Pope Francis admitted that sex abuse scandals surrounding the Catholic Church have driven younger people away.

“We know – and you have told us – that many young people do not turn to us for anything because they don’t feel we have anything meaningful to say to them,” he told a group of Catholic, Lutheran and Orthodox young people in Estonia on September 25.

“They are upset by sexual and economic scandals that do not meet with clear condemnation, by our unpreparedness to really appreciate the lives and sensibilities of the young, and simply by the passive role we assign them.”

Surveys commissioned by the Vatican, of a bishops meeting to discuss how to better minister to young Catholics, have been filled with similar complaints.

Francis said that the church wanted to respond to the criticism in an honest and transparent way. “We ourselves need to be converted,” he said.
“We have to realise that in order to stand by your side
we need to change many
situations that, in the end,
put you off.” The Pope was
speaking during the fourth
and final day of his tour of
the Baltics. The public
admission coincided with a devastating new report into decades of sex abuse and cover- ups in Germany. The document, produced by the German bishops’ conference, found that around 3,677 people were abused by clergy between 1946 and 2014.

Over half of those abused were 13 or younger. Nearly a third were altar boys.

University researchers compiled the report and found evidence that some files on the abuse were destroyed, many cases were not brought to justice and some bishops were simply moved to other dioceses when complaints were made, without congre- gations being informed about the accusations. The sex abuse scandal began in Ireland in the 1990s but has returned to the headlines recently after a former Vatican ambassador accused the Pope of knowing about abuse allegations against Theodore McCarrick, an American cardinal.

Francis is accused of rehabilitating Mr McCarrick despite the allegations.

The head of the German bishops conference formally apologized for sexual abuse in the church, saying it “has been denied, turned away from and covered up for far too long.”

“Sexual abuse is a crime,” Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising told a news conference on September 25 in Fulda, Germany. “And whoever is guilty of it must be punished by law.”

The bishops met in a plenary session in Fulda and released a study, conducted on behalf of the Bishops’ Conference from 2010 to 2014, on abuse. The study, leaked earlier in September, researched an estimated 3,700 sex abuse cases in the German church.

Marx said that, although prevention measures had been put in place by the Bishops’ Conference, it was not enough.

“I feel shame for looking away from many who did not want to believe what happened and who did not provide care for the victims. That also applies to me,” the cardinal said. “We did not listen to the victims.”

“As a church, we want to build up new trust. I know that many people do not believe us anymore. And I understand that,” he said. “But I hope very much that we can earn trust again.”

Criminologists who conducted the study were present in a panel to discuss their findings and answer media questions.

The details of the research project’s findings in all 27 German dioceses were released. Ten dioceses were selected for research dating back to 1946. Within the remaining 17 dioceses, the research focused only on abuse dating from 2000. The names of those accused were withheld from the document.

The Catholic Church has grown in its understanding of the horror of clerical sexual abuse and of the “corruption” of covering it up, Pope Francis said. Returning to Rome from a trip on Sept. 22-25 to the Baltic nations, Pope Francis was asked about his remarks to young people in Tallinn, Estonia, when he said young people are scandalized when they see the church fail to condemn abuse clearly. “The young people are scandalized by the hypocrisy of adults, they are scandalized by wars, they are scandalized by the lack of coherence, they are scandalized by corruption, and corruption is where what you underlined — sexual abuse — comes in,” the Pope responded.

Whatever the statistics say about rates of clerical abuse, the Pope said, “if there is even just one priest who abuses a boy or a girl, it is monstrous, because that man was chosen by God to lead that child to heaven.”

The fact that child abuse occurs in many environments does not in any way lessen the scandal, he said.

But it is not true that the church has done nothing “to clean up,” Pope Francis told reporters. If one looks at the Pennsylvania grand jury report released in
August or other similar
studies, he said, it is clear
that the majority of cases
occurred decades ago “because the church realized that it
had to battle it in a different
way.” “In olden times these things were covered up — but they were covered up also in families, when an uncle abused his niece, or a father raped his child; it was covered up because it was a very great shame,” Pope Francis said. “That was how people thought in the last century.”

To understand what happened in the past, he said, one must remember how abuse was handled then.

“The past should be interpreted using the hermeneutic of the age,” Pope Francis said. People’s “moral consciousness” develops over time, he said, pointing to the death penalty as an example.

But, he said, “look at the example of Pennsylvania. Look at the proportions and you will see that when the church began to understand, it did all it could.”

In fact, the Pope said, he has encouraged bishops to report cases to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and he “never, never” granted amnesty to a priest found guilty of abuse.

Pope Francis did not mention by name Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, the former nuncio to the United States, who claimed that Pope Francis knew of and ignored the sexual misconduct of former Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick. And the journalists’ question about Archbishop Vigano was never asked because the Pope insisted that most of the questions be related directly to his trip to Lithuania,

Latvia and Estonia.
But the Pope did say that “when there was that famous statement from an ex-nuncio, bishops from the whole world wrote to tell me they were close to me and praying for me.” One of the letters, he said, came from China and was signed jointly by a bishop from the government-controlled Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and a bishop from “the, let’s say, traditional Catholic Church.”