Pope Francis said yesterday that Catholic priests who sexually abuse children are "vicious wolves" who should turn themselves into authorities, The Telegraph website reports today (December 22, 2018).
His remarks came at the end of the year in which he was accused of mishandling an abuse scandal in Chile and in which the Vatican's third most senior figure, economy minister Cardinal George Pell of Australia, was put on trial in Melbourne for sexually abusing boys.
Any priest who abused a child was "a vicious wolf ready to devour innocent souls," the pope said in his annual address to the Curia, the Vatican's governing body.
The pope acknowledged that the Catholic Church had hugely underestimated the phenomenon and failed to punish predatory priests and the bishops who cover up for them, often by moving them from parish to parish rather than reporting them to the police.
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