Pope says parts of Church abusive 'as a system'

VATICAN: Pope Leo XIV on Monday said parts of the Catholic Church have sometimes "as a system been abusive", following his meeting with several victims of clerical sex abuse in France.

"Several of them spoke about systemic abuse," the pope told reporters on the plane on his way back to the Vatican, referring to the victims.

"Personally, I prefer to express it in a different way, although I did speak about some organisations within the church who have at times, if you will, as a system, been abusive."

After the meeting, Jerome Guillement, who has written about a priest abusing him as a teenager, said the pontiff understood the "systemic" character of sexual abuse in the Church.

"From his point of view, the perpetrators are individuals, but what allows it to continue is the systemic dimension within the institution," he said.

A 2021 inquiry found that clergy or lay members of the Church had abused about 330,000 minors in France over 70 years.

The pope on Monday said that abuse within the Church also meant that "people's lives of faith are deeply wounded and sometimes even destroyed.

"So there's a particular responsibility of the church to walk with them and to help them seek healing," he said.