A new pope confronts his church's abuse scandal amid praise and scrutiny

Boston Globe

15-05-2025

Leo has not made any public statements about the sexual abuse crisis, though in past interviews he disavowed 'cover-up and secrecy' and emphasized assistance for victims. One possible sign of an early focus on the issue came Wednesday, when the pope met with Cardinal Sean O'Malley, a retired leader of the Boston Archdiocese who heads the Vatican's commission on the abuse of minors.
Advertisement
Experts and those who have worked with Leo during his lengthy tenure as priest, missionary, bishop, and leader of an international order express confidence that he has the characteristics to accelerate
progress -- excellent listening skills, a canon law degree, experience suppressing an abusive Catholic movement in Peru.
Advertisement
Yet his record during those years, when he was known as Father
Robert Prevost, has already faced scrutiny from some survivor groups.
They say they are troubled by his ascent to the apex of the church, calling his oversight of two cases involving accused priests problematic.
In March,
the US-based Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, sent a complaint to the Vatican calling for investigations into both cases: an accusation that a quarter-century ago, Prevost
approved the relocation of an abuser to a Chicago friary located near a parish
elementary school;
and a 2023 claim by three sisters in Peru who say that Prevost, at that point a bishop for the Diocese of Chiclayo,
insufficiently investigated their allegations of sexual abuse
by two priests years earlier.
In neither case did the alleged abuse
occur under Prevost's
watch. Still, SNAP president
Shaun Dougherty said he felt 'flabbergasted' last week when Prevost emerged as Pope Leo XIV on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica. The cardinals' selection of Prevost was 'tone deaf' as the church continues to grapple with the decades-long crisis, Dougherty said.
Others have a different assessment, saying abuse in the church has been so widespread that the
conclave would have struggled to choose a pontiff whose career was untouched by the fallout.
Activists of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests held a press conference in Rome in March. From left were Sarah Pearson, Peter Isely, and president Shaun Dougherty.
Andrew Medichini/Associated Press
'For me, the bigger story is what he does moving forward,' said Brian Clites, an expert at Case Western Reserve University on clergy sexual abuse. The allegations 'are serious,' he said, 'but they're so common that I cannot imagine many people who would have been elected pope who would not have had similar profiles.'
Advertisement
And in a statement posted last week on X, the president of the Peru Survivors Network said he had met with Prevost in January and praised the new pope's role in helping to dismantle Sodalitium Christianae Vitae. The Peru-based movement, a lay community founded to recruit 'soldiers for God,' was dissolved early this year after a Vatican investigation uncovered sexual and spiritual abuses.
'He listened with attention to my ideas and showed his total agreement and support for my fight against physical, psychological, spiritual, and sexual violence in the Catholic Church,' Jose Enrique Escardó Steck wrote of their conversation.
The church's reckoning became far more visible under Francis, who met several times with survivors and in 2014 created a Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. Five years later, he convened an unprecedented summit on clerical sexual abuse, where he called for an 'all-out battle' to end it. Francis followed that with a sweeping law to hold clerics accountable, requiring church officials to report accusations of abuse or cover-ups to their superiors. (The law does not require civil authorities to be contacted.)
Even so, Francis was criticized for slow-walking certain cases, and survivors and their advocates saw many of his moves as toothless. Some commission members quit in protest, saying the body lacked independence and transparency, a charge the group itself echoed in a report last year.
Though thousands of priests have been disciplined by the Holy See and abuse cases keep surfacing, critics say the investigative process remains cloaked, the result of an entrenched hierarchy averse to openness and change.
Advertisement
Hans Zollner, a German Jesuit priest who is considered one of the church's foremost authorities on safeguarding children from sexual abuse, quit the commission out of frustration in 2023. But he said he has seen 'a positive dynamic' worldwide over the past two to three years and
is looking for the new pope to build on it.
Zollner hopes Leo will invite victims to Rome -- not only so
he
can hear directly from them, but also so he can involve them in 'rethinking procedures in the church and in promoting safeguarding.'
As a native of the United States, where the scandal exploded in Boston in 2002, Leo would have significant familiarity with the problem and what is now the US church's 'zero tolerance' policy. Across the country, dioceses and other Catholic entities have since reported more than 16,200 credible allegations of abuse made by minors, as detailed in a report early this year by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
But Leo's many
years in Peru may give him a broader perspective -- one that grasps the scope of abuse in countries from Ireland to Australia to the Philippines.
Some Catholics around the world continue to believe 'this is a decadent American problem,' said Stephen White, who leads Catholic University's response to the abuse crisis.
'I think he will be very much disabused of that idea.'
Clites said Leo,
like Francis, seems to embrace a liberation-theology-style approach that gives a 'preferential option' for the poor. Whether he will extend the same
to survivors of abuse, as SNAP and other groups have demanded, is unclear.
'The biggest thing a pope could do that we haven't seen from the past few popes would be to direct dioceses around the world to be more transparent. We really have no idea about the rates and cases of abuse outside of the most developed countries,' Clites said. He added: 'It's not just about implementing policies and the speech acts that Francis did a good job at.'
Advertisement