Worldwide Call for Action: Stop Child Abuse in the Catholic Church, Part 2 of 2

“It’s disgusting, and it’s ridiculous and it’s completely unacceptable in our Church.” “ Shame on them for putting power, their power and prestige and possessions over the lives of the children who were entrusted to their care. Shame on them!” The child sex abuse scandal has rocked the Catholic Church to its very core; as more cases come to light around the world the Vatican is forced to reflect at every step. But survivors say the Vatican still needs to be more accountable.

In Germany, a study commissioned by the Catholic Church in 2018 found that more than 1,600 members of the clergy abused over 3,500 children under their care in almost 70 years. As a result, it’s estimated that over a half million people had left the Church in 2022, in addition to approximately 360,000 in the previous year. In October 2021, the whole of France was shocked by a scandalous report that exposed large-scale child abuse by the Church that went on for decades. The report estimates the number of child victims of sexual abuse at the hands of priests, deacons, monks, or nuns at 216,000. There was above all, a catalogue of negligence, failures, silence, an institutional cover-up which appeared systematic. In October 2018, victims and their supporters traveled from all over the world to Rome, the heart of the Catholic Church, to protest against its complicity in child sexual abuse.

Our Most Compassionate Supreme Master Ching Hai (vegan) has repeatedly condemned the evil of child abuse by priests and others in authority. “They’re not! How can they be a priest? Just to put on that robe and then cheating the whole world, and killing children. Not just physically but emotionally, psychologically. All these people have to be in the court and judged like everybody else, because a cancer is a cancer. […] What’s wrong cannot be right, no matter who you are! […]”