By Makiko Inoue and Mike Ives

Tokyo, April 8, 2019: Catholic bishops in Japan plan to conduct a nationwide survey on sexual abuse of children by members of the clergy, church officials said April 8.

Archbishop Mitsuaki Takami of Nagasaki, the leader of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan, shared the plan on Sunday during a gathering in Tokyo where a man spoke of being abused as a young boy at the hands of a German priest.

“Japan’s Catholic Church is small, and we are not sure what we can do” about child sexual abuse, Archbishop Takami said by telephone on Monday. “But we think we have to pay attention to this issue.”

According to The Mainichi Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, bishops from around the country agreed last week to carry out the survey in all 16 dioceses. The survey method has not yet been decided.

The Roman Catholic Church faces accusations around the world of covering up child sexual abuse.

In December, Cardinal George Pell of Australia became the highest-ranking church leader to be found guilty of sexual abuse, after he was convicted of molesting two boys in the 1990s.

Abuse by church officials has also been reported in India, the Philippines and elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific, a region the church considers important for its continued growth.

In Japan, the bishops’ conference said in 2002 that it had found incidents of child abuse in its ranks. It issued behavioral guidelines for bishops the following year, and has updated them several times since.

“Concerning this problem we must confess that we have not adequately fulfilled our responsibility,” the conference said in a statement in 2002. “To those who have been harmed we promise now that we bishops will respond to the problem in all sincerity, and that any priests or religious who are guilty will be dealt with severely.”

Nationwide questionnaires of bishops, conducted in 2002 and 2012, found that at least five “damage reports” had been filed over church sexual abuse, The Mainichi Shimbun reported on Monday. The newspaper quoted Archbishop Takami as saying in an interview that the church would consider conducting third-party investigations into child sexual abuse cases “as necessary.”

(New York Times)