Allegations that the Pope knew about abuse within the Church are no surprise – here's what the Vatican must to do atone

The abuses are well known now, and regretted as Ireland goes modern and secular. The Church needs to work hard to achieve justice, and to shore up its position in one of its last relative strongholds

As far as I’m concerned, the onus is on the Catholic Church, not one individual pope, to tackle the historic abuse of children (Getty)

As a spectacularly lapsed Roman Catholic of Irish heritage (though one who journeyed to see the pop star-like Pope John Paul II on his last visit to the UK in 1982), I don’t suppose I have much claim to tell his holiness what to do.

I will though, because – like every other political and religious leader – he has a duty, in his case a god-given one, to do the right thing. And the time for action, not words, has arrived.

The latest news that the Pope was told back in 2013 about the sexual abuse of children at the hands of a cardinal and did nothing about it has prompted calls for him to resign from top Vatican officials. As far as I’m concerned, the onus is on the Catholic Church, not one individual pope, to tackle this issue head on.

As it happens, like to many Catholics, the revelations came as no great shock to me. When I was growing up, in England, we had a priest, or monk, hanging around my Roman Catholic primary school who, in retrospect, showed inappropriate and potentially paedophillic behaviour. The kids used to gossip about him and warn each other to stay away from him. I wondered later on what might happen to him and then, about twenty years on, I heard that the police were on his case and he died after driving into a motorway bridge. So he escaped justice.

It irks me to this day, and I also think about how many of his fellow clergy, the teachers at our Roman Catholic school or the hierarchy in the diocese knew about his predilections. We now know that many serious assaults were allowed to occur through the Church and its schools up and down the country – and the world. It’s easy to ask why nothing was ever done.

We now know that there was plenty of Church-enabled sexual abuse – including horrifying physical cruelty – inflicted upon scores of children, and there seems to be no end to the revelations of corruption and cover ups. Ireland was surely one of the countries that most suffered.

Almost every child of Irish heritage will have heard of or suffered the pride that their parents, grandparents, teachers and priests would take in inflicting harsh physical punishment for minor misdemeanours. They were at times almost terrorist-like in their taste for the belt, the rod, tawse, cane or any other device used to scar the legs, hands and backsides of infants and children. It was widespread. In Ireland, the state itself was so closely intertwined with the Church that it can and should be held responsible.

The manifold abuses are well known now, and regretted as Ireland goes modern and secular. What the Church needs to do is threefold, not only to achieve justice but to shore up its position in one of its last relative strongholds.

First it needs to set up a Church tribunal with powers, country by country, to pay substantial damages to those with a case. In Ireland, these cases are often decades old so the evidence can be sketchy, but the very presence of the Church in a single mother’s institution, for example, or its involvement in cases of forcible adoptions suggests there were people who were exposed to some hardship at the Church’s hands. The Vatican can afford it.

Second, the old sods still at large need to be brought to Church and civilian justice. There should be no hiding place, and Pope Francis needs to set aside personal loyalties or misplaced compassion in prosecuting them. They’ll have to suffer more than reciting a dozen Hail Marys.

Lastly, he should carry on making his speeches and using frank language to condemn those who use his/our church for evil. Words are valuable and necessary to admit fault, error and culpability, but “mea culpa” in this case is not enough.

That would be a holy trinity of reform for Rome, and one that every catholic, devout or otherwise, should pray for.