Group calls for Pope to introduce worldwide child protection policy
Sexual abuse support group One in Four has today called for the introduction of worldwide mandatory child protection policy within the Catholic Church.
Responding to the BBC Panorama film aired last night, One in Four also called on the Vatican to fulfil its obligations as a signatory to the United Convention on the Rights of Children which it signed in 1990.
“The urgent need for such a policy is surely clear to any objective person who watched last nights film and heard about Warley, the then five-year-old boy repeatedly raped in 2003 by a priest known to the church to be an abuser,” said One in Four’s Colm O’Gorman.
“(This was) at a time when the Vatican required bishops to inform it of all allegations against priests any where in the world.”
“It is simply not credible to suggest that the Vatican, and in particular Pope Benedict XIV as Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Church, bear no responsibility for the ongoing sexual abuse of children by priests in Catholic dioceses across the world.”
