Pope Francis Thanks Journalists For Helping Expose Sex Scandal In The Catholic Church

Pope Francis. (Wikimedia Commons/Xonn)

JAKARTA - The head of the world's Catholic Church Pope Francis on Saturday thanked journalists for helping to uncover a scandal over sexual abuse of priests that the Roman Catholic Church initially tried to cover up.

Pope Francis praised what he called the "mission" of journalism, saying it was vital for journalists to get out of their newsrooms, discovering what was happening in the outside world to counter the misinformation often found online.

"(I) thank you for what you told us about what went wrong in the Church, for helping us not to hide it under the carpet, and for the voice you gave to victims of abuse," Pope Francis said, citing Reuters Nov. 13.

Pope Francis spoke at a ceremony honoring two veteran correspondents, Philip Pullella of Reuters and Valentina Alazraki of Noticieros Televisa of Mexico, for the long careers they have spent covering the Vatican.

The sexual abuse scandal made headlines in 2002, when the United States daily The Boston Globe wrote a series of articles exposing patterns of abuse of minors, by priests and the widespread culture of concealment within the Catholic Church.

Since then, various scandals have rocked the Church in many countries, most recently in France where a major investigation found in October that French priests had sexually abused more than 200,000 children over the past 70 years.

Critics have accused Pope Francis of being too slow to respond to the scandal, after he became pope in 2013 and trusted the words of his clerical colleagues over those of victims of abuse.

However, in 2018 he tried to come to terms with past mistakes, publicly admitting he was wrong about a case in Chile and vowing that the Church would never again try to cover up such mistakes. In 2019 Pope Francis called for an "all-out battle" against evil that must be "erased from the face of the earth".

Pope Francis on Saturday said journalists have a mission "to explain the world, to make it less obscure, to make those who live in it less afraid".

To do that, he said journalists needed to "escape the tyranny" of always being online. "Not everything can be told via email, phone, or screen," he concluded.