Scandals Are Turning Young People Away From The Church- Pope

Pope Francis on Tuesday while addressing young people at a Lutheran church in Tallinn on the last day of a four-day trip to the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia has disclosed that young people are turned off by the Catholic Church because of sex abuse and financial scandals.

“Some of them expressly ask us to leave them alone, because they feel the Church’s presence as bothersome or even irritating.

“They are outraged by sexual and economic scandals that do not meet with clear condemnation, by our unpreparedness to really appreciate the lives and sensibilities of the young,’’ Francis said during a visit to Estonia.

Report says the Catholic Church is facing a worldwide crisis over allegations that it failed to discipline paedophile priests among its ranks.

On Tuesday, the Catholic Church in Germany presented a report indicating that 1,670 priests, 4.4 per cent of total Catholic clergy numbers, had abused 3,677 people between 1946 and 2014 in Germany.

Most of the victims were underage boys and over 50 per cent of the victims were under the age of 13, with one in six cases related to accusations of rape.

Many of the perpetrators had simply been moved to other parishes when the abuse was discovered, without informing the communities.

In more than 60 per cent of cases, priests went unpunished.