VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Boston Globe
May 5, 2025
By Joan Vennochi
Activists are fighting a church that wants to put the scandal behind it and a public that may be tiring of it.
The priests were protected, not the children.
Is the Catholic Church any different today than it was 20-plus years ago, when the scandal of clergy sexual abuse first engulfed the Archdiocese of Boston and then spread across the country and the world? When it comes to the church policing itself and disclosing its findings, it’s not different enough, according to survivors and their advocates. Which is why, as the conclave to elect a successor to Pope Francis begins this week, many survivors and their advocates are in Rome, where they are pressing the church, once again, for substantive change.
But they are up against a church that has been eager to declare the scandal over and a public that may be tired of hearing about it. “I know what people mean when they say that victims, or people like me, can never be satisfied. But I reject that,” Anne Barrett Doyle, codirector of the watchdog group BishopAccountability.org, told me from Rome. “Those folks are guilty of setting the bar too low.” According to Barrett Doyle,children are still being sexually assaulted “by clergy around the world. Pope Francis could have increased their safety, and he chose not to. Being grateful for his small constructive deeds is a kind of soft complicity, in my view.”
If it takes a combination of public outrage and media pressure to change any institution, there has been plenty of both since the Boston Globe Spotlight team first reported in 2002 that the Archdiocese of Boston shuttled priests from parish to parish, despite extensive evidence that they were sexually abusing children. Yet if you ask those in the survivor network how much has changed in the Catholic Church after similar revelations came to light around the world, the answer will range from nothing to not enough.
Pope Francis, who died last month, talked about reform. But “strip away the words, and performative actions are what we’re left with,” Barrett Doyle said.
For example, in 2014, soon after he became pope, Francis set up a pontifical commission for the protection of minors — but it was purely advisory, she said, and was not given full access to church files on clergy sexual abuse. In 2019, Francis convened a groundbreaking summit on child abuse at the Vatican — but what came out of it, Barrett Doyle said, was a list of recommendations, including one that the names of alleged perpetrators would not be made public until final judgment under canonical or criminal law.
On Francis’s watch, at least a dozen bishops lost their positions, which is to his credit, Barrett Doyle said. But they didn’t lose their titles, and no public explanation was given for their removal.
Francis gave advocates hope in 2019 when he defrocked Theodore McCarrick, a former archbishop of Washington and religious and political power broker, after a Vatican report detailed McCarrick’s abuses and identified instances where others knew about it and did nothing. But the pope’s action against McCarrick, who died last month at age 94, was “one and done,” Barrett Doyle said.
Francis also asked for forgiveness from victims of sexual abuse, met with them, and admitted that he was wrong about his assessment of the abuse crisis in Chile. But that did not make children safer, Barrett Doyle said, and while the meetings might have offered some comfort to victims, they could also “lull the watchdogs.”
Francis refused to adopt a universal zero-tolerance policy calling for the permanent removal of a priest from church ministry based on even a single act of sexual abuse, admitted or proven under church law.
That policy, which was adopted by the US Catholic Church at the height of the US scandal in 2002, initially led to the removal of thousands of priests from the ministry, according to Sarah Pearson, a spokesperson for the group known as SNAP — Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. But since then, “The issue is compliance,” Pearson said in an interview from Rome. As a result, SNAP is pushing for an updated version of the policy, which would apply globally and put enforcement into the hands of an independent, investigative body.
In advance of the conclave, SNAP is also compiling a list of cardinals who, survivors say, have covered up sexual abuse. Noting that for the first time, the College of Cardinals announced that one of the three priorities in the upcoming conclave is dealing with sexual abuse, Pearson said, “They know we’re serious. They are fearful of the information we have.”
To Mitchell Garabedian, a lawyer who has represented several thousand victims of alleged clergy sexual abuse, the church hasn’t changed, but the public has. “What is changing is society’s attitude,” he said. “Parents know they have to watch their children when they are in the care and custody of priests.”
Garabedian said the next pope should order all dioceses to publicly release the files kept by every bishop and archbishop, which detail investigations of sexual abuse allegations. What’s currently released is selective, he said. “The attitude is that the church is the victim,” he said.
Asked if he fears the reform movement is running up against public weariness with the topic, Garabedian said, “The Catholic Church certainly hopes for fatigue because it will serve to keep things quiet.”
As the conclave gets underway, activists are trying to make enough noise to change an institution that has resisted change for centuries — even when resisting change protects priests, not children.
Joan Vennochi is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her @joan_vennochi.