VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
New York Times [New York NY]
October 16, 2025
By Elisabetta Povoledo
The commission’s report highlights the difficulties Pope Leo faces in trying to end clerical abuses and ensure abusers are held to account.
A Vatican commission set up to address the clerical sexual abuse crisis said on Thursday that the Roman Catholic Church was still too slow in addressing a problem that has plagued it for decades.
The commission called on church leaders to act more quickly and more transparently, and recommended that the church listened to, and involved, survivors as it worked to build trust after decades of scandal.
“Many times I have also asked myself that same question: Why so slow?” Msgr. Luis Manuel Alí Herrera, the commission’s secretary, said at a news conference to present its latest report on the church’s progress in dealing with abuse. “Sometimes I admit that I have been discouraged because I wanted the change to be more obvious, more radical.”
But, he added, many bishops around the world were now actively working with the commission, a marked change from the pattern when it was established 11 years ago.
The latest report comes just months into the papacy of Leo XIV and underlines the challenges he will face. It covers 2024, before Leo was pope. Leo has met with commission members four times.
Advocacy groups for clerical abuse survivors said that the report again revealed the church’s shortcomings in dealing with the issue.
Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, issued a statement commending the commission “for depicting how little progress the church has made in ending abuse and cover-up.” She said the report should “serve as a wake-up call to Pope Leo.”
She added that although the report was constructive, it was also “inadequate and vague, a reflection of the limited power and remit of the commission itself.” The panel did not deal with specific cases, for example, meaning it could not determine whether offenders had been removed from ministry — which critics say is crucial to stop the cycle of abuse.
The focus of this year’s report, the commission’s second, was to push for more reparations beyond the financial payments now being given to some victims.
The report said that “the primary need” for survivors was “recognition of harm, genuine apologies, and meaningful action to prevent future abuses.” Many survivors had complained to the commission that the church had often responded with “empty settlements, performative gestures and a persistent refusal to engage” with them “in good faith.”
But Matthias Katsch, a survivor based in Germany who was consulted for the report, said that more financial support was needed to help victims who often “suffer lifelong limitations, including in terms of their professional activities and income.”
Many victims interviewed for the report said that their complaints of abuse had been ignored and that the church had often failed to provide access to information about their cases.
One frustrated person, who was unnamed, was quoted as saying, “You want to know, and they don’t tell you anything. It’s like being sent to purgatory.”
The panel, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, was formed in 2014 to advise Pope Francis on how to protect minors and vulnerable adults from sexual predators among the clergy. Its members include clergy, survivors and independent outsiders, including some with law-enforcement expertise.
From the beginning, critics have complained that the commission has no enforcement powers. Reports to it from individual countries are still based mainly on self-reporting by bishops’ groups. And compliance with questionnaires meant to explore how cases were handled was not universal, the commission said.
In Italy, for example, only 81 of 226 dioceses answered the commission’s questionnaire, the report noted, while in South Korea, all 15 dioceses complied.
The overall findings suggest that more than two decades after the clerical abuse crisis exploded into the public sphere, the church’s response remains mixed, despite efforts by Pope Benedict XVI and by Pope Francis to codify a response through new church laws. Although some progress has been made, victims’ groups said that the Vatican had done too little to ensure that allegations had been properly investigated, that predators had been removed from their posts and that those who covered up abuse had been held accountable.
The report noted that in several countries, including Italy, Slovakia and some in Africa, “cultural resistance” still hindered reporting of abuse. And Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, the report’s chief writer, said that the church had not allocated enough money to set up centers to handle abuse cases.
After the first report was issued last year, critics dismissed the findings given by individual countries, noting that they had not been verified by independent observers. The second report sought to rectify that by presenting notes about each country from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, as well as observations from Vatican ambassadors in each country and comments from personnel on the ground.
The commission also said that it had spoken to victims to allow them to offer their “reactions and perspectives on the accuracy and relevance of the commission’s findings.”
But at least in the case of Italy, the commission had not reached out to Rete l’Abuso, the country’s leading advocate for sexual abuse survivors, Francesco Zanardi, that group’s founder and president, said.
Elisabetta Povoledo is a Times reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years.