A report [text, PDF] released Monday by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse [official website] revealed that 4,444 people alleged sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Australia between January 1985 and February 2015. Looking at data going back to 1950, the study found that 7 percent of all priests in Australia were accused in sexual abuse claims. At one church, St. John of God in Sydney, 40 percent of priests were alleged to be sexual perpetrators. “These numbers are shocking … they are tragic … and they are indefensible,” Francis Sullivan of the Truth, Justice and Hearing Council [official website] said in a speech [Daily Telegraph report, video] responding to the findings. In a statement [text, PDF] first released in September of 2013, around the time the Royal Commission began its investigation, leaders of the Catholic Church of Australia said they “recognize and acknowledge the devastating harm caused to people by the crime of child sexual abuse.”

For years, clergy sexual abuse [JURIST news archive] has created controversy for the Roman Catholic Church. In October 2014 a judge in Minnesota approved a settlement [JURIST report] in a sexual abuse case involving church leaders that neglected to warn parishioners about an abusive priest. In May of that year the Vatican appeared [JURIST report] before the Geneva committee that oversees the UN Convention Against Torture, arguing that a strict interpretation of the convention limited the church’s responsibility for the international priest sex abuse scandal. In January 2014 the UN Committee on the Convention on the Rights of the Child criticized the Vatican [JURIST report] on the its handling of child sex abuse. In December 2013 the Pennsylvania Superior Court unanimously reversed [JURIST report] the conviction of a priest for his failure to protect children from a sexual predator and ordered he be released from prison.