VATICAN CITY – The Vatican’s child protection board said Thursday the Catholic Church has a moral obligation to help victims of clergy sexual abuse heal. It said financial reparations for the abused and tougher sanctions for abusers and their enablers are essential remedies.
The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors focused on reparations in its second annual report – an often sensitive topic for the church, given the financial, reputational and legal implications.
The report was significant: an official Vatican publication prepared with input from 40 abuse survivors worldwide. It gave voice to their complaints about how poorly the church handled their cases and highlighted measures they say are needed to heal.
It contained the shocking revelation that the Vatican office responsible for one-third of the world’s Catholic dioceses had received only a “small number of cases,” and just two reports of bishops who covered up child sex crimes. The data suggests clergy abuse is going unchecked and unreported in vast parts of the developing world, more than three decades after the scandal first exploded publicly in the West.
The report covers 2024, a period before Pope Leo XIV was elected. History’s first American pope has acknowledged that the abuse scandal remains a “crisis” for the church.
Leo has signaled a commitment to the commission, which Pope Francis created in 2014 to advise the church on best practices to prevent abuse.
The report said monetary settlements are necessary to provide victims with therapy and other assistance to help them recover from the trauma.
But it said the church owes a far greater debt to victims, the broader church community and God. The hierarchy must listen to victims and provide spiritual and pastoral assistance. Church leaders must apologize for the harm done, explain what they are doing to punish offenders and outline measures to prevent future abuse, the report said.
“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,” it said.
The report was prepared with victims in focus group settings, where they listed priorities for healing. They identified the need for accountability from church leaders, information about their cases, and true reform of church structures to adequately punish abusers and enablers.
Significantly, the 2024 report said the church’s handling of abuse cases – and its “decades-long pattern of mishandling reports, including abandoning, ignoring, shaming, blaming, and stigmatizing” victims – is itself retraumatizing.
It referred to the church’s dysfunctional in-house canonical code, where cases can take years to process and the most severe punishment for a serial rapist priest may be dismissal.
The process is cloaked in secrecy, leaving victims with no rights to information about their case beyond its outcome.
The report called for sanctions that are “tangible and commensurate with the severity of the crime.” While laicization is possible for priests who rape children, the church frequently imposes lesser penalties, such as a period of retreat from active ministry.
Even when a bishop is removed for mishandling cases, the public is often told only that he has retired. The report urged the church to “clearly communicate reasons for resignation or removal.”
Audit of countries and Vatican office
Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org said the report should serve as a wake-up call to Leo, who she noted had seemed to minimize the scandal’s enormity in an interview stressing the need to protect priests’ rights.
“The global church has hundreds of millions of children under its care, and it is still failing to prioritize their safety,” she said in a statement.
The report included an audit of child protection policies and practices in more than a dozen countries, as well as two religious orders, a lay movement and the Vatican office responsible for the church in the developing world.
It gave high marks to church leadership in Malta, South Korea and Slovakia, where most dioceses responded to the commission’s questionnaire on prevention policies.
But even in Italy – the Vatican’s backyard – only 81 of 226 dioceses responded. In places like Mali, the challenges appear greater: the bishops conference website “does not seem to be functioning and accessible.”
The report revealed that the Dicastery for Evangelization’s missionary office, responsible for 1,124 dioceses in Asia, Africa, Oceania and parts of Latin America – or a third of the church’s dioceses – had received only a “small number of cases,” and just two reports of bishops who covered up abuse.
That is a staggeringly low number given the size of the territory. It suggests the Vatican still has a long way to go in regions where abuse – especially same-sex abuse – remains taboo and where the church faces broader issues of war, conflict and poverty.
Commission member Benyam Dawit Mezmur, an Ethiopian jurist, said he cringes when the church claims there are no abuse cases in Africa, when the truth is they are not being reported. A lack of resources and societal and cultural barriers are mostly to blame.
“I know for a fact that there are cases,” he said. “But we need to look deeper and see why are they not being reported. Are the structures in place? Are there issues about reprisals? Are there issues that we need to address about power relations?”
He said encouraging a culture of reporting requires empowering minors and their families to report abuse and educating them about child protection and prevention.
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