A former top Vatican official who dealt with clergy sexual abuse issues joined victims on Monday in urging Pope Francis to enact a zero-tolerance law throughout the global Catholic church so any cleric found guilty of abuse would be removed from ministry.
Rev. Hans Zollner, a German Jesuit priest who resigned in frustration from the pope’s clergy abuse commission in 2022, was part of a press conference in Rome with Ending Clergy Abuse, an international group of victims.
They called on Francis to take a zero-tolerance law adopted by U.S. Catholic bishops in 2002 and apply it to the entire 1.4-billion-member Church.
Zollner, who heads a centre for the study of abuse at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, said the Church needed “a change of knowledge, a change of attitude, a change of mentality (that is) much more than what has been done so far”.
Francis has made addressing abuse by clergy a priority of his 11-year papacy, with mixed results so far.
Continue reading at Rueters