It sometimes feels as though the endless flow of clerical abuse scandals will never stop, writes Niall Gooch.
The most recently uncovered perpetrator of sexual abuse in the Church is French cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, who has confessed to abusing a 14 year old girl in the 1980s. The Ricard revelations come close on the heels of a 2021 report which estimated that the number of French children abused by clerics since the 1950s may be as high as 216,000.
Some have questioned the methodology of the report, but even if that figure is an overestimate by three or four times, the facts are staggering. In addition to Ricard, there are ten serving or retired French bishops under investigation. Others were not themselves abusers, but covered up or ignored abuse. Earlier this year it was also reported that the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio, USA, had concealed serious sexual misconduct by a priest.
