Supreme leader of the Catholic
Church, Pope Francis, on Thursday vowed that priests who were indicted in cases
of sexual indecency against children would no longer be given a right of appeal
against being kicked out of the Church.
Pope Francis, who added that he
would never pardon any of such priests, said he had learned his lesson after
allowing an Italian Bishop to not defrock a priest who had been found guilty of
acts of abuse, and who then committed similar offences two years later.
The Catholic Pontiff said this
while addressing his child abuse advisory panel at the Vatican.
Francis also acknowledged that
the Church had been slow to wake up to the scale of the problem of clerical
abuse, which has done enormous damage to its standing in many countries.
He said, “The abuse of a minor,
if it is proven, is sufficient for there to be no possibility of appeal. If the
proof is there, the punishment is definitive.
“And as for requests for papal
pardons, I will not sign anything for these crimes.
“The means of resolving the
problem are also arriving a bit late.
“That is the reality, the old
practice of moving (paedophile priests) from one diocese to the other put
people’s conscience to sleep.”
Francis has repeatedly vowed to
rid the church of the scourge of paedophilia through a zero-tolerance approach
which his predecessors proved incapable of implementing.
But his credibility on the issue
has been hit by the resignation of two members of his advisory panel over
opposition to changes from within the Vatican hierarchy.
Victims’ organisations also
maintain that the church remains reluctant to hand paedophile priests over to
criminal justice authorities.
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