HispanicBusiness

A U.S. group representing alleged victims of child sex abuse by clergy on Wednesday released a blacklist of cardinals it said were unfit to be elected to lead the Catholic Church.

"We urge the College of Cardinals to elect none of these twelve as the next pope. And we urge them to stop pretending the crisis has abated," the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said.

The group accused those it blacklisted of having connived with so-called paedophile priests worldwide, failing to take effective action against them or downplaying the extent of the child sex abuse when details emerged.

SNAP named its "dirty dozen" as: Oscar Andres Rodriguez Maradiaga (Honduras), Norberto Rivera (Mexico), Marc Ouellet (Canada), Peter Turkson (Ghana), George Pell (Australia), Tarcisio Bertone and Angelo Scola (Italy), Leonardo Sandri (Argentina), Dominik Duka (Czech Republic) and Sean Patrick O'Malley, Timothy Dolan and Donald Wuerl (United States).

The group raised allegations of wrongdoing against each of them.

Dolan, the archbishop of New York, the group said had not confronted priests accused of child sex abuse, but paid them 20,000 dollars to leave the diocese quietly.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi, responding to the SNAP statement, said it was not up to the group to pass judgement on Catholic prelates.

"I think it is up to the cardinals themselves to judge who is apt and who is not apt, without asking for advice from SNAP," Lombardi said.

Over the past decade, there have been numerous revelations of child sex abuse committed by Catholic priests in Europe and North merica. Several US dioceses have been bankrupted by settlement payments to victims.

SNAP said the scandal have yet to surface in Africa, Asia and South America and predicted that "the worst is almost certainly ahead."