Catholic Church officials never prosecuted more than half the roughly 3,000 priests accused of sexual impropriety in the past decade, a top Vatican official has revealed. There has been "no trial" in 60 percent of cases, mostly "because of the advanced age of the accused," said Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, head of the Vatican office that investigates crimes the church considers most serious.
The priests in those cases were subject to "administrative and disciplinary provisions" such as instructions not to celebrate Mass or hear confessions, Scicluna told L'Avvenire, the Italian Catholic bishops' newspaper, on Saturday.
Those cases include some of the most "sensational... which have caught the attention of the media," he said, without revealing more details.
Scicluna insisted the priests in question had not been absolved of their sins.
"It's true that there has been no formal condemnation, but if a person is obliged to live a life of silence and prayer, then there must be a reason," he said in an unusually revealing interview.
Scicluna was talking only about investigations by the church, not by civil authorities.
The Vatican released an official English translation of the remarks, which come as accusations of child abuse by priests sweep across Western Europe.
A damning Irish government-backed report into child abuse by priests led four bishops to resign in December, and Pope Benedict XVI is expected to issue a formal statement, or pastoral letter, about it before Easter.
The Netherlands, Austria and Germany also are facing new allegations of child abuse -- including ones in a diocese once directly connected to the pope and to his brother, Georg Ratzinger.
The coming months are likely produce more sexual abuse allegations across Europe.
"It is like a tsunami or an extensive fire," said the Rev. Andreas Batlogg, editor of the German Jesuit magazine Stimmen der Zeit. "The estimated number of undetected cases seems to be far higher than the yet known ones."
Nearly every day since the end of January, more Germans have come forward with allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, with roughly 170 reporting such abuse.
Two self-identified German victims were connected to a boy's choir that was directed by the pope's brother from 1964 to 1994.
Scicluna's disclosures about the number of complaints and the results come as the Vatican fights to show it is handling the problem properly -- and to protect the pope.
About 20 percent of priests accused of "delicta graviora" faced full trial by church officials -- many of which ended in convictions, he said.
Ten percent requested a discharge from the priesthood, and the pope summarily dismissed 10 percent, Scicluna said.
A small minority of the 3,000 complaints against priests accused them of abusing children, he added.
"About sixty percent of the cases chiefly involved sexual attraction toward adolescents of the same sex, another 30 percent involved heterosexual relations, and the remaining 10 percent were cases of pedophilia in the true sense of the term," he said.
About 300 priests were accused of child abuse between 2001 and 2010, he confirmed.
He said the problem was "not as widespread as has been believed."
"Please don't misunderstand me. These are of course too many," he said.
There are about 400,000 Catholic priests around the world, he said, in an attempt to illustrate that the number of complaints against priests is relatively small.
Most of the complaints came from the United States, he said.
Scicluna said the Vatican should reconsider its policy of not prosecuting particularly old complaints.
The Vatican has a 10-year statute of limitations on child abuse, starting from the date the alleged victim turns 18. Pope John Paul II introduced the policy in 2001, at the height of scandals in Boston, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles, California.
"The limit of 10 years is not enough in this kind of case," Scicluna said. "It would be better to return to the earlier system of 'delicta graviora' not being subject to [a] statue of limitations."
Scicluna's official title is the "promoter of justice" of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican's doctrinal arm.
He is effectively the prosecutor of the tribunal, L'Avvenire said.
His job is to investigate what are known as "delicta graviora," the crimes that the Catholic Church considers as being the most serious of all.
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SIC: CNN