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| Pope Benedict XVI |
Pope Benedict XVI removed nearly 400 priests in two years for molesting children, it has been revealed.
The shocking statistics for 2011-12 represent the first time the Vatican has revealed how many priests who have been defrocked.
Prior to that, the Catholic Church only revealed the number of alleged sexual abuse cases it had received.
The revelations come after centuries of tradition which saw the Vatican dealing with cases internally, without the involvement of police.
The document was prepared from data the Vatican had been collecting to help the Holy See defend itself before a UN committee in Geneva, Switzerland, this week.
Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's UN ambassador in Geneva, referred to just one of the damning statistics during eight hours of criticism and questioning from the UN human rights committee.
The rise in the number of defrockings is in stark contrast to 2009, when only 171 priests were removed following allegations.
Changes were brought in by Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, after suggesting bishops around the world were not following church law, while officials used ways to keep the accusations from surfacing.
Prior to that, Bishops routinely moved problem priests from parish to parish rather than subject them to trials - or turn them into police.
There has since been a remarkable evolution in the Holy See's in-house procedures to discipline pedophiles since 2001.
One of the chief accusations from victims is that bishops put the church's own procedures ahead of civil law enforcement by often suggesting victims keep accusations quiet while they are dealt with internally.
Development: Pope Benedict brought in changes to
the system when he was Cardinal Ratzinger after suggesting church law
was not being followed
The maximum penalty for a priest convicted by a church tribunal is essentially losing his job: being defrocked, or removed from the clerical state. There are no jail terms and nothing to prevent an offender from raping again.
In 2005, the Congregation authorised bishops to launch church trials against 21 accused clerics, but the verdicts were not recorded, according to the annual reports cited by the spreadsheet.
In 2006, the number of canonical trials doubled to 43 and and for the first time publicly revealed the number of cases reported to it: 362.
Vatican officials, however, have said that it received between 300-400 cases annually following the 2002 explosion of U.S. sex abuse cases.
In 2008, Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, traveled to the scandal-hit United States in and is quoted in the annual report as telling reporters en route that he was 'mortified' by the scale of abuse and simply couldn't comprehend 'how priests could fail in such a way'.
That year's entry was also notable for another reason: For the first time, an official Vatican document made clear that nothing in the church process stopped victims from reporting abuse to the police.
For the first time, the Vatican revealed 68 priests had been defrocked while 191 new cases were reported.
A year later, the number of defrocked priests rose to 103, while some 223 new cases were received, the vast majority of them abuse-related.
Breaking tradition: For centuries, the Vatican had their own internal way of dealing with sexual abuse cases
In 2010, 527 cases were reported to the Congregation. No figures were given that year for the number of defrocked priests, rather the Congregation described new church laws put in place to more easily and quickly remove them.
By 2011, with the new streamlined laws in place, the number of defrocked priests rose dramatically: 260 priests were removed in one year only, while 404 new cases of child abuse were reported. In addition to those defrocked, another 419 priests had lesser penalties imposed on them for abuse-related crimes.
In 2012, the last year for which statistics are available, the number of defrockings dropped to 124, with another 418 new cases reported.
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