Pope says ashamed Church did not prioritise abuse victims in France

Pope Francis said on Wednesday he was saddened and shamed by the Catholic Church’s inability to deal with sexual abuse of children in France and that the Church must make itself a “safe home for everyone”.

“I would like to express to the victims my sadness, sorrow for the trauma they have suffered and also my shame, our shame for the church’s too long inability to put them at the centre of its concerns,” Francis said at his weekly general audience.

Speaking a day after a major investigation revealed that French clergy had abused more than 200,000 children over 70 years, the pontiff invited Catholics in France to take responsibility for what had happened in order to make the Church a “safe home for everyone”.

A representative of France’s Catholic’s bishops asked victims of sexual abuse by clergy for their forgiveness, after a report was published on the scale of abuse in the French church going back decades.

Monsignor Eric de Moulins-Beaufort, head of the French conference of bishops, said he and his fellow bishops wanted to express to victims their shame at the abuse revealed in the report.