ROME – Facing what he called the “real crisis” of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV stressed the importance of “an authentic and deep sensitivity and compassion” for victims, voicing frustration over delays in victim’s cases, but also warned of the risk of false allegations which, he said, can destroy a priest’s life.
“Victims must be treated with great respect and with an understanding that those who have suffered very deep wounds because of abuse, sometimes carry those wounds for their entire life,” the pontiff said in comments to Crux’s Elise Ann Allen.
“First and foremost,” the pope said of his approach, the church must foster “an authentic and deep sensitivity and compassion to the pain, the suffering that people have endured at the hands of church ministers, whether that be priests, or bishops, laity, religious, men or women, catechists, et cetera.”
At the same time, Leo said there’s also increasing attention to the rights of the accused in abuse cases.
“People are beginning to speak out more and more: The accused also have rights, and many believe that those rights have not been respected,” he said.
The pontiff stressed that in over 90 percent of cases, people who come forward with abuse allegations are telling the truth: “They are not making this up,” he said.
Yet, the pope said, it’s also true that “there have also been proven cases of some kind of false accusation. There have been priests whose lives have been destroyed.”
The pontiff’s comments...
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