for clerical paedophiles to turn themselves in has been described as a “non-runner” by the head of an agency for child sexual abuse survivors.

Maeve Lewis, executive director of One in Four, was responding to the Pope’s appeal to priests who abuse minors during his traditional Christmas address to the Curia, the Vatican’s central administration.

“The idea that sex offenders would hand themselves in is not a runner,” said Ms Lewis.

“They don’t engage with the authorities.”

She said the Catholic Church needs to “absolutely co-operate with civil authorities”. It is not enough to talk about the need for cultural change in the Catholic Church, she said, adding: “That day is long gone.”

“What we need now is action,” Ms Lewis said.

In his address to the Curia, Pope Francis said: “To those who abuse minors, I would say this: Convert and hand yourself over to human justice, and prepare for divine justice.”

The Pope said the Church “will spare no effort to do all that is necessary to bring to justice whoever has committed such crimes”. He described crimes of abuse against children as “abominations”.

“It is undeniable that some in the past, out of irresponsibility, disbelief, lack of training, inexperience, or spiritual and human short-sightedness, treated many cases without the seriousness and promptness that was due,” he said.

That must never happen again. This is the choice and the decision of the whole Church. The Church will never seek to hush up or not take seriously any case.

Commentators described his speech as one of his strongest comments ever on the crisis sweeping the Catholic Church. It comes two months ahead of an extraordinary summit on the global sexual abuse crisis that will be attended by the heads of some 110 national Catholic bishops’ conferences and dozens of experts and leaders of religious orders in the Vatican.

However, Andrew Madden, the first person in Ireland to go public about clerical child sexual abuse in 1995, tweeted yesterday that the Pope has “not a scintilla of credibility left”.

Pope Francis’s remarks cap an appalling year for the Catholic Church, one that began with his own botched handling of a sprawling sex abuse scandal in Chile and ended with the US hierarchy in a free-fall of credibility as state prosecutors have begun uncovering decades of cover-up.

He warned the Vatican bureaucrats who run the 1.2bn-strong Church that the scandal now undermines the credibility of the entire enterprise.

He prayed for help so that the Church can discern true cases from false ones.

“This is no easy task, since the guilty are capable of skilfully covering their tracks,” and choosing victims who they know will keep silent, he said.