TALLINN: Young people are turned off by the Catholic Church because of sex abuse and financial scandals, Pope Francis said on Tuesday.
“Some of them expressly ask us to leave them alone, because they feel the Church’s presence as bothersome or even irritating,” Francis said during a visit to Estonia. “They are outraged by sexual and economic scandals that do not meet with clear condemnation, by our unpreparedness to really appreciate the lives and sensibilities of the young,” he saud.
Francis was addressing young people at a Lutheran church in Tallinn,on the last day of a four-day trip to the three Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
The Catholic Church is facing a worldwide crisis over allegations that it failed to discipline paedophile priests among its ranks.
On Tuesday, the Catholic Church in Germany presented a report indicating that 1,670 priests — 4.4 per cent of total Catholic clergy numbers — had abused 3,677 people between 1946 and 2014 in Germany.
Cardinal Reinhard Marx said he was ashamed over the decades of abuse that have shattered trust, the crimes carried out by officials of the Church, as well as how so many have looked away for so long. The report’s authors said however that the figure was “the tip of the iceberg” and that the real extent of the problem was far greater. Most of the victims were underage boys and more than 50 per cent of the victims were under the age of 13, with one in six cases related to accusations of rape.
Many of the perpetrators had simply been moved to other parishes when the abuse was discovered, without informing the communities. In more than 60 per cent of cases, priests went unpunished.
A similar study in the US state of Pennsylvania shook the American Catholic Church in August and last week the number of Chilean bishops who have resigned over a recent sex abuse scandal rose to seven.
The Church has also suffered a series of fraud scandals. Francis has made cleaning up the Vatican’s murky finances a priority since his election in 2013.
A report in April by the Holy See’s Financial Intelligence Authority showed that reforms designed to end decades of misconduct were now well-rooted. Estonia has only about 4,500 Catholics, or about 0.4 per cent of the population of 1.3 million. A majority said they have no religious identification. — Agencies
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