Pope Francis, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, has acknowledged that nuns have been systematically sexually abused and held as sex slaves by priests and bishops within the church.
The statement is part of the Pope's attempts to rid the church of sleaze and wrongdoing, following years of complaints and scandals involving the mass sexual and physical abuse of children by members of the church, including the recent discovery that hundreds of native children had been killed in catholic church run institutions in Canada. In many cases, the catholic church covered up this abuse in order to preserve its public image, and the perpetrators were allowed to go on to commit further heinous crimes.
Returning from a trip to Abu Dhabi, Pope Francis told the Associated Press:
"It's true … There have been priests and even bishops who have done this. I think it is still going on because something does not stop just because you have become aware of it. It's a path that we've been on. Pope Benedict had the courage to dissolve a female congregation which was at a certain level, because this slavery of women had entered it — slavery, even to the point of sexual slavery — on the part of clerics or the founder."
In recent times, female church members across the world, notably in Latin America, India and Africa, have spoken up about the systematic abuse within their congregations.
A recent article by Lucetta Scaraffia, editor in chief of the catholic magazine 'Women Church World', shed light on the abuse of nuns within the church. She wrote:
"If eyes continue to be closed to this scandal – rendered even more serious by the fact that the abuse of women entails procreation and is thus at the root of the scandal of imposed abortions and of the children not recognized by priests – the condition of oppression of women in the Church will never change."
The International Union of Superiors General, the world's largest body representing nuns, has also spoken out against a culture of secrecy and sexual abuse within the clergy.
Earlier this year, the catholic church in France admitted that, by its own estimations, 216,000 children, mostly boys, had been abused over the last 70 years at the hands of over 2,000 individual priests, an admission that shocked the world by revealing the scale of the abuse.
[Based on reporting by: The Mind Unleashed]
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