A top Catholic cardinal admitted Saturday that Church files on priests accused of sexually abusing children were destroyed or never even drawn up in a move which allowed paedophiles to prey on others. "Files that could have documented the terrible deeds and named those responsible were destroyed, or not even created," German Cardinal Reinhard Marx told a landmark Vatican summit on tackling paedophilia within the clergy.

"Instead of the perpetrators, the victims were regulated and silence imposed on them," he said. "The stipulated procedures and processes for the prosecution of offences were deliberately not complied with." Marx was speaking on the third day of an unprecedented summit of the world's top bishops convened by Pope Francis in a bid to get on top of a crisis.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2019