Sham At Rome? Holy Fathers Congregate For Vatican Summit To Discuss Ways To Prevent Predatory Priests From Sexually Abusing Children

Pope Francis has opened a four-day Vatican conference that will discuss ways to fight the sexual abuse of children by predatory Christian priests, The Guardian reported.

The unprecedented meeting of bishops is being perceived as an acknowledgement by the Vatican of the scale of the sexual abuse problem.

Francis has come under fire for his apathetic response to gruesome revelations over the past year that thousands of Catholic priests sexually preyed on minors and adult seminarians. Francis has himself faced allegations of covering up their sexual crimes.

In his opening remark, Francis called on the church "to heal grave wounds the paedophilia scandal has caused to both the young and the believers".

"The holy people of God are watching and waiting not for simple and obvious condemnations but concrete and efficient measures," Pope added.

The conference is being attended by the heads of some 110 national Catholic bishops’ conferences and dozens of experts and leaders of religious orders in the Vatican. The meeting is expected discussing steps to prevent clerical sex abuse.

Many critics have dismissed the event as nothing but a publicity stunt aimed at salvaging some credibility by an institutions which has been hit by hundreds of sex abuse scandals for more than three decades now.

This meeting will take place amid the global release of a new book titled “In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy” by a gay French journalist Frédéric Martel who claims that 80 per cent of the Vatican clergy are gay.

The book also claims that in vast majority of sexual abuse cases, the priests and bishops protect the aggressors because they fear their own homosexuality might be revealed in the event of a scandal.