Sex abuse victims blast Church‘s paedophile solution

Dublin. Victims sexually abused by Roman Catholic clergy expressed outrage at the church‘s proposed two-track process for dismissing paedophile priests, deriding the idea as a sham. Following crisis meetings at the Vatican this week, U.S. cardinals, reeling from a series of sex scandals in the United States, appeared reluctant to implement a zero-tolerance policy for all sex offenders and issued an ambiguously worded statement differentiating between serial child abusers and lone cases.

John Kelly, founder of the Dublin-based Survivors of Child Abuse, dismissed the statement as a fudge, saying it highlighted the church‘s refusal to deal with clerical paedophilia.

U.S. bishops meet in Dallas in June to review the proposals outlined after their meetings at the Vatican.

Colm O‘Gorman, of the U.K.-based One In Four support group, said the church‘s response showed it had yet to grasp the seriousness of the problem. O‘Gorman is one of four men who revealed in a recent BBC documentary that they had been abused as a teenager by a priest, Father Sean Fortune, in Ireland in the 1980s. The broadcast precipitated the resignation of one of Ireland‘s most high-profile Roman Catholic bishops, Brendan Comiskey, for his handling of the affair.

The Catholic Church has been rocked by a growing spate of sex abuse scandals across dioceses around the world. In the United States, revelations spread that top clergy had shielded offenders and not prevented them from interacting with children after abuse was uncovered. The Pope summoned senior U.S. clergy to the Vatican for an emergency meeting last week to try to address the crisis. He told cardinals he would no longer tolerate paedophile priests. But in their final statement, U.S. church leaders angered abuse victims by failing to take a clear, uncompromising position against any form of paedophile abuse. In Dublin, O‘Kelly said he was angry that the Vatican meeting had been restricted to U.S. cardinals when there were also serious sex abuse problems within the church in Europe. (Reuters)