The reckoning: Child sex abuse in the Catholic Church
This file photo shows Pope Francis (right), flanked by Italian priest Federico Lombardi, praying during the opening of a global child protection summit for reflections on the sex abuse crisis within the Catholic Church, on February 21, 2019 at the Vatican.
Between 1950 and 2018, the US Catholic Church received credible complaints of child sex abuse involving 7,002 members of the clergy
In Ireland, the number of underage victims of clerical sex abuse is estimated at nearly 15,000 between 1970 and 1990 alone
The biggest scandal in Australia centred on the Vatican's former finance chief, Cardinal George Pell, who was convicted in 2018 of sexually abusing choirboys in Melbourne in the 1990s
France's biggest scandal centred on Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, archbishop of Lyon, who received a six-month suspended jail sentence in 2019 for covering up for a priest
Portugal on Monday will become the latest country to issue an independent report into clerical sexual abuse, an issue that has dogged the Catholic Church for years and undermined its moral authority.
From Australia to Ireland via the United States, thousands of priests, bishops and cardinals have been caught up in abuse scandals, as well as lay members of the Church such as Catholic school teachers or youth group leaders.
