Pope Benedict Kicked Out 400 Pedophile Priests In Two Years, Report Says [Breaking]

Pope Benedict XVI defrocked almost 400 Catholic priests for sexually abusing children just in the final two years of his papacy, an explosive new report from The Associated Press reveals.

The AP report is based on a document the organization says that it obtained today, January 17. The statistics on pedophile priests, not generally thought to be compiled all in one place by the Vatican, were prepared by The Holy See for use by its representatives at a United Nations human rights hearing in Geneva this week.

National Public Radio also reported on the document without having seen it, but said it was unable to independently confirm the information it is said to contain.

“If confirmed, the number of nearly 400 marks a sharp increase over the 171 priests removed in 2008 and 2009, when the Vatican first provided details on the number of defrocked priests,” NPR‘s Sylvia Poggioli reported from Rome. “Before that, the Vatican only revealed the number of alleged cases of sexual abuse it had received.”

It remains unclear what accounts for the sharp increase in pedophile priests defrocked by Pope Benedict in 2011 and 2012.

The news agency report speculated that a spike in media reports on cases of priests who molested children in 2010 could account for the seeming crackdown by Pope Benedict in those two years.

But on February 28, 2013, the then-85-year-old Pope Benedict, whose given name is Joseph Ratzinger, himself stepped down from the papacy, taking the newly created title of Pope Emeritus. Pope Benedict became the first pope to resign the Catholic Church’s highest office in nearly 600 years.

The document was apparently used during the testimony of Archbishop Silvano Tomasi before the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. But in eight hours of often intense interrogation by committee members, Tomasi referred to only one of the statistics in the document, the AP reports.

“The Holy See was asked to provide data on the scale of clerical sex abuse, what it’s done to address it, and what Pope Francis intends to do with a new commission he announced last month to find best practices to protect children from abuse and to help victims heal,” reported NPR correspondent Poggioli, who called the questioning of Tomasi, “a tough grilling.”

The Vatican has not yet commented on the AP report, nor has the now-retired Pope Benedict.