Pope thanks journalists for helping expose Church sex scandals By Reuters

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis on Saturday thanked journalists for serving to uncover the clerical sexual abuse scandals that the Roman Catholic Church initially tried to cowl up.

The pope praised what he referred to as the “mission” of journalism and mentioned it was very important for reporters to get out of their newsrooms and uncover what was occurring within the exterior world to counter misinformation typically discovered on-line.

“(I) thanks for what you inform us about what’s mistaken within the Church, for serving to us to not sweep it below the carpet, and for the voice you’ve given to the abuse victims,” the pope mentioned.

Francis was talking at a ceremony to honour two veteran correspondents — Philip Pullella of Reuters and Valentina Alazraki of Mexico’s Noticieros Televisa — for his or her lengthy careers spent overlaying the Vatican.

The sexual abuse scandals hit the headlines in 2002, when U.S. day by day The Boston Globe wrote a sequence of articles exposing a sample of abuse of minors by clerics and a widespread tradition of concealment inside the Church.

Since then, scandals have rocked the Church in myriad nations, most just lately France the place a significant investigation present in October that French clerics had sexually abused greater than 200,000 youngsters over the previous 70 years.

Critics accused Francis of responding too slowly to the scandals after he turned Pontiff in 2013 and of believing the phrase of his fellow clergy over that of the abuse victims.

However in 2018 he tried to deal with previous errors, publicly admitting he was mistaken a few case in Chile and vowing that the Church would by no means once more search to cowl up such wrongdoing. In 2019 he referred to as for an “all-out battle” towards a criminal offense that must be “erased from the face of the earth”.

Francis on Saturday mentioned journalists had a mission “to elucidate the world, to make it much less obscure, to make those that dwell in it much less concern it”.

To do this, he mentioned reporters wanted to “escape the tyranny” of all the time being on-line. “Not the whole lot will be advised by means of electronic mail, the telephone, or a display,” he mentioned.