ABOARD THE PAPAL PLANE (AP) — Pope Francis has for the first time publicly acknowledged the scandal of priests and bishops sexually abusing nuns, and says he is committed to doing more to fight the problem.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Francis said: “Should we do something more? Yes. Is there the will? Yes. But it’s a path that we have already begun.”

Francis noted that Pope Benedict XVI had taken action against a French order after some of its religious sisters had been reduced to “sexual slavery” at the hands of priests or their founder.

The issue has come to the forefront amid the Catholic Church’s overall reckoning with the sexual abuse of minors and the #MeToo-inspired acknowledgement that adults can be victims of abuse when there is an imbalance of power in a relationship. </s> (VATICAN CITY) — The Vatican on Wednesday clarified comments by Pope Francis about a case of what he called “sexual slavery” within a French congregation of nuns, saying he was referring to an abuse of power that was reflected in instances of sexual abuse.

Francis cited the case when responding to a question about the sexual abuse of nuns by clergy during a press conference Tuesday returning home from the United Arab Emirates. It was the pope’s first-ever public acknowledgment of the problem of priests and bishops sexually abusing nuns. He stressed that the Vatican had been confronting the issue for some time and vowed to do more.

Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti said Wednesday Francis “spoke of ‘sexual slavery’ to mean ‘manipulation’ or a type of abuse of power that is reflected in a sexual abuse.”

The Community of St. Jean admitted in 2013 that its late founder had behaved “in ways that went against chastity” with women in the order, according to the French Catholic newspaper La Croix. The Vatican under Pope Benedict XVI ultimately dissolved an offshoot of the congregation.

The issue has come to the fore amid the Catholic Church’s overall reckoning with the sexual abuse of minors and the #MeToo-inspired acknowledgement that adults can be victims of abuse whenever there is an imbalance of power in a relationship. In the past year, The Associated Press and other media have reported on cases of abused nuns in India, Africa, Europe and South America — evidence that the problem is by no means limited to a certain geographic area.

In November, the organization representing all the world’s female Catholic religious orders, the International Union of Superiors General, publicly denounced the “culture of silence and secrecy” that prevented nuns from speaking out and urged sisters to report abuse to their superiors and police. And just last week, the women’s magazine of the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano identified the clerical culture of the all-powerful clergy as the culprit.

The magazine, “Women Church World,” noted that the scandal involves a corollary: nuns being forced to abort the priests’ children or bear children that the priests refuse to recognize.

Francis’ acknowledgement of the problem comes as he prepares to decide the fate of the disgraced American ex-cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, who is accused of abusing minors as well as adult seminarians. </s> Pope Francis has for the first time publicly acknowledged that priests and bishops sexually abused nuns, the latest scandal to hit the Roman Catholic Church.

Speaking to reporters while returning home from the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, Francis said, "It's not that everyone does this, but there are some priests and also bishops who have done it."

"And I think that it's continuing because it's not like once you realise it that it stops. It continues. And for some time we've been working on it," he said.

The February issue of "Women Church World", a supplement distributed with the Vatican's Osservatore Romano newspaper, warned that nuns have been silent over abuse for decades for fear of retaliation.

It said the Vatican received reports of priests abusing nuns in Africa in the 1990s.

"If the Church continues to close its eyes to the scandal - made even worse by the fact that abuse of women brings about procreation and is therefore at the origin of forced abortions and children who aren't recognised by priests - the oppression of women in the Church will never change," editor Lucetta Scaraffia wrote.

Francis said the mistreatment of women is a problem in society at large, where women are still considered "second-class citizens."

"It's a cultural problem. I dare say that humanity hasn't matured," he said, adding that in some parts of the world, the mistreatment gets to the point of feminicide.

The issue hit the headlines last year after an Indian nun accused a bishop of repeatedly raping her in a case that triggered rare dissent within the country's Catholic Church.

Bishop Franco Mulakkal was arrested on September 21 in the southern state of Kerala on suspicion of raping the nun in question 13 times between 2014 and 2016.

Pope Francis suspended him the day before his arrest, appointing another bishop in his place.

Mulakkal, 53, who headed the diocese of Jalandhar in the northern state of Punjab, denied the allegations.

The nun first spoke out in June but police only started formal questioning in September, as fury over the case mounted.

Five nuns - in a rare public show of dissent within the Indian Church - and dozens of supporters staged days of protests.

Francis said Pope Benedict XVI had taken action against a France-based order after some of its religious sisters were reduced to "sexual slavery" at the hands of the priest who founded the order and other priests.

Francis credited Benedict, pope from 2005-2013, with having had the courage to tackle the problem, saying the popular impression that he was somehow weak was completely wrong.

He said Benedict took action against the French congregation "because a certain slavery of women had crept in, slavery to the point of sexual slavery on the part of clergy or the founder," he said.

"Sometimes the founder takes away, or empties the freedom of the sisters. It can come to this," Francis said.

The pope has summoned the heads of some 110 national Catholic bishops' conferences and dozens of experts and leaders of religious orders to the Vatican on February 21-24 for an extraordinary meeting on the sexual abuse crisis.

Victims of clerical sexual abuse are hoping that the meeting will finally come up with a clear policy to make bishops themselves accountable for the mishandling of abuse cases. </s> Vincenzo Pinto, AFP | Pope Francis speaks to reporters aboard a plane on his way to Abu Dhabi on February 3, 2019.

Pope Francis admitted Tuesday that priests and bishops in the Catholic Church had sexually abused nuns.

“There are some priests and also bishops who have done it,” the pontiff said in response to a journalist’s question on the abuse of nuns, speaking on the return flight from his trip to the United Arab Emirates.

The papal admission followed a rare outcry last week from the Vatican’s women’s magazine over the sexual abuse of nuns by priests and religious sisters feeling forced to have abortions or raise children not recognised by their fathers.

The issue hit the headlines last year after a nun accused an Indian bishop of repeatedly raping her in a case that triggered rare dissent within the country’s Catholic Church.

Francis said the problem could be found “anywhere” but was prevalent in “some new congregations and in some regions”.

“I think it’s still going on, because it’s not something that just goes away like that. On the contrary,” he added.

He said the Church has “suspended several clerics” and the Vatican has been “working (on the issue) for a long time”.

“I don’t want to hear it said that the Church has not got this problem, because it has.

“Must we do more? Yes! Do we want to? Yes!” he said.

The February issue of “Women Church World”, a supplement distributed with the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano newspaper, warned that nuns have been silent over abuse for decades for fear of retaliation.

It said the Vatican received reports of priests abusing nuns in Africa in the 1990s.

“If the Church continues to close its eyes to the scandal made even worse by the fact that abuse of women brings about procreation and is therefore at the origin of forced abortions and children who aren’t recognised by priests the oppression of women in the Church will never change,” editor Lucetta Scaraffia wrote. </s> UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - Pope Francis admitted Tuesday that priests and bishops in the Catholic church had sexually abused nuns.

"There are some priests and also bishops who have done it," the pontiff said in response to a journalist's question on the abuse of nuns, speaking on the return flight from his trip to the United Arab Emirates. </s> On Tuesday, February 5th, Pope Francis offered his first public comments on what the Associated Press called a “global and pervasive” scandal that has quietly plagued the Roman Catholic Church for decades — the sexual abuse of nuns by bishops and priests. Last year, the Vatican refused to comment on an AP investigation which found allegations by religious sisters against Church clergy in Europe, Africa, South America and Asia were met with inaction by local Church leaders and the Vatican. However, according to the Washington Post, an article published last week by the Vatican’s women’s magazine, Women Church World, denounced the abuse as a “condition of the oppression of women,” who hold second-class status within Church hierarchy, saying nothing will change so long as the Vatican “continues to close its eyes.”

“It is true … there have been priests and even bishops who have done this,” Pope Francis said, according to Reuters, when asked about the article. “I think it is still going on because something does not stop just because you have become aware of it. … I can’t say ‘this does not happen in my house.’ It is true. Do we have to do more? Yes. Are we willing? Yes.”

While he acknowledged that the sexual abuse of nuns was an ongoing problem, Pope Francis claimed it was largely contained to “certain congregations, predominantly new ones,” and that the Church is “working on it.”

“It’s a path we’ve been on,” Francis said, noting that certain members of the clergy have been suspended. He went on to acknowledge his predecessor, Pope Benedict, for having “the courage to dissolve a female congregation which was at a certain level … slavery, even to the point of sexual slavery, on the part of clerics or the founder.”

Alessandro Gisotti of the Vatican press office told the New York Times that Pope Francis was referring to the Community of St Jean, which was based in France and dissolved in 2005. It wasn’t until eight years later, in 2013, the Community of St Jean disclosed that several women in the order had been treated “in ways that went against chastity” by Catholic priests.

According to Women Church World editor Lucetta Scaraffia, the scandal is “made even worse by the fact that abuse of women brings about procreation and is therefore at the origin of forced abortions” — particularly galling given the Catholic Church’s vehement opposition to abortion — “and children who aren’t recognized by priests.”

According to the AP and Women Church World, many of the victims feared retaliation against themselves and their orders if they reported the abuse – even after the Church was forced to publicly reckon with the ever-growing scandal of predatory priests sexually molesting children.

“The priests and even more, the bishops, have a huge power, not just over a single nun but over a whole congregation,” Scaraffia told the AP. “So if an abused nun goes to her superior general and says that she has been abused, she will be told ‘Keep quiet because if you don’t this bishop will turn against us.’”

The sisters who are now speaking out about the abuse, according to Scaraffia, have been empowered by the #MeToo reckoning and a growing movement of women within the Church demanding a greater distribution of power. </s> Pope Francis met privately with victims of clergy and other sex abuse and pledged that all those responsible for the scandal would be held accountable. Speaking to bishops and seminarians, Francis described his private, unscheduled meeting with the sex abuse victims, three women and two men, whom he said “have become true heralds of mercy. Humbly, we owe each of them our gratitude for their value as they have had to suffer terrible abuse.”

The pope’s early Sunday meeting with the sex abuse victims at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary lasted about half an hour. He met with the victims one by one, listened to their experiences and prayed with them, according to the Vatican.

The victims had all been abused as children, according to a statement released by the Vatican press office. They were abused by “priests, parents, teachers,” but officials declined to give specifics.

“He renewed his commitment and that of the church so that victims are heard and treated with justice, that the guilty are punished and that the crimes of abuse are fought with efficient prevention efforts in the church and society,” Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi said in a statement. “The pope thanked the victims for their essential contribution to establish the truth and begin the path of healing.”

In June, Francis sacked two US bishops accused of looking the other way: the archbishop of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, John Clayton Nienstedt, and his aide Lee Anthony Piche. And earlier this month the Vatican replaced Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, who resigns in April after failing to report a priest accused of pedophilia.

Pope Francis is cleaning house. Here is his speech in its entirety.

Pope Francis On Sex Abuse: ‘God Weeps’ [VIDEO] was originally published on elev8.com </s> ROME—Pope Francis has officially lost control of the American clerical sex-abuse scandal.

On the heels of the damning Pennsylvania grand jury report out this month, he now finds himself facing calls for his resignation over allegations that he was complicit in the coverup of a different sex-abusing cardinal, this time Washington, D.C.’s Theodore McCarrick, whose abuse was apparently so well known that he once advertised in a church bulletin that young seminarians should seek him out. And now, a BuzzFeed News exposé published Monday about murderous nuns at St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Vermont is sure to feed the fire, or at least prove once and for all—lest anyone doubted—that clerical sex abuse in the Catholic Church is endemic.

Francis may actually be making things even worse by refusing to comment. He was widely criticized for his “no comment” remarks in the days after the Pennsylvania case. And last night on the flight back to Rome from Ireland, he did not deny claims of a coverup involving McCarrick. Instead, he refused to comment once again.

“I read the statement this morning, and I must tell you sincerely that, I must say this, to you and all those who are interested: Read the statement carefully and make your own judgment,” the pontiff said, according to a transcript of the in-flight Sunday night press conference published on the Catholic News Agency’s website. “I will not say a single word about this. I believe the statement speaks for itself.”

Those in support of Francis will take that as a denial, that the claims are unsubstantiated. But those who doubt the pope instead see it as confirmation that Francis continues to fail to do the right thing.

The latest claims come from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican’s former apostolic nuncio to the United States who is no big fan of Francis. The two have publicly differed on a number of topics, not least of all the pontiff’s tolerance for same-sex couples and his willingness to welcome divorced and remarried Catholics back to the church. Viganò is responsible for the ill-advised private meeting with anti-gay-marriage martyr Kim Davis when Francis visited America in 2015 and he has called the pope’s religious order a “deviated wing of the Jesuits.”

The Vatican’s former man in America says Francis is complicit in the now well-known widespread coverup of clerical sex abuse in America—starting with McCarrick. He says the pope should lead the way and step down along with Cardinal Donald Wuerl and other prominent prelates tied to recent sex-abuse revelations in Pennsylvania involving more than 300 priests and 1,000 victims. McCarrick, who is a personal friend of Francis, did resign in June over “credible sex-abuse allegations.” Viganò now demands that the pope do the same.

“Francis is abdicating the mandate which Christ gave to Peter to confirm the brethren. Indeed, by his action he has divided them, led them into error, and encouraged the wolves to continue to tear apart the sheep of Christ’s flock,” Viganò wrote in a damning 11-page “testimony” submitted to the Roman Curia while Francis was in Ireland. “In this extremely dramatic moment for the universal church, he must acknowledge his mistakes and, in keeping with the proclaimed principle of zero tolerance, Pope Francis must be the first to set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick’s abuses and resign along with all of them.”

While it is highly unlikely that the pope will resign on the recommendation of a man who is so clearly and publicly against him, it is as troubling a moment for Francis as it is for the American Catholic church at large.

Even reputable cardinals who have given credibility to the crumbling institution are now caught up in the scandal. Boston’s Sean O’Malley, who leads the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, had also been informed of McCarrick’s record of abuse in 2015, but he revealed that his office had neglected to show him the letter, which included accusations that McCarrick often invited six or more seminarians to his five-bedroom New Jersey beach house where he asked some to share his bed.

While many thought the pontiff would use at least one of his six speeches in Ireland to lay out new plans for combatting abuse and its coverup, he chose to instead offer up prayers and beg forgiveness for the past sins of the church, which has been his go-to defense.

McCarrick’s crimes and their coverup are well-documented. Pope Benedict XVI sanctioned the cardinal sometime between 2009 and 2010, according to Viganò’s letter, which states: “The cardinal was to leave the seminary where he was living, he was forbidden to celebrate [Mass] in public, to participate in public meetings, to give lectures, to travel, with the obligation of dedicating himself to a life of prayer and penance.”

Viganò goes on to say Francis then lifted these sanctions when he took office, and only reinstated them in June after it became clear that McCarrick was indeed a serial pervert. Viganò describes a scene in Vatican City when he met the formerly disgraced cardinal. “As soon as I entered the hall I met Cardinal McCarrick, who wore the red-trimmed cassock,” Viganò wrote. “I greeted him respectfully as I had always done. He immediately said to me, in a tone somewhere between ambiguous and triumphant: ‘The pope received me yesterday, tomorrow I am going to China.’”

Viganò, who is a staunch ally of hard-right American Cardinal Raymond Burke, who has also been highly critical of Francis, goes on to make other accusations against the pontiff and the church under his rule. “To restore the beauty of holiness to the face of the Bride of Christ, which is terribly disfigured by so many abominable crimes, and if we truly want to free the church from the fetid swamp into which she has fallen, we must have the courage to tear down the culture of secrecy and publicly confess the truths we have kept hidden,” he writes. “We must tear down the conspiracy of silence with which bishops and priests have protected themselves at the expense of their faithful, a conspiracy of silence that in the eyes of the world risks making the church look like a sect, a conspiracy of silence not so dissimilar from the one that prevails in the mafia.”

The Ireland trip was seen by many as another wasted opportunity for Francis, and one that looks almost sure to repeat itself as he struggles to manage a cancer within the church that is now metastasizing rapidly, especially in the United States, where Francis has yet to fully engage. Marie Collins, a victim of clerical sexual abuse from Ireland who had been a member of Pope Francis’ Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors until she resigned last year over the pope’s “lack of action” to protect children, said she despaired about her conversation with the pope.

“I was very disappointed that he felt that local processes are working,” she wrote in an op-ed in the Irish Independent. “That is not what I was hoping for, not what I was looking for, and not what many people were looking for. It also shows that we are not going to get any universal step in regard to accountability in the near future.” </s> VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis has accused Chile's bishops of destroying evidence of sex crimes, pressuring church lawyers to minimise accusations and of "grave negligence" in protecting children from paedophile priests.

In a devastating 10-page document delivered to Chilean bishops during a summit this week, Francis said the entire Chilean church hierarchy was collectively responsible for "grave defects" in handling abuse cases and the resulting loss of credibility that the Catholic Church has earned.

The document, reported by Chile's T13 television and confirmed as authentic today by the Vatican, puts mounting pressure on the bishops as a whole to resign given Francis told them that "no one can exempt himself and place the problem on the shoulders of the others.

" The bishops are due to hold a news conference in Rome later today.

Francis summoned the entire bishops' conference to Rome after admitting that he had made "grave errors in judgment" in the case of Bishop Juan Barros, who is accused by victims of Chile's most notorious predator priest, the Rev.

Fernando Karadima, of witnessing and ignoring their abuse.

But the scandal grew beyond the Barros case after Francis received a 2,300-page report written by two Vatican sex crimes experts sent to Chile to get a handle on the scope of the problem.

Their report hasn't been made public, but Francis cited its core findings in the footnotes to the document he handed over to the bishops Tuesday.

And those findings are damning.

Francis said the investigation showed there were "grave defects" in the way abuse cases were handled, with superficial investigations or no investigation at all of allegations that contained obvious evidence of crimes.

The result, he said, "created a scandal for those who denounced them and all those who know the alleged victims.

" In other cases, there was "grave negligence" in protecting children from pedophiles by bishops and religious superiors a reference to the many cases of sexual abuse that have arisen in recent years within Chilean religious orders, including the Salesians, Franciscans and the Marist Brothers community.

Some of these religious order priests and brothers were expelled from their congregations because of immoral conduct, but had their cases "minimized of the absolute gravity of their criminal acts, attributing to them mere weakness or moral lapses," Francis wrote.

But those same people "were then welcomed into other dioceses, in an obviously imprudent way, and given diocesan or parish jobs that gave them daily contact with minors," he said.

Such behaviour has been the hallmark of the clerical sex abuse crisis worldwide, with bishops and religious superiors shuttling abusers around from parish to parish or dioceses rather than reporting them to police or launching canonical investigations and removing them from ministry.

Francis said he was also "perplexed and ashamed" by the report's evidence that there were "pressures exercised" on church officials tasked with investigating sex crimes "including the destruction of compromising documents on the part of those in charge of ecclesiastic archives.

" He said such behaviour showed "an absolute lack of respect for the canonical process and worse, reprehensible practices that must be avoided in the future.

" He said the problem wasn't limited to a group of people, but can be traced to the training Chilean priests receive in seminary, blaming the "profound fracture" within the church on the seminaries themselves.

The Vatican investigation, he said, contained "grave accusations against some bishops and superiors who sent to these educational institutions priests suspected of active homosexuality."
Pope Francis makes a public statement acknowledging that some priests and bishops in the Catholic Church have been sexually abusing nuns.