Following a crisis meeting this week with Pope Francis about the cover-up of sexual abuse in their country, all of Chile's 34 bishops have offered to resign.
In a joint statement issued at the end of the emergency summit, all 31 of Chile's active bishops and three retired ones in Rome put their fate in the Pope's hands, though at the time of writing it's unknown if the head of the Catholic church has accepted their resignations.
The mass resignation marks the first known time in history that an entire national bishops' conference has offered to resign en masse. Pope Francis has the authority to either accept or reject the resignations or delay his decision.
In a 2,300-page document issued by the Vatican about the Chilean scandal, Pope Francis accused the bishops of destroying evidence of sex crimes and pressuring investigators to minimise abuse allegations, as well as demonstrating 'grave negligence' in protecting children from paedophile priests.
In the report, which hasn't been made public but was published by Chile's T13 television - and later confirmed as accurate by the Vatican itself - the Pope wrote: "No one can exempt himself and place the problem on the shoulders of the others."
Responding to the document, the Chilean bishops issued their statement, which said the contents of the document were 'absolutely deplorable' and showed, in addition to the sexual abuse, an 'unacceptable abuse of power and conscience'.
The bishops asked for the victims - as well as all Catholics and the Pope - to forgive them. The scandal grew after Bishop Juan Barros was accused by victims of Chilean priest, the Rev. Fernando Karadima, ignoring the abuse they had suffered, even though he himself was witness to it, prompting the Pope to call the emergency summit.
It's not the first time that the Catholic Church has been rocked by abuse scandals. In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI ordered an investigation into Irish seminaries when it emerged that abuse cases weren't being considered seriously.
There have been allegations of abuse by the Chilean church for years, with victims claiming that bishops were protecting the abusers and not reporting them to the police.
"The problems inside the church community can't be solved just by dealing with individual cases and reducing them to the removal of people, though this - and I say so clearly - has to be done," Francis wrote in the document.
"But it's not enough, we have to go beyond that. It would be irresponsible on our part to not look deeply into the roots and the structures that allowed these concrete events to occur and perpetuate."
Featured Image Credit: PA