Curia clarifies paedophilia statistics as Malta accused of high abuse rate
Raphael Vassallo
Maltese Church authorities yesterday issued a clarification of the statistics it released last week, after a foreign website speculated that Malta – contrary to popular perception both locally and abroad – may have a higher-than-average percentage of Catholic priests accused of child abuse.
Last week, the Archbishop’s Curia released statistics compiled over 11 years of investigations by the Response Team, set up in 1999 specifically to investigate allegations of child abuse by members of the clergy.
According to this report, the Response Team had investigated a total of 45 priests and members of religious orders in connection with over 80 allegations of sexual molestation of minors. Of these, only three have since faced criminal proceedings in court - after the alleged victims, dissatisfied with the work of the Response Team, referred the matter to the police.
The statistics released by the Curia lost no time finding their way onto the Richard Dawkins Foundation’s online forum – a social networking website for atheists and secular humanists, founded by the well-known author of The God Delusion – where one anonymous user extrapolated a percentage for Malta’s rate of child abuse by the clergy as a whole.
Going on the figures supplied by the last nationwide census (carried out in 2004), this amateur statistician concluded that the 45 investigated priests represented 6% of the Malta’s total of 7,326 priests present in Malta.
And yet, the Vatican’s Maltese promoter of justice at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Mgr Charles Scicluna, claimed that ‘between 1% and 5%’ of clergymen worldwide had been investigated over child abuse allegations.
“If we extrapolate the 5% value (which is likely to be low, in my opinion) to the 400,000 catholic priests globally... then we have a total of 20,000 child-raping criminals being sheltered by the Catholic Church, and goodness knows how many traumatised and scarred victims,” the forum user, who signs off as ‘SteveN’, commented.
By comparison to global statistics, Malta’s own rate of 6% appeared to suggest that the problem is significantly more keenly felt here than elsewhere – prompting the Church to issue a clarification yesterday to the effect that of the 45 cases investigated, 19 were proved to be baseless, 13 were still ongoing, and six had been concluded, and the priests concerned found guilty.
In the light of this revision, Malta’s rate of predatory priests drops to an altogether less dramatic 3% – well within the average rates registered in countries worldwide – but as Scicluna himself put it with regard to the global percentage: “The Church feels that even one case of abuse is one too many.”
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