Portuguese panel receives over 200 allegations of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church

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More than 200 allegations of child sexual abuse have been made against the Portuguese Catholic Church, a special committee has said.

The allegations were made by people born between 1933 and 2006, the independent authority added.

Portuguese church officials said two years ago that authorities had only investigated about a dozen sexual abuse allegations involving Portuguese priests since 2001.

More than half of those cases were dropped because church investigators decided there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute them.

But the An Independent Committee for the Study of Child Abuse in the Church was established in January to examine historical allegations.

The six-person lay committee said it received reports from 214 people in its first month of work.

“This suffering is associated with feelings of shame, fear, guilt and self-exclusion,” the committee said in a statement Thursday.

Numerous allegations suggest a strong possibility that other children were victimized by the same abuser, he added.

Some of the anonymous allegations came from Portuguese citizens now living in Canada, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The authority will report its findings to the Portuguese Episcopal Conference at the end of the year ahead of any investigations.

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