VATICAN CITY (AP) — Italy’s Catholic bishops provided their first accounting of clergy sexual abuse and revealed Thursday that more than 600 cases from Italy were on file at the Vatican since 2000.

The report of the Italian bishops’ conference, which only covered complaints that local Italian church authorities had received over the last two years, did not mention the hundreds of cases. It identified 89 presumed victims and some 68 people accused.

But responding to a reporter’s question during a press conference about the report, Monsignor Giuseppe Baturi revealed that the bishops’ conference was researching 613 files held at the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The Vatican in 2001 required dioceses around the world to send all their credible reports of abuse to the dicastery for processing. The Vatican had felt compelled to act after decades in which bishops and religious superiors moved predator priests around from diocese to diocese rather than punishing them or reporting them to police.

Baturi, the secretary-general of the bishops’ conference, noted that some of the 613 cases might have been archived and some might contain multiple victims of a serial predator.

“We have to understand how many victims, what their profile is, who are those responsible,” he said.

The almost haphazard revelation underscored that the initial report by the bishops’ conference was not intended to provide an accurate or historic look at the clergy abuse problem in Italy. The country’s bishops never authorised such research despite demands from survivors for a full accounting, which some other Catholic Churches in Europe have published.

Instead, the Italian bishops limited the scope of their report to evaluate the work of “listening centers” that were set up in dioceses since 2019 to receive complaints from victims. Organisers said during a news conference Thursday that the report provided a “first photograph” of the problem and the bishops planned to release annual reports from now on.

The report said 89 people had made reports in the past two years and identified 68 abusers. It found most victims were between ages 15-18 when the abuse took place, though 16 were adults whom the church considered “vulnerable.” Most of the claims involved inappropriate language or behaviour and touching.