Catholic clergy in Portugal have abused nearly 5,000 children since 1950, an independent commission said on Monday after hearing hundreds of survivors’ accounts. This comprises mostly priests, the commission said in a report on Monday.

Thousands of reports of paedophilia within the church have surfaced around the world, and Pope Francis is under pressure to tackle the scandal.

The Portuguese inquiry, commissioned by the church in the staunchly Catholic country, published its findings after hearing from more than 500 survivors last year.

“This testimony allows us to establish a much larger network of victims, at least 4,815,” the commission head, Pedro Strecht told a press conference in Lisbon that was attended by several senior church officials.

Strecht said the 4,815 cases were the "absolute minimum" number of victims that fell prey to the sexual abuse by clergy members in Portugal in the last 70 years. "These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg," he said.

Priests made up for most of the perpetrators (77 per cent) and 57 per cent of the victims were men, Strecht said. He informed that the abuse happened in Catholic schools, churches, priests' homes, confessionals, among other locations. Those abused mostly belonged to the 10-14 age group, with the youngest victim being just two-years-old.

Strecht further said that now that the report is out, it would be difficult for Portugal to ignore the existence of child sexual abuse and the resulting trauma.

Responding to the report, the head of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference (CEP), Bishop José Ornelas, said,“I am satisfied with this difficult and dramatic work, and we hope it marks a new beginning.” He also expressed “a thought for the victims”.

The country’s bishops will convene in March to draw conclusions from the report and “rid the church of this scourge as much as possible”, Father Manuel Barbosa, a senior CEP member, said in January.

Child sex abuse is a “heinous crime,” Ornelas said in a statement he read out later Monday, adding, “It is an open wound which pains and embarrasses us.”

The panel regretted that the Vatican had taken so long to grant access to church archives. Permission came only in October, giving the panel just three months to go through written evidence of abuse.

The panel is not publishing the names of the victims, the identities of the alleged abusers, or the places the abuses allegedly happened. However, it is to send to bishops by the end of the month a list of alleged abusers who are still active in the church.

The final report includes a separate — and confidential — annex of all the names of church members reported to the committee that is being sent to the Portuguese Bishops Conference and to the police.

The Portuguese church hasn’t said whether it intends to pay compensation to any victims.

The six-person committee included psychiatrists, a former Supreme Court judge and a social worker.

Image source: Reuters