The Associated Press is reporting that the Vatican’s U.N. ambassador to Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, revealed the figures during a second day of grilling Tuesday by a U.N. committee monitoring implementation of the U.N. treaty against torture.
Tomasi revealed that 848 Catholic Church priests have been laicized (defrocked) as a result of allegations of sexual abuse worldwide in the past ten years.
Perhaps more importantly, Tomasi acknowledged that sexual abuse involving children “can be considered torture.”
According to a 2004 John Jay Report, there were allegations made against 4,392 Catholic priests and deacons in the United States alone. Since that report is a decade old, there are many more allegations about abuse by Catholic Church priests that have been made since its publication.
While the Catholic Church in the United States continues to claim that the majority of allegations made since the 2004 John Jay Report happened in the 1950’s and 1960’s, there are still a number of recent allegations of sexual abuse.
The sexual abuse crisis that rocked the Catholic Church more than a decade ago has not abated because true reform has not taken place.