About 848 priests and 2,572 others have been given lesser sanctions over the past 10 years as a form of discipline by the Vatican after they were accused of raping and molesting children, the Associated Press reported.
During a second day of grilling by a U.N. committee monitoring implementation of the U.N. treaty against torture, comprehensive statistics and figures were released for the first time Tuesday by the Vatican's U.N. ambassador in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi.
Although Tomasi claimed that the convention applied only to the tiny Vatican City state, statistics about how the Holy See has adjudicated sex abuse cases globally were nevertheless revealed by him.
He also did not dispute the committee's contention that sexual violence against children can be considered as a form of torture.
More than 3,400 credible cases of abuse had been referred to the Vatican since 2004, he said. There were 401 cases reported in 2013 alone.
"He said that over the last decade, 848 priests had been defrocked, or returned to the lay state by the pope," the AP reported. "Another 2,572 were sentenced to a lifetime of penance and prayer or some other lesser sanction, which is often used when the accused priest is elderly or infirm."
The Associated Press in January reported that then-Pope Benedict XVI had defrocked 384 priests in the final two years of his pontificate.
"Tomasi told the AP on Tuesday that those figures from January were 'incomplete' and that the data he provided the torture committee Tuesday -- the first ever year-by-year breakdown of how cases were adjudicated -- was complete."
He told the committee that "there is no climate of impunity but there is a total commitment to clean the house" and prevent more abuse.
"I think we have crossed a threshold so to say in our evolution of the approach to these problems," he concluded. "It's clear that the issue of sexual abuse of children, which is a worldwide plague and scourge, has been addressed in the last 10 years by the church in a systematic, comprehensive, constructive way."
