Catholic clergy abuse nearly 5,000 children since 1950

Portuguese Catholic clergy had committed the heinous crime of child sex abuse on more than 4,800 children since 1950.

As many as 512 victims have already come forward to speak out, but the Portuguese church officials tried to downplay the cases saying there were only a handful of cases.

Senior clergymen sat in the front row of the auditorium where an expert panel looking to the abuse, read out some of the harrowing allegations of abuse, full of shocking descriptions.

The head of the Portuguese Bishops Conference, Bishop José Ornelas, said the church authorities would study the panel’s 500-page report before giving an official response.

“We have seen and heard things we cannot ignore,” he told reporters. “It’s a dramatic set of circumstances. It won’t be easy to get over it.”

The Independent Committee for the Study of Child Abuse in the Catholic Church, established by Portuguese bishops about a year ago, looked into allegations of abuse starting in 1950.

The panel produced its final report on Monday, and the bishops are scheduled to discuss it next month. The limitation has expired for most of the cases, and only 25 allegations were passed to prosecutors, the panel said.

The panel said it regretted that the Vatican had taken so long to grant access to church archives. Permission came only in October, giving the panel just three months to go through written evidence of abuse.

The report comes four years after Pope Francis gathered church leaders from around the world at the Vatican to address the crisis of sexual abuse in the church, more than 30 years after the scandal first erupted in Ireland and Australia. Bishops and other Catholic superiors in many parts of Europe at the time denied the existence of clergy sex abuse or insisted on giving little weight to the problem.