VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
The Catholic Observer [United States]
October 17, 2025
By Gary Gately
Its report faults “the Church’s decades-long pattern of mishandling reports, including abandoning, ignoring, shaming, blaming, and stigmatizing” abuse victims.
This story has been updated.
The Catholic Church has been lax in fulfilling its “moral and spiritual obligation to heal the deep wounds” inflicted on victims of clergy sexual abuse for decades, according to a highly critical report released Thursday by the Vatican’s child protection commission.
The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors’ 200-page report called for tougher sanctions for abusers and their enablers; public acknowledgement of cover-up and mishandling of abuse cases; and reparations for victims going beyond financial compensation, to include invitations for them to help develop safeguarding procedures and professional psychological support for survivors.
The new report marks only the second from the commission since the late Pope Francis established it in 2014. The commission’s new report, coming a year after its first, draws on accounts from dozens of abuse survivors throughout the world and covers 2024, predating Pope Leo XIV’s election by four months.
“The Church bears a moral and spiritual obligation to heal the deep wounds inflicted from sexual violence perpetrated, enabled, mishandled, or covered up by anyone holding a position of authority in the Church,” the report said. “In many cases, however, victims/survivors report that the Church has responded with empty settlements, performative gestures, and a persistent refusal to engage with victims/survivors in good faith.”
The report points to the 1.4 billion-member Catholic Church’s “decades-long pattern of mishandling reports, including abandoning, ignoring, shaming, blaming, and stigmatizing victims/survivors” and, in turn, perpetuating the trauma they suffer.
“The commission is committed to saying to victims and survivors: ‘We want to be by your side,’ French Archbishop Thibault Verny, the commission’s president said at a Vatican news conference.
Victims often complained of a lack of accountability and responsiveness to reports of abuse, stressing the “urgent need for bishops and major superiors to be held accountable for negligence and cover-up.” The Church does not disclose when bishops are removed for mishandling abuse cases, and the report called for it to clearly communicate the reasons in such cases.
Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the clergy abuse watchdog group BishopAccountability.org, praised the commission’s “especially sobering” new report for underscoring “how little progress the Church has made in ending abuse and cover-up.”
In an email to The Catholic Observer, Doyle wrote that the report “should serve as a wake-up call to Pope Leo.” She said he “appeared to minimize the enormity of the crisis” in an interview last month when he spoke about the rights of accused priests and the harm caused by false accusations “as if the pendulum had swung too far in favor of victims.”
In the interview, with the Catholic publication Crux, Leo said 90% of those who allege abuse are telling the truth, but added: “There have also been proven cases of some kind of false accusation. There have been priests whose lives have been destroyed…. The fact that the victim comes forward and makes an accusation and the accusation presumably is accurate, that does not take away the presumption of innocence. The priests also have to be protected.”
Angela Walker, executive director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), America’s longest-active support group for victims of clergy abuse, said she welcomes the report’s acknowledgement of the Church’s failings in responding to sexual abuse.
“But it doesn’t go far enough,” Walker told The Catholic Observer. “What we see too often is that someone comes forward and says they have been victimized by a member of the clergy and then they are traumatized further when no action is taken and that cleric is moved to another position….
“The time to act is now to protect victims of clergy abuse and prevent another generation from suffering from abuse.”
SNAP has sharply criticizedwidespread statutes of limitations on abuse claims that prevent many victims from ever getting justice, and on May 8, the day of Pope Leo’s election, the group wrote in a letter to him: “Why are tens of thousands of clerics, known by you and your fellow bishops around the world to have raped and sexually assaulted children and the vulnerable, still in ministry today? Why can any bishop in the world, including you, cover up instances of rape and transfer offenders to new assignments where they are likely to abuse again?”
The group called for a “universal zero-tolerance law enacted into canon law, removing all abusers and complicit officials”; a “reparations fund” supported by the Church to provide victims financial restitution, education and psychological care; and “acts of restitution” by the Church, including memorials and official public acknowledgements of abuse.
Among other findings and recommendations in the new report:
- Again and again, victims shared “disturbing accounts of retaliation taken by Church leaders” against those who reported abuse. One family said a priest at their parish declared them excommunicated after they reported a family member had been abused. Another victim recalled: “I reported my case, and the bishop remained silent for months. When I persisted, he sent representatives to gaslight me, saying I was making trouble.” The Church must take concrete steps to protect abuse victims from all forms of retaliation, including discrimination, professional consequences, and social exclusion, the report said.
- Victims’ lack of access to Church documents containing information about their cases represented a “significant topic of concern.” As one victim put it: “You want to know, and they don’t tell you anything. It’s like being sent to Purgatory.”
- The Church must “adopt robust communications protocols,” the report said, to publicly acknowledge its failings in response to the “scourge” of abuse — “essential to prevent the resurgence of victims’/survivors’ pain, which can occur when they feel ignored or silenced.” Victims suggested examples including memorials, dedicated liturgies, formal letters acknowledging harm and making public abuse-prevention measures.
- Victims stressed the importance of investigations and reporting systems independent from the Church hierarchy, including cooperation and collaboration with the civil authorities.
- As a result of “culture of silence,” victims said they’re often stigmatized for reporting abuse, and that priests and Church members violate their confidentiality. One victim said: “After I spoke out, my own parish turned against me. People said I was trying to destroy the priest’s reputation.” Other victims said they had been accused of tempting priests. One victim alleged that Church leaders leaked victims’ complaints, exposing them to stigma and discrimination.
In early July, the 70-year-old Pope Leo appointed Archbishop Verny of Chambéry, France, as head of the child protection commission, to succeed Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley, the retired archbishop of Boston, who had served as its president since Pope Francis established it in 2014.
Verny, a member of the commission since 2022, also heads the child protection conference of France. He has played a key role in the Catholic Church’s response to a 2021 French government report that revealed that more than 330,000 children had been abused by priests and other Church staffers over the past seven decades.
The 59-year-old Verny’s appointment came two weeks after Leo, in his first public statement on abuse since becoming pope, stressed the “urgent need to establish a culture of prevention throughout the Church that does not tolerate any form of abuse — neither of power nor of authority, nor of conscience or spiritual, nor of sex.”
Verny said in a statement after his appointment that he is “fully aware of the grave and sacred task entrusted to the commission: to help the Church become ever more vigilant, accountable, and compassionate in her mission to protect the most vulnerable among us.”