Pope Leo XIV on Monday condemned sexual abusers holding positions of authority in the Catholic Church, expressing support for reparation for victims.
The Catholic Church has for decades faced investigations concluding it systematically turned a blind eye to thousands of child sex predators operating globally as priests and in other capacities within the Vatican’s network. This week, the pope acknowledged concerns, telling Spain’s Catholic bishops that one of the “most painful encounters is with those who have been wounded precisely by those who were supposed to care for them, including members of the clergy.”
“Faced with this scourge, the ecclesial community is called to respond with listening, truth, justice, reparation and an ever more determined commitment to prevention and a culture of care,” Leo told bishops, following a 2023 report by Spain’s human rights ombudsman that indicated around 440,000 people in the country were sexually abused in the Catholic Church as children. “Every wounded person must be able to find sincere listening, welcome, protection, and real paths to healing.”
Leo, the first American pope, has attracted some accusations that he helped to cover up child sex crimes during his tenure as bishop of Chiclayo in Peru. The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests has expressed concern that he played a role in covering up how clerics accused of sexual assault were allowed to continue their roles in the Catholic Church, including granting an honorable discharge to a priest who confessed to abusing three children, according to the Chicago Sun Times.
“We cannot have another pope in this institutional system who has covered up child sex crimes,” SNAP founder Peter Isely, a survivor of clerical sexual abuse from Wisconsin, said in December. “I’ve been at this 35 years, and the only way things change is when there are consequences and accountability. … We don’t want this to happen to another child.”
The Catholic Church has faced reports that members of the church engaged in acts of pedophilia worldwide for years.
In the United States, the John Jay Report stated in 2004 that between 10,667 abuse allegations were reported against 4,392 priests, a total of 4% in the ministry, between 1950 and 2002. The landmark investigation followed a 2002 Boston Globe investigative series, which found the Vatican often protected abusive priests by reassigning them and settling with victims to keep incidents from public scrutiny.
Such accusations have continued, including in Pennsylvania, where then-attorney general Josh Shapiro in 2018 released the results of a two-year inquiry finding that hundreds of Catholic Church officials molested up to thousands of children in the state over the span of several decades, and then engaged in a “sophisticated” cover-up to protect abusers.
In France, an independent investigation released in 2021 estimated 330,000 minors, mostly young boys, were abused by up to 3,200 leaders in the Catholic Church from 1950 to 2020. Only a handful of cases prompted disciplinary action under canonical law, let alone criminal prosecution, according to the French Independent Commission.
In Australia, a five-year public inquiry released in 2017 found 7% of priests in the country’s Catholic Church were accused of sexually abusing children between 1950 and 2010. The report from Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse indicated that at least 4,444 children were sexually abused at more than 1,000 Catholic institutions between 1980 and 2015.
“Tens of thousands of children have been sexually abused in many Australian institutions. We will never know the true number,” the report said. “It is not a case of a few ‘rotten apples’. Society’s major institutions have seriously failed.”
POPE LEO DOES ‘6-7’ TREND FOR CHILDREN AT THE VATICAN
In Ireland, two separate investigations released in 2009 detailed sweeping accusations that the Vatican and police colluded to hide sex crimes against children for years. The 700-page Murphy Report said the Catholic Church was concerned only with “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets.” One priest admitted to abusing more than 100 children, while another said he had abused, on average, a child every two weeks for 25 years.
The Ryan report found that thousands of Irish children were sexually abused by Catholic authorities for over 60 years in a network of church-run residential schools and institutions meant to care for the poor and the vulnerable. In the boys’ schools, sexual abuse was “endemic,” and about half of all witnesses who testified to the Ryan commission’s confidential committee said they were sexually abused.