VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Washington Post
April 24, 2025
By Chico Harlan
Pope Francis had once vowed to eradicate the “evil” of sexual abuse from the Roman Catholic Church. He called bishops to Rome for listening sessions. He drew up new guidelines for handling cases.
Anti-abuse advocates commend Francis for grasping the systemic nature of the problem and for meeting empathetically with victims. But they say he struggled to alter the church’s penchant for secrecy and its habit of acting forcefully only when under outside pressure.
What that means, in the aftermath of Francis’s death, is that the next pope will inherit a crisis that is still roiling the Catholic Church.
Even now, the Holy See is receiving a steady 800 cases per year from places like Poland, Italy, Latin America and Asia, according to Archbishop Charles Scicluna, a member of the Vatican department that oversees the handling of abuse claims.
The church, with its meticulous recordkeeping, was aware of rampant clerical sexual abuse well before it exploded into public view in the early 2000s. The first revelations emerged primarily in Western countries with strong prosecution services, independent media and advocacy groups. Now, the nature of the crisis is changing, and new regions are training a spotlight on crimes within the church.
“Now it is different places,” he said. “A culture of disclosure takes time to develop.”
One concern within the church is that any revelations could geographically broaden the church’s credibility problems, which have already driven a historical exodus of Mass-goers in Western Europe. The church is growing most quickly in Africa and parts of Asia, and even if reckonings don’t happen anytime soon, they lurk as potential risks during future pontificates. The lesson of the past three decades is that clerical abuse is widespread — so long as somebody is looking for it and victims have confidence to come forward.
Shaun Dougherty, an American who is the board president of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, said that abuse “is the single biggest issue in the church today.”
“They are still more willing to protect their church and themselves than the innocent,” he said.
The issue has altered the course of the last three pontificates.
Pope John Paul II, who led the church when the early evidence came to light, tended to view individual priests as the problem, paying less attention to crimes or cover-ups in the hierarchy. That oversight posthumously bruised his reputation, when it emerged that he had known about and overlooked sexual misconduct claims against Theodore McCarrick, a powerful American cardinal who was defrocked in 2019.
John Paul II’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, moved more aggressively to punish priests and was the first pope to meet with clerical abuse survivors. But he also faced accusations — levied in a 1,900-page report released a year before his death — that he’d mishandled cases during an earlier point in his career. He expressed “profound shame” to abuse victims but admitted no wrongdoing.
Francis faced abuse-related challenges on many fronts. Conservatives, connecting the scourge to homosexuality in the priesthood, accused the pope of overlooking the root causes. Liberals, particularly in Germany, said the pope wasn’t going far enough in reforming the church. And several of Francis’s international trips, including to Belgium in September, were dominated by feelings of anger and betrayal stemming from the church’s response to abuse.
“It is shameful,” Francis said during that trip. “The church must be ashamed, ask for pardon and try to solve this situation.”
Some critics say that Francis, when not directly confronted with the issue, paid less attention to abuse in his final few years. During a landmark two-year church gathering that ended in 2024, known as a synod, many thorny church issues were discussed. But abuse was not a focus.
“Given that this was the existential crisis to the moral legitimacy to the church around the world, it was a stunning disappointment,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of the watchdog group BishopAccountability.
‘All-out’ battle against abuse
Francis’s most relevant measures to counter abuse came at the midpoint of his pontificate, when global scandals brought pressure to an unprecedented level. In Chile, prosecutors were raiding church offices and accusing church leaders of a cover-up. In Australia, a cardinal was preparing to stand trial on numerous sex-related offenses. And in the United States, accusations about McCarrick were bubbling to the surface — as the pope promised a canonical trial.
Francis swiftly summoned bishops to Rome for a first-of-its-kind meeting to discuss abuse.
They listened to victims and aired proposals about improving oversight.
At the end of the four-day summit, the pope vowed an “all-out battle” against abuse.
He subsequently issued a sweeping new law that aimed to create a better system for fielding and investigating abuse claims. As part of that law, dioceses were required to set up offices for receiving complaints. Priests and nuns were obligated for the first time to report accusations of wrongdoing to religious authorities. And, perhaps most importantly, the measures added a new layer of oversight for bishops, who’d previously been answerable only to the pope — meaning they could operate without much scrutiny. Under the new system, bishops could essentially police their own ranks: If one bishop was accused of abuse or a cover-up, a prelate heading the largest regional dioceses could step in and lead an investigation.
The Vatican also made an example out of McCarrick. He was stripped of the rights of the priesthood, the most significant abuse-related punishment ever given to a onetime cardinal. His rise through the ranks was also subjected to an internal investigation, resulting in a 449-page report that unearthed papal decision-making in searing detail.
Lack of transparency
But the McCarrick report was a one-off.
And abuse experts, as well as Vatican officials, acknowledge that the church still does not operate with transparency or consistency.
A report issued last October by the pope’s abuse commission noted that not all dioceses have created the offices for receiving cases.
Sometimes the church investigates higher-ups according to its rules. But other cases are improvised, without explanation. Experts say it is hard to tell how well the system is working, because the church does not make public information about which bishops are sanctioned and why.
“We need to work on a consistent application of adhering to the law,” said Hans Zollner, a German priest who helped organize Francis’s abuse summit, and who specializes in safeguarding. “This is the main challenge for the church” when it comes to abuse.
When one of Francis’s top-ranking cardinals, Canadian Marc Ouellet, faced accusations of inappropriate touching, the Vaticandelegated the investigation to a priest who already knew Ouellet well. When a Nobel-winning bishop from East Timor, Carlos Ximenes Belo, was accused of abusing impoverished children, the Vatican disciplined him. But the restrictions — including a ban on contact with minors — were kept secret until a Dutch news outlet looked into the case.
Victims commonly say they struggle to obtain information about any discipline meted out against their alleged abusers.
Scicluna called that a “fair” criticism.
“If you look at the record of Pope Francis, we are in a better place when it comes to laws and structures,” Scicluna said. “One thing is having laws and structures. Another is how they operate on the ground.”