Pope Francis has been quoted as saying that reliable data indicates "about 2 percent" of Roman Catholic clerics to be sexual abusers, an Italian newspaper reported on Sunday. The Vatican, however, have issued a statement claiming that certain parts of the long article in the left-leaning La Repubblica did not correspond to the pope's exact words, including one that quoted him as saying that there were cardinals among the abusers.
Vowing to "confront it with the severity it demands," the Pope said abuse of children was like "leprosy" infecting the Church, in an article that was a reconstruction of an hour-long conversation between the pope and the newspaper's founder, Eugenio Scalfari, an atheist who has written about several past encounters with the pope.
"Many of my collaborators who fight with me (against pedophilia) reassure me with reliable statistics that say that the level of pedophilia in the Church is at about two percent," Francis was quoted as saying. "This data should hearten me but I have to tell you that it does not hearten me at all. In fact, I think that it is very grave," he was quoted as saying. While most pedophilia took place in family situations, "even we have this leprosy in our house," he added.
Representing around 8,000 priests out of a global number of about 414,000 Roman Catholic priests, the pope was quoted as saying that the 2 percent estimate came from advisers, BBC News reported. While the incidence of pedophilia as a psychiatric disorder in the general population is not accurately known, some estimates have put it at less than five percent. "Among the 2 percent who are pedophiles are priests, bishops and cardinals. Others, more numerous, know but keep quiet. They punish without giving the reason," he said. "I find this state of affairs intolerable."
Scalfari, 90, is popularly known to engage in long traditional conversations with public figures without taking notes or taping them, and then reconstructing them from memory, the Vatican said in a statement Monday.
"While acknowledging that the conversation had taken place, Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi issued a statement saying that not all the phrases could be attributed 'with certainty' to the pope," Reuters reported. "Lombardi said that, in particular, a quote attributed to the pope saying cardinals were among the sex abusers was not accurate and accused the paper of trying to 'manipulate naive readers.'"
Last year, Pope Francis strengthened the Vatican's laws against child abuse, and held his first meeting with victims of sexual abuse last week, begging for forgiveness from the victims and vowing zero tolerance for abusers.
