Clerical sex abuse: Pope Francis's thorniest challenge

The Hindu

22-04-2025

When Pope Francis took over in 2013, the Catholic Church was embroiled in a global scandal over child sex abuse by priests, and the institution's attempts to cover it up.
Pope Francis death LIVE:
The pontiff sanctioned top clergy and made reporting abuse mandatory, but victims said more can and must be done.
Criticised commission
In December 2014, Pope Francis established an international panel of experts to recommend how to protect minors, but the commission was mired in controversy from the start.
Two members representing abuse survivors resigned in 2017, including Marie Collins, who was raped by a priest in Ireland when she was 13 years old and who decried as 'shameful' the lack of cooperation from Vatican officials.
Also read: Pope updates canon law to address paedophilia by priests
In March 2023, the commission's last remaining founding member, prominent German Jesuit priest Hans Zollner, resigned expressing concerns over 'responsibility, compliance, accountability and transparency'.
Turning point in Chile
Pope Francis's trip in January 2018 to Chile, where a clerical paedophilia scandal had caused outrage, was a turning point.
Pope Francis initially defended a Chilean bishop against allegations he covered up the crimes of an elderly priest, demanding the accusers show proof of his guilt.
He later admitted making 'grave mistakes' in the case — a first for a pope. He summoned all of Chile's bishops to the Vatican, after which they all submitted their resignations.
McCarrick affair
In February 2019, in a historic first, Pope Francis defrocked former U.S. cardinal Theodore McCarrick after he was found guilty by a Vatican court of sexually abusing a teenager in the 1970s.
McCarrick had been known for having sex with adult seminarians, and the year before, the Vatican's former ambassador to the United States, Carlo Maria Vigano, accused Pope Francis of ignoring years of allegations against the cardinal.
A Vatican report in 2020 acknowledged errors by the Catholic hierarchy and found former pope John Paul II ignored advice against promoting McCarrick, but largely absolved Pope Francis.
Unprecedented summitv
In February 2019, the pope convened the heads of 114 bishops conferences from around the world with the head of the eastern Catholic Churches and superiors of religious congregations for a four-day summit on 'the protection of minors'.
It heard devastating accounts from abuse survivors and searing criticism from within the Church.
German Cardinal Reinhard Marx, a close adviser to the pope, dropped the bombshell that bishops' offices might have destroyed files on clerical abuse suspects.
The pope promised an 'all-out battle' against abuse, comparing child sex abuse to human sacrifice.
Legal changes
In December 2019, the pope made complaints, testimonies and documents from internal Church trials available to lay courts. Victims were able to access their files and any judgements.
The same year, he made it compulsory to report suspicions of sexual assault or harassment to Church authorities — and any attempt at a cover-up.
In 2021, the Catholic Church updated its criminal code for the first time in nearly 40 years to include an explicit mention of sexual abuse by priests against minors and disabled people.
However, victims continued to complain that clergy were still not obliged to report abuse to civil authorities under Church codes, and anything said in the confessional box remained sacrosanct.
A mixed record
On his foreign trips from Canada to Belgium Pope Francis met with survivors of abuse and regularly issued calls for forgiveness.
But while he did the most of any pope to combat the scourge, campaigners say he has never acknowledged what might be the 'systemic' causes of abuse within the Church.
He was criticised for not meeting the authors of a major report into sexual abuse within the Church in France, and urging caution in interpreting its claim that, about 330,000 minors had been abused over 70 years.
Critics also say he should have been more decisive with Marko Rupnik, a Slovenian priest and world-renowned mosaic artist accused of abusing a community of adult religious women in the 1990s.
Under pressure, the pope waived the statute of limitations in 2023 to allow potential disciplinary proceedings.