Church failing to tackle sex abuse in ‘Global South’: Vatican

VATICAN CITY: A senior official in the Vatican´s advisory commission on clerical sexual abuse admitted on Friday that the Catholic Church was failing to tackle the scourge in the southern hemisphere.

There was a “disparity in training and prevention of child sexual abuse between the northern and southern hemispheres”, warned Andrew Small, the secretary of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.

The abuse scandal erupted in the second half of the 1980s, sparking an avalanche of allegations about paedophile priests around the world, from Australia to Chile, France and the United States.

Pope Francis has insisted the Church will adopt a “zero tolerance” approach to abuse, but critics say many countries have yet to seriously confront the issue. There was an “urgency... to remedy the huge inequality in safeguarding services between the global north and south”, Small said in an article published in the Vatican´s newspaper L´Osservatore Romano.