Swiss bishops speak to Pope about sexual abuse scandal
Pope Francis received the President of the Swiss Bishops' Conference (SBK), Felix Gmür, and the Chur Bishop Joseph Bonnemain.
Switzerland’s Catholic Church is the subject of a Vatican investigation into its cover-up of sexual abuse.
+ Will the Catholic Church really investigate abuse claims?
The visit to the Holy See on Wednesday served to present to the Pope “the measures that the Swiss bishops would like to take,” SBK told the Keystone-SDA news agency after a report from the Italian news agency Ansa. The visit was “positive”.
In September, the SBK announced the opening of a preliminary investigation on behalf of the Vatican under the direction of Bishop Joseph Bonnemain.
A report published almost simultaneously by the University of Zurich uncovered at least 1,002 cases of sexual abuse in the Swiss Catholic Church, committed by more than 500 priests or employees over decades since the middle of the last century. A “culture of silence” was denounced.
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
External Content
Your subscription could not be saved. Please try again.
Almost finished… We need to confirm your email address. To complete the subscription process, please click the link in the email we just sent you.
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.