'Two per cent' of clergy are paedophiles, Pope quoted as saying

Pope Francis has been quoted as saying that "two per cent" of the Catholic church's clergy are paedophiles involved in abuse cases.

"The Church fights in order for this vice to be eradicated . . . but even we have this leprosy at home," the pontiff was reported as saying in an article run by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica published on Sunday. "I find this situation intolerable and it is my intention to confront it with the severity it demands."

The remarks were contained in a three-page long account of an informal dialogue between the Argentine pontiff and Eugenio Scalfari, the former editor of the La Repubblica, which took place last Thursday.

"Many of my collaborators who fight with me [against paedophilia] reassure me with reliable statistics that say that the level of paedophilia in the Church is at about two per cent," Francis was reported to have said.

"This data should hearten me but I have to tell you that it does not hearten me at all. In fact, I think that it is very grave."

However, Father Federico Lombardi, Vatican spokesman, took issue with some aspects of the article, saying the quotations did not correspond to the pope's exact words. Although the story conveyed the "sense and the spirit" of the conversation between the two men, it was not an interview in the normal sense of the word, he said.

Fr Lombardi added that, in particular, a quotation attributed to the pope saying cardinals were among the sex abusers was not accurate and accused the paper of trying to "manipulate naive readers".

The delicate issue of abuses by clergy in the Catholic Church represents one of the most challenging tests for the pontiff to confront.

Although the Vatican has never quantified the extent of the phenomenon, in May Archbishop Silvano Maria Tomasi, permanent observer of the Holy See to the UN in Geneva, said that a total of 3,420 credible accusations of sexual abuses by priests had been referred to the Vatican in the past ten years.

Addressing the UN committee on torture, which called for a permanent investigation on what it defined a "climate of impunity" within the Church, he added that 824 clerics had been defrocked in that time.

Since the beginning of his papacy, the pontiff has strengthened Vatican laws against child abuse but numerous victims associations still accuse the Catholic Church of turning a blind eye to decades of abuse, covering up cases and failing to punish clergy, especially senior officials

Francis met victims of sex abuse from Britain, Ireland and Germany last week and made an unprecedented request for their forgiveness "for the sins of omission on the part of church leaders who did not respond adequately".

According to Church statistics for 2012, the latest available, there are about 414,000 Roman Catholic priests in the world.

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