There is a cancer at the heart of the Catholic Church and Francis's successor must tackle it

Telegraph

27-04-2025

From his very first appearance greeting crowds in St Peter's Square in Rome on March 13 2013, Pope Francis made warmth, good humour and charisma his hallmarks as he bestrode the world stage. Only on a small handful of occasions over his dozen years as pontiff was that easy charm absent.
We all have off days, but one such unhappy encounter during his January 2018 visit to Chile is particularly significant, since it revealed his failure to adequately address one of the greatest scandals to engulf Catholicism in its long history – clerical sex abuse.
While in Chile, Francis had been publicly rebuked by victims of cleric abuse for appointing a priest, Juan Barros, as a bishop in the diocese of Osorno despite claims that he knew (from complaints by victims sent to the Vatican) of allegations that Barros had witnessed and covered-up what the Church itself had already formally judged to be sexual exploitation of young people by a popular priest, Fernando Karadima.
Francis's response to being challenged was angry and unmeasured. 'It is calumny,' he snapped. 'Is that clear?'
It prompted demonstrations in Chile by loyal Catholics who would otherwise have been out in the street celebrating a papal visit. Barros denied any wrongdoing, but even Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston, who heads the Commission for the Protection of Minors, set up by Francis in 2014 to take 'decisive action' on clerical sex abuse, publicly rebuked his boss. Francis's words, he said, 'abandon those who have suffered reprehensible criminal violations of their human dignity and relegate survivors to discredited exile'.
In fairness to Francis – and much more in keeping with that popular image of him as a pope who encouraged the Catholic Church to change entrenched teachings on sex and gender – he subsequently sent an envoy to Chile on a fact-finding mission, then summoned all 31 Chilean bishops to Rome for a ticking-off and finally sacked three of them.
He also met victims of Karadima to apologise, and reportedly told them, 'I was part of the problem'. He made a point of sitting down in private gatherings and listening to others who had been groomed and betrayed by clerics throughout his pontificate.
Yet in the years that followed, his promise to put the problem right did not translate into action. All experts advise that two changes are needed to ensure youngsters are safe around priests. The first is to agree to a wholly independent safeguarding process, rather than the current set-up where the Church acts as judge and jury. And the second – as recommended in 2017 by a Royal Commission on child abuse in Australia – is to introduce mandatory reporting of such abuse by any individual who sees or hears about it, including priests in the confessional. Francis refused to do either.
'The idea of Francis turning over a new leaf on all of this feels very hollow to victims and survivors,' the lawyer Richard Scorer told me in 2023. He has represented hundreds of victims of clerical sex abuse in the UK. 'The harm caused [to them] by abuse is lifelong. Closure is generally a very glib word. I'm not sure people get it. They struggle to achieve it.'
Francis, of course, was not the only pope to fail in this crucial area, where the numbers involved are extraordinary, covering between 1.5 and 5% of all ordained clergy over the past half century according to Vatican officials' own estimates. Indeed, he did considerably better than his two predecessors. But still not good enough.
John Paul II (pontiff from 1978 to 2005) simply ignored thousands of reports of abuse sent to him by victims, and allowed both the disgraced American cardinal Bernard Law, who covered-up such cases in his diocese, and the Mexican priest Marcial Maciel, a serial abuser, to escape justice by giving them sanctuary in the Vatican. Benedict XVI (2005-2013) did better – banning Maciel from taking services, but still not deporting him to face trial.
Yet to measure Francis against his pledge, soon after his election, to take 'decisive action' quickly is to see him fail. The Commission for the Protection of Minors was his structural answer, established in 2014 as part of the Vatican bureaucracy, known as the curia. It even included on its board victims of clerical abuse. But one of them, Marie Collins from Ireland, first publicly criticised it for lacking sufficient funding in 2015, and then resigned in 2017, alleging that the continued presence of 'men [at senior levels] in the Church who resist or hinder the work to protect children is just not acceptable.'
In 2023, she was followed by the highly regarded Jesuit priest Hans Zollner, who suggested the commission risked becoming an exercise in public relations, and cited 'lack of transparency, compliance and responsibility' as the reasons prompting his resignation. In an anonymous article published in the same year in the leading US paper, the National Catholic Reporter, a survivor of clerical abuse wrote: 'it seems to me like the gap between what top Catholic officials say about abuse and that they do about abuse has never been bigger'.
Francis's rhetoric on combatting clerical sexual abuse was certainly impressive. In 2018, in a letter to all Catholics, he acknowledged 'the heart-wrenching pain of victims' which had been 'long-ignored'. The next year he likened their suffering to child sacrifice in pagan rituals. But even that tailed off in more recent times. Instead, Francis began to react defensively, telling a visiting group of safeguarding experts in September 2023, for example, that abuse was a problem that isn't restricted to the Catholic Church.
'The abuses that have affected the Church are but a pale reflection of a sad reality that involves all of humanity and to which the necessary attention is not paid,' he said. That is true up to a point, but there are also few bodies that claim moral authority to protect the vulnerable so strongly as churches.
And it is not just victims who were disappointed by Francis's failure to match words with action. A report commissioned by the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales revealed a wider 'crisis of faith' causing the pews to empty, while those still there were felt they had 'to keep their faith private' in their everyday lives, the very opposite of the gospel imperative to spread the Good News.
There are, of course, many reasons for a decline in church-going in developed societies since the mid 20th century. Francis's legacy contains many attempts to tackle some of them, including putting more women in senior positions in the Church (though still refusing to ordain them) and undertaking a global exercise in asking Catholics their views. That culminated in two clumsily entitled Synods on Synodality in Rome in 2023 and 2024 that promised, but have yet to deliver, greater power for their laity in decision-making.
Next to something so horrific as priests sexually abusing children, and other priests covering it up, however, all the good he did undeniably struggles to cut through. It is the reason for lapsing that anecdotally comes up most. The English and Welsh bishops also acknowledged that it is also 'constantly raised by non-Catholics who see it as proof of the failure of the Church to live up to what Christ called us to be'.
On the other hand, though, recent figures suggest that in Britain at least, Catholicism is experiencing a resurgence: according to a study from the Bible Society, The Quiet Revival, Anglicans have been overtaken and are now outnumbered by Catholics by more than two to one among Generation Z and younger millennial churchgoers.
But that broader damage to the Church's reputation for answering to a higher set of God-given values has been gathering pace these past dozen years, ironically at the same time as Pope Francis used his global platform to speak out more powerfully and repeatedly than most pontiffs on important issues such as climate change, the evils of war, the scourge of poverty, the shortcomings of capitalism and the causes of migration.
There will be many issues in the in tray of Francis's successor, but until the clerical sex abuse scandal is addressed with real vigour, there will be more victims and the exodus from the pews in the West will continue.