Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, the third most senior active cardinal in the worldwide Church, has called on bishops and other Catholic officials to better engage in listening to victims of clergy sex abuse.

At a lecture last month in the Austrian capital of Vienna, where he has been archbishop since 1995, Schönborn said listening to victims was essential to breaking the “spiral of silence” that has allowed such abuse to continue for so long.

“The victims have to overcome an enormously high threshold even to begin talking,” the 74-year-old cardinal said at a conference on “Sex & Crime” at the Religiosity in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Institute at Vienna University.

He shared his own experience of what he described as the Austrian Church’s “25-year-long painful learning process” of clerical sexual abuse.

Schönborn, a Dominican theologian who became an auxiliary bishop of Vienna Archdiocese in 1991, recalled how it was not until he had actually met with and listened to victims that he was able to overcome his initial defensive reflexes, correct his wrong assumptions and completely change his awareness of clerical sexual abuse. But he said it was extremely difficult to get victims to talk about the abuse they had experienced. The cardinal said a number of victims had told him, “if only I hadn’t begun (talking about the abuse),” telling him they believed suppressing the memory of the painful trauma might spare them even greater suffering.