VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
September 22, 2025
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
[Photo above: Pope Leo XIV signs the guest book at the Augustinian Order’s headquarters in Rome in the days after his election, May 2025. From the Augustine Order’s social media.]
The Pontiff’s remarks about “false claims” of clergy sexual abuse reopen old wounds, as they contradict major reports pointing to systematic underreporting.
Pope Prevost’s talk about “false claims” on clergy sexual abuse brings the debate on the issue back to the 1990s.
Leo XIV’s unsupported comments on clergy sexual abuse risk undermining the Church’s efforts to help survivors, as now they will be forced to prove they are not liars.
Early on Thursday September 18, the English-speaking portal Crux published several stories coming out of the interview that her senior correspondent in Rome, Elise Ann Allen, had with Pope Leo XIV.
One of such stories, available here, focuses on how Robert Francis Prevost sees the future of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. He seems to be at ease with his own assessment, but it is almost impossible to share his approach.
As told by Crux’s staff, Prevost said at some point: “people are beginning to speak out more and more: The accused also have rights, and many believe that those rights have not been respected.”
There one can hear echoes of Giuliana Caccia’s complaints against Pope Francis, Charles Scicluna and more so against Jordi Bertomeu, when they carried the probe on the Sodalitium of Christian Life that ultimately led to the suppression of that Peruvian order.
In that regard is it really hard to not see Leo XIV as destroying the already timid attempts of his predecessor to put under control predatory organizations which have perfected mechanisms to keep the reports as low as possible.
This is more troubling as noted Peruvian survivors and journalists credit Robert Prevost’s role in the suppression of the Sodalitium of Christian Life, active in Peru, Chile, Brazil, Colombia and the United States. Several accounts credit then bishop Prevost with sending critical updates to Rome regarding the real extent of the abuse perpetrated by the Sodalitium.
However, the troubling paragraphs of the Pope’s take come when he told Crux “in over 90 percent of cases, people who come forward with abuse allegations are telling the truth: ‘They are not making this up,’ he said.”
The problem with that 90 percent figure is that even if high, it leaves room for one of the Church’s favorite sports: intimidating, gaslighting, and discrediting victims of clergy sexual abuse.
More troublingly, after leaving that figure there at “over 90 percent” the Pope went on to say “there have also been proven cases of some kind of false accusation. There have been priests whose lives have been destroyed.”
The statement is shocking for a guy who, back in the late 1970s got a bachelor’s degree from Villanova, the Augustinian flagship university in the United States in Math, because it implies that for him, for unknown reasons, he estimates that ten percent of the people claiming to be a victim of sexual abuse are liars.
Open doors
Also, because it leaves the door open to try to discredit victims, it echoes what critics of any kind of acknowledgment of the true extent of the clergy sexual abuse crisis have been saying and, mostly, because there is no evidence to support Leo XIV’s assertion.
From the story linked before this paragraph comes the photograph of the premiere of a play based on the accusations launched against several journalists in Peru but centered for narrative purposes in the play around Paola Ugaz, who appears in the picture, near the center of the frame.
And another unavoidable question after the still relatively new Pope’s interview is, innocent according to whom? Because there is abyss between civil (penal) law understanding of sexual crime and what the Catholic Church is willing to acknowledge as cause of the sole “punishment” it is able to set, unless the cleric is holder of a Vatican passport: defrocking or the reduction to the lay state.
There are priests who have been found guilty in penal courts, who have been or are right now in prison, who, despite that fact remain as priests because in the logic driving the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith there is no reason to defrock them.
One of the most notable, from Argentina, is Julio César Grassi, who is the first of the seven cases of predators the story linked after this paragraph deals with.
Regardless of each person’s take on Grassi, whether one sees him as guilty or not, there is a noticeable discrepancy between the ruling of the Argentine authority and the attitude of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. Was Robert Prevost thinking about priests such as Grassi when he said what he said over his first interview?
And there is the case of who was, for a few days, the chancellor or the archdiocese of Toulouse, France, Dominique Spina. He was found guilty of sexually abusing a teenager who was trying to become a priest in Bayonne, where Spina was part of the team dealing with priestly vocations.
Spina was declared guilty by the French civil authority. He purged what was a rather short, laughable, term in prison, and after a period in some sort of limbo, Spina restarted his ecclesiastical career at the Archdiocese of Toulouse, where he got promoted to chancellor early this year (see the story linked after this paragraph).
A wave of repudiation to the appointment of Spina swept France, even lay groups who usually avoid taking a stand on issues or cases of clergy sexual abuse rejected Spina’s appointment at Toulouse. It was way too obvious that he was a risk for the faithful there and the archbishop Guy de Kerimel backtracked the appointment.
In that regard it is impossible not to wonder why Leo XIV is betraying Robert Prevost, at least up until is it possible to see at a distance, endorsing the views of those who, as Giuliana Caccia did, claimed to be a victim of clergy sexual abuse to discredit the whole probe against the Sodalitium.
The ripples of such statement will remain with us for years to come, which is more relevant since he is a relatively young male (70), with a very healthy lifestyle, so the expectation is that he will be Pope at least until the late 2030s.
A baseline, please
His words are already being used by abuse deniers in social media to discredit many years of efforts to acknowledge what, very rigorous, national reports have been saying for the last 30 years or so: the issue is not overreporting of clergy sexual abuse; quite the opposite, the issue is underreporting.
Underreporting because of the victims’ fear of being labeled as “enemies of the Church” in social media and other settings, and because given the nature of the Church’s own internal handling of these reports, often times the clerics tasked with such duties do their best to avoid internal conflict and even more to avoid external reporting of sexual abuse.
Coupled with what the gestures Leo XIV has had with the U.S. Catholic far-right it is hard not to see a backlash against victims and their relatives and the radicalization of bishops and their closest all over the Catholic world to protect clergy and even laypersons close to them facing credible accusations of abuse.
The figure as cited by a Mathematician is harder to understand as, he was not quoting a meaningful, large-scale report setting the number of false accusations at that rather high rate.
And it is true, there are estimates from scholars working on the issue showing that in some cases there are false claims. However, it must be stressed that they also acknowledge that when happens, it frequently occurs in the context of bitter divorces and other intrafamily conflicts.
Back in 2008, a study found the Los Angeles Police Department reported a 4.5 percent rate of false reports of sexual assault cases. A page published back in 2017 by the British Open University dealing with sexual abuse in the United States and the European Union, at some point states what follows:
- The evidence on false allegations fails to support public anxiety that untrue reporting is common. While the statistics on false allegations vary – and refer most often to rape and sexual assault – they are invariably and consistently low. Research for the Home Office suggests that only four percent of cases of sexual violence reported to the UK police are found or suspected to be false. Studies carried out in Europe and in the US indicate rates of between two percent and six percent.
I have no access to the full content of the interview which I would guess happened all of it in English, even if both Prevost and Allen are proficient in Spanish and Italian, so I cannot figure out if there was some reference a specific study from some credited university or professional association rising all the way up to ten percent, one in each ten, the number of false cases, as to fit the true cases at the 90 percent rate cited by Pope Leo XIV.
Underreporting the world
Pope Leo XIV’s assertion is more troubling as there is no possible base for it. All the available reports from credible organizations worldwide, including the so-called John Jay Report commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in the early years of this century have a series of common markers. The most notable of them all is that they all talk of underreporting of clergy sexual abuse.
There is not one single credible source claiming that there are false victims accusing innocent priests. Oddly enough, the only people doing that is Ms. Caccia in Lima and her buddies at the Sodalitium. Even worse, as a gambit of sorts, she pretended to be a victim of a male who had reported abuse. She did so to discredit Pope Francis, Charles Scicluna and Jordi Bertomeu.
The findings from independent investigations across the globe over the last three decades paint a chilling picture of the Catholic Church’s systemic failure to protect its faithful, because it has been more interested in consolidating a deliberate culture of silence and institutional self-preservation.
In Belgium, the Adriaenssens Commission‘s report of 2010 (available here but only in French and Dutch) tore away the veneer of respectability of the Catholic Church there, a process some have compared to lifting the mask of secrecy. It did so by exposing a widespread network of complicities.
The Commission’s report documented 476 instances of abuse and revealed that the problem was not isolated but a deeply embedded phenomenon. The investigation showed that the response was not one of sincere respect for the victims but of calculated concealment, leading to the systematic underreporting of the instances of clergy sexual abuse.
As it is common still today in Latin America, victims’ were silenced, their stories buried to protect the reputation of the clergy and the institution itself, proving a callous disregard for human suffering by moving the Church’s deep relation with the crown and the national government.
Moving North, in The Netherlands the Deetman Commission published its findings in 2011. There, a similar tale of calculated negligence and institutional emerged.
It concluded that thousands of children were abused, and that high-ranking Church officials, including Cardinals and bishops, were fully aware of the allegations. Instead of acting as shepherds, they became accomplices, orchestrating a campaign of “priest shuffling,” the already too familiar geographic solution, moving moved predators from one parish to another, with no reports to the faithful. The full report is available only in Dutch here.
As Los Angeles Press has documented for cases in Latin America in the stories before and after this paragraph, the Dutch bishops essentially transferred a priest known for his abusive behavior to new, unsuspecting communities.
The Dutch report laid bare a history of calculated negligence, where the safety of the faithful was willingly sacrificed at the altar of institutional integrity. At no point the report hints the possibility of overreporting of clergy sexual abuse there.
Germany: The tip of the iceberg
Moving East, in Germany the situation has been similar, compounded by the inability of the German Conference of Bishops to come clean about the role of Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI in the clergy sexual abuse crisis there. It is not out of chance that survivors in Germany, such as Doris Reisinger-Wagner talk about a “Ratzinger system” in place in the Catholic Church to systematically conceal the true extent of the crisis there.
The key German report on the sexual abuse crisis is known as the MHG study, named after the universities conducting it (Mannheim, Heidelberg, and Giessen). Released in 2018, after a failed attempt at publishing it in full in 2013, the study was commissioned by the German Bishops’ Conference. Its findings were shocking and revealed a profound institutional failure to address the crisis.
Running counter to Pope Leo XIV’s interview with Crux, the study’s authors emphasized that the documented cases were only “the tip of the iceberg.” The German scholars tasked with the report state that the true number of cases is much higher, as many files had been destroyed or were incomplete. So, already there, the issue was not overreporting as Robert Prevost implied, but underreporting.
The study’s findings were limited by the available records, which systematically underreported the extent of the problem. This underreporting proves that the number of cases is likely much higher than the report’s figures suggest, meaning there is no basis to discredit reporting if no baseline has not been set.
The German MHG study identified at least 3,677 victims of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy between 1946 and 2014. The report linked these victims to 1,670 accused clerics, which represented 4.4 percent of the priests and deacons in the study population. The vast majority of victims were young males.
The report concluded that the Church’s internal structures and policies eased the abuse and its cover-up. It cited “asymmetrical power relations” and the Church’s “closed system” as factors that enabled the abuse to flourish.
It also found that in many cases, accused priests were simply reassigned to new parishes without the new community being informed of their past, a practice of “priest shuffling” that allowed them to continue their abuse.
In that regard, it must be noted that “Ratzinger system” is a term to describe an institutional mindset and approach to the clergy sexual abuse crisis. It is not a formal set of rules but rather a pattern of institutional behavior that, as Reisinger-Wagner argues, prioritizes protecting the reputation of the Church over the well-being of abuse victims.
Reisinger-Wagner explores this concept in her 2021 co-authored book, Nur die Wahrheit rettet. Der Missbrauch in der katholischen Kirche und das System Ratzinger (Only the truth saves. The abuse in the Catholic Church and the Ratzinger system), as built on several key principles:
Secrecy and centralization: All abuse cases were kept under a strict veil of secrecy, handled internally and centrally by the Vatican. The official policy of pontifical secrecy was used to prevent information from reaching civil authorities or the public.
Focus on canonical process: The system relied on slow and complex canonical processes to handle cases, which often led to minimal consequences for abusers and discouraged victims from coming forward.
Protection of the clerical state: A primary goal was to avoid defrocking priests, even when they were proven predators. Instead, they were often transferred to new parishes (“priest shuffling” or geographic solution) allowing them to continue their abuse in new locations.
Blaming external factors: This mindset tended to downplay the systemic nature of the crisis, attributing the problem to external factors like the sexual revolution of the 1960s rather than a deep-seated culture of abuse and cover-up within the Church itself.
This approach created a culture of silence where the lack of accountability and the institutional fear of scandal discouraged victims from reporting their abuse. The systemic underreporting allowed the institution to protect itself and its members. Nobody would be able to talk in Germany about overreporting.
France: An unimaginable scale of betrayal
In France, the CIASE (Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church) report delivered in its 2021 report a bombshell. This is, up until now, the most comprehensive report on sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise, in Europe.
It estimates as many as 216,000 children were victims of sexual abuse by clergy and laypersons in the Catholic Church in France since 1950. The so-called Sauvé Report, which has been repeatedly quoted and referenced in several installments of this series, describes a widespread culture of secrecy and institutional protection that allowed the abuse to continue unaddressed for decades, highlighting that the problem is not overreporting but a lack of reporting of cases generally speaking and more so to the civil authorities.
And despite the reach of the report, new “old” cases are still emerging in France these days. On Thursday, Paris Match ran an eight-page detailed story of abuse at the archdiocese of Marseille, led by Cardinal Jean Marc Nöel Aveline who is the current president of the French Conference of Catholic Bishops. There, the usual story of cover-ups and the systematic gaslighting of the faithful willing to trust the canonical (Church) process emerges once again.
One survivor, quoted by Paris Match tells the usual story of a bishop making overstated promises about his swift and urgent interest in addressing the issue, with no real achievement despite the survivor’s will to wait for Aveline’s intervention. And a former seminarian tells a similar story.
Local French media in the region such as La Provence Marseille were telling, over this weekend, stories of how Cardinal Aveline tried to justify his unwillingness to act on those and other cases in his diocese.
As recently as 2024, the many victims at the Catholic school of Our Lady of Bétharram were able to come out and speak, in many cases for the first time about their devastating experiences. Catholic priest Camille Rio wrote a piece for Los Angeles Press, available after this paragraph, where he goes over what he sees as the key issue of that case.
The sheer scale of the 216,000 children sexually abused by clergy since 1950 shattered the notion that the issue was limited to certain areas or settings, revealing a crisis of a scale hard to estimate.
The report confirms that the French Catholic Church’ attitude was “too focused on the protection of the institution,” leading to cover-up. It was an admission that the very structure meant to offer moral guidance had instead promoted a culture of endemic abuse and secrecy.
At no point does the report offer data that could be seen as supporting the notion of a ten percent overreporting of clergy sexual abuse thrown by Pope Leo XIV during his interview.
Across the Pyrenees
Moving South, across the Pyrenees, an independent investigation by the Spaniard Ombudsman (Defensor del Pueblo) has shed light on the issue of clergy abuse in Spain, with its findings highlighting a significant problem of underreporting.
The report, available in full here, but only in Spanish, presented in October 2023, was the country’s first official probe into the extent of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church. While the investigation collected testimonies from hundreds of victims, it used a large-scale survey to estimate the actual number of people affected by the phenomenon, which revealed the scale of underreporting.
The survey of over 8,000 adults estimated that 1.13 percent of Spaniard adults, which equates to more than 440,000 people, had been victims of abuse in a religious setting.
Of that figure, 0.6 percent, or approximately 200,000 persons, stated that their abuser was a priest or other member of the clergy.
The Ombudsman, Ángel Gabilondo, noted that this figure is far higher than the number of cases officially reported to authorities or the church. The report was critical of the Church’s response, citing a history of “denial or a desire to conceal or protect the abusers,” which directly contributed to the silence and lack of reporting.
In contrast to the Ombudsman’s report, a separate report published by the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE) in 2023, titled Para dar luz (To illuminate), disputed what they saw as “large figures,” using the baseline of the official cases in Spain.
This discrepancy between the independent investigation’s estimates and the Church’s reported numbers further illustrates the core issue of underreporting.
Not only the Catholic Church
Crossing North, one finds the British reports from the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) on both the Catholic and Anglican churches.
The IICSA report on the Catholic Church in England and Wales, published in November 2020, investigated safeguarding within the Church. The report analyzed data from 1970 to 2015 with 931 complaints of child sexual abuse. These complaints involved 1,753 individuals and 936 alleged perpetrators. The review stresses a significant increase in reporting from the mid-1990s onward. The Catholic Church’s safeguarding advisory services have since accepted the IICSA recommendations.
The IICSA report on the Anglican Church in England and Wales found that it failed to protect minors from sexual abuse. The report noted that in the past, child protection systems were under-resourced and safeguarding personnel were at times ignored to protect the reputation of the clergy and the Church. Since the publication of the report, the Church of England has acknowledged these failures and has made improvements in its safeguarding policies and procedures, although more work is needed. The report found a total of 390 convicted offenders associated with the Church between 1940 and 2018.
A crucial aspect of these reports is the challenge of underreporting, making it difficult to set a baseline for the scale of abuse in the United Kingdom, at least in two key territories of it, England and Wales. Both the Catholic and Anglican reports from the IICSA acknowledge this issue.
For the Catholic Church, an evidence assessment found that there was “no robust study” for the prevalence of abuse and that underreporting and delays in reporting made it difficult to figure out the number of victims.
The report also states that the number of complaints is likely to be “considerably higher than the figures set out”. In this sense, official figures in the United Kingdom, a country with an extremely robust judiciary, a floor, not a ceiling.
For the Anglican Church, the IICSA report highlights how an “inaccurate impression was given of the scale of the problem” due to inconsistencies in diocesan records. This suggests that the reported figures are not an accurate representation of the issue and that the true extent is likely larger.
The report also highlights that a culture of clericalism and deference presented significant barriers to disclosure, which many victims could not overcome.
The reports on both churches prove that the data collected, while shocking, cannot be considered a true “baseline” because of the systemic issues that prevented victims from coming forward.
Ireland and Australia
Moving further West, in the Republic of Ireland the situation is similar.
Due to the key role played by the Catholic Church in shaping Irish national identity, as the Church was the very heart of a resilient society, the revelations about abuse and the extent of the cover ups to disguise the true scale of the issue, were particularly devastating.
The Ryan Report and the Murphy Report exposed a profound betrayal of trust. The reports showed that church leaders, from archbishops down, consciously chose to protect the institution over their faithful.
This pervasive culture of secrecy and institutional protection led to a significant underreporting of abuse, meaning the documented cases are likely only a fraction of the true number.
The Murphy Report revealed a playbook of “secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the Church, and the preservation of its assets,” a chilling philosophy that guided their actions and allowed abuse to flourish unchecked for decades.
Even Benedict XVI had to admit, in his pastoral letter to the faithful there, back in 2010, the scale of what actually happened in Ireland.
Finally, there is the information from the Australian Royal Commission.
If something is clear in its many papers, reports, and testimonies is that there is evidence of widespread institutional failure to address the root causes of the issue. Australian priests would be sent, in secrecy, to Jémez, New Mexico, to partake of disastrous and ultimately useless short-term therapies.
The priests would be back in Australia, in a different parish or Catholic school to replay their role as predator. The main 2017 report concluded that the Church had systematically failed to protect children, with allegations deliberately concealed to avoid scandal.
And if they were concealed it is almost unthinkable to admit the idea that there was a clear count of the number of instances of abuse and neglect and, more troubling, of the actual number of predators.
The Royal Commission’s report found how perpetrators were shielded while victims were silenced, all in a desperate effort to preserve the institution’s image. The commission’s findings laid bare a culture where the Church prioritized its own reputation and power over the safety and well-being of the most vulnerable in society.
In that regard, I only hope the best for the communications teams in the Vatican. This is the kind of media nightmare that will follow the relatively new Pope for years to come, not only when facing media, but also when attending public functions, as it happened over the last 30 years or so with John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis.
Potential scenarios: A Damascus moment?
Francis himself had a similar moment in January 2018, during a trip to Chile. At the time, Pope Francis accepted an improvised interview with an Argentine medium. Despite the rather poor attendance to his public functions, he was willing to go again into the deaf toned defense of bishop Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid, who was accused by victims of covering up the crimes of notorious predator priest Fernando Karadima.
Pope Francis claimed he had seen “not one shred of proof against him” and called the accusations “slander.” This statement caused a significant outcry among victims and their advocates, and it was widely seen as a major crisis for his papacy.
The backlash was severe, and it prompted Pope Francis to take what was called at the time a “midcourse correction” after then head of Tutela Minorum and archbishop of Boston, Cardinal Seán O’Malley felt the urgent need to join Francis in Lima, Peru to ask him to change course.
Ultimately, the Argentine Pontiff understood the reach of his mistake. Commissioned a second probe on Karadima and accepted his own mistakes. He issued an apology to the victims he had discredited and ultimately asked for the resignation of the entire Chilean hierarchy, although only a few were actually forced out of office.
It should be noted at this point that similar accusations were raised against Chilean survivor Juan Carlos Cruz Chellew, who is now a lay member of Tutela Minorum when he and other victims of Fernando Karadima came forward to tell their story about large-scale, systematic, abuse at the parish of the Sacred Heart of Providencia in Santiago de Chile.
In that regard one must wonder if French archbishop Thibault Verny will be up to the task to talk with his boss, the Pope, about the potential damage of his unsubstantiated affirmations regarding the scale of false claims of clergy sexual abuse.
The issue is relevant and there are at least three potential scenarios at this point. On the first one, there is heightened scrutiny on victims who were about to talk about their cases, with accusations of victim-blaming going all the way up to the new Pope.
Similar to Pope Francis’s situation, Pope Leo XIV’s mention of “false accusations” is already being perceived as undermining the credibility of all victims. Critics, including victims and their advocates, may accuse him of victim-blaming and of focusing on a small number of unsubstantiated claims rather than the systemic issue of abuse and cover-up.
This is more relevant, again, as proved previously there is no actual report, study or meta-study allowing for such kind of claim. Most of the available data on “false claims” are for sexual abuse at large, and if something should be clear by now is that the dynamics of clergy sexual abuse are significantly different from abuse in other settings.
In this scenario, as it happened back in 2018, there is an unavoidable media and public outcry, with a heightened risk of media backlash, with headlines and social media campaigns highlighting the Pope’s comments as a step backward. The public could see it as a sign that the Church’s priority is still protecting its reputation and accused clergy, rather than supporting victims.
An example of this was, on the very same day, the statement released by SNAP, the Survivors’ Network of those Abused by Priests, available here at Scribd, where they challenge the Pope’s understanding of the issue and call him to make addressing the root causes of the crisis a priority of his Papacy.
In this scenario the statement could further erode trust in the Church’s commitment to addressing the abuse crisis, especially among victims and their families. It could make survivors less likely to come forward, fearing their claims will be questioned or dismissed.
A call for action?
A second scenario is one where Rome acknowledges the need for immediate clarification and action. It less likely as the Pope’s comments probably reflect and attitude in Rome and elsewhere in the Catholic world of dissatisfaction with Francis’s timid efforts at improving minor aspects of the Church’s institutional behavior on the issue.
In the hours after Leo XIV’s interview there is no sign of a move to acknowledge a mistake on his side. Perhaps it is because of the ongoing political crisis in the United States or some other reason, but the fact is that Rome seems to be trying to dismiss criticism.
Still, there is a chance for an apology and clarification of the actual meaning of what he said during the interview the statement. Main problem is that he also dismissed any chance at a major reform in the foreseeable future and his pontificate seems to be way more interested in backpedaling Francis reforms than in pushing them forward. A measure of the true commitment of the current Pope will come in the coming days.
Other choice could be to open or reopen a major case. Rome could help the processes to report abuse through an app or a website or with a series of such technological resources by country, region or language, as to prove some actual interest in attention to the victims’ experiences.
Sadly, there is third less optimistic scenario where a probably miscalculated statement ends up deepening the chasm in the Catholic Church.
Up to a certain extent, that is the point where the Catholic Church was before the interview, and that is why Leo XIV’s words, at least as reported by Crux, are so troubling for people who are friends or relatives and even are themselves survivors of clergy sexual abuse and they still see themselves as Catholics.
For those who have already left their Church of origin is a painful reminder of a troubling era in their lives, one that they would like to put behind them, but it is really hard to forget because of this dance of Pontifical conga, two steps forward, three steps behind.
The statement’s vagueness, the lack of actual evidence to support its claims could be used by conservative factions within the Church to further resist any change, and to go harder in their anti-survivors’ campaigns in social media and in the real life. further reforms.
They could seize on the “false accusations” part of the statement to argue against more robust accountability measures, and more importantly to radicalize the Catholic base to further repudiate and attack survivors of clergy sexual abuse coming forward with their stories.
The comment could be selectively quoted and amplified online, leading to a distorted view of the Pope’s overall message. This could create a narrative that the Pope is siding with priests playing victim when there is plenty of evidence of hundreds of predator priests worldwide.
Ultimately, the impact of the statement will depend on how the Vatican and the Pope handle the response. Pope Francis’s 2018 handling of the Chilean incident shows that a swift and genuine “midcourse correction” can mitigate a crisis, but the misstep can cause significant and lasting harm to the already damaged Church’s reputation and its relationship with victims.
Sadly, the worse effects of what Pope Prevost told Crux will be felt in countries with weak police departments and judiciary. Where there is no guarantee of the availability of a rape kit when abuse is reported, and where there are still hurdles to acknowledge how hard is for victims of clergy sexual abuse to provide a bean-counter-like account of how abuse happened.
Overzealous police?
Most notably Leo XIV also went to war to defend the alleged victims of false accusations who, he claimed, have had their lives destroyed by the accusations. Sadly, if one goes over the many, myriads of cases going unreported in countries such as Mexico or Peru, who Prevost knew quite well during his days as bishop there, it is hard to worry about overzealous police departments, district attorneys or judges.
Oddly enough, Crux’s interview with Leo XIV saw the light a few hours after French newspaper La Croix published a short story on Tuesday September 16 (contents in French, could require a subscription), about Prevost’s final ruling on the file of an Italian permanent deacon, Alessandro Frateschi, who actually got the news about being defrocked, with no chance to appeal, at an Italian jail.
He abused five minors, three of whom were also his students at the Catholic religion course that is available for the parents who chose to enroll their offspring, as it is customary in some European countries. La Croix, ends its story with a reminder of how unwilling the Italian Catholic bishops have been to launch a national probe regarding clergy sexual abuse.
I would not imagine a scenario in which, for whatever reason, Italy would be a country where there is an epidemic of false reports from vengeful “fake victims,” as Peruvian Giuliana Caccia tried to sunk Pope Francis’s efforts to deal with the Sodalitum.
In that regard it is hard to imagine a scenario where there could be an epidemic of false claims of clergy sexual abuse, forcing Pope Prevost to say what he told Crux.
More so when it is clear than most of the Francis’s timid attempt at a meaningful reform of the Catholic Church is going nowhere. As it has been repeated over and over in this series, in Mexico, second or third country with the largest number of Catholics, the bishops were unwilling to comply with Pope Francis instruction from 2019 of setting up a commission to prevent clergy sexual abuse in each diocese.
It is unclear what the Pope was trying to achieve, perhaps it was out of the kindness of his heart, but it will fuel the rage of the Catholic far-right in Latin America and other countries to try to discredit any and all victims of clergy sexual abuse as pretenders trying to set up a priest or, even worse given the current context, as enemies of the Church.