​

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 27, 2025
 

The next pope must do what Francis refused: enact a universal zero tolerance law for abuse and cover-up

Sympathy for the pope must not mean ignoring his failure on abuse 

Unlike Francis, Benedict XVI, and John Paul II, successor cannot have covered up sex crimes

 

CONTACT: 
Peter Isely 
Program Director of Nate's Mission
414-429-7259
peter@natesmission.org

Sarah Pearson
Deputy Director of Nate's Mission
414-366-5403
sarah@natesmission.org

Shaun Dougherty
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) President
814-431-8386
sdougherty@snapnetwork.org

Summary

• The next pope must institute a zero tolerance law for sexual abuse that immediately removes abusive clergy and leaders who have covered up abuse from ministry and mandates independent oversight of bishops. He must use his authority to enact fundamental, institutional changes to end the systematic practice of sexual abuse and its concealment.

• The next pope must not have any history of having covered up sexual abuse.

• Because of his history of covering up abuse in Argentina, Francis never possessed the necessary credibility to overhaul the Vatican’s management of sexual abuse cases.

• None of Francis’ reforms or initiatives have produced actual “zero tolerance” for abuse or ended the culture of extreme secrecy and control that enables it.

​

As Pope Francis lies in the hospital, potentially facing the end of his life, survivors around the world are mourning what they perceive as the "tragedy" of his papacy—a preventable catastrophe for the children and vulnerable people who were abused during his tenure.
Peter Isely, a founder and Chair of Global Advocacy of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said, "Francis began his papacy by promising us and the world that he would put an end to clergy abuse and cover-up. If we had known then what we know now—that he himself covered up sexual crimes in Argentina before becoming pope and that, for twelve years, he failed to use his authority to implement a universal zero-tolerance policy—we would have felt very differently."

​

The failure of Francis’ papacy to end sexual abuse and cover-up

When Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope in 2013, there was no law mandating universal zero tolerance for sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Almost 12 years later, as revelations of sexual abuse and cover-up have continually poured in from around the world, there is still no law mandating universal zero tolerance for sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.

​

Pope Francis has attempted to rewrite history. In 2019, the pontiff told CNN Portugal that the Catholic Church had “zero tolerance” and that he was “responsible that it doesn’t happen anymore.” Responding to media inquiries about abuse in 2022, Francis said, “Now, everything is transparent.” Recent history indicates this is unequivocally false. 
 

• Years after serial sexual and spiritual abuse allegations against Slovenian priest Fr. Marko Rupnik had been made public and after his 2020 expulsion by the Jesuits following a canonical trial, Francis received Rupnik in a private audience in 2022, the Diocese of Rome promoted his speech on YouTube, and Rupnik was welcomed into ministry in the Diocese of Koper in 2023. Over a year after public outrage finally pressured the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith (DDF) into investigating Rupnik’s case, Rupnik is still free to exercise his ministry while victims feel “betrayed” by the Vatican’s delay and lack of transparency. 

• After Bishop Rosario Gisana came under fire in 2021 when Italian media reported on a phone call intercepted by police where he told now-convicted priest Fr. Giuseppe Rugolo, “The problem is also mine because I buried this story,” Francis went out of his way to praise Gisana in 2023, saying, “He was persecuted, slandered, yet he stood firm, always, just, a just man.” Only this January, after a public prosecutor ordered Gisana to stand trial for giving false testimony in Rugolo’s case, did the Vatican dispatch an apostolic visitor (another Italian bishop) to Sicily to assess the accusations. 

• Abuse survivors and advocates were stunned when Francis named Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández as head of the DDF in July 2023. In his recent history, Fernández had severely mishandled cases of serious sexual abuse in three instances, especially that of Fr. Eduardo Lorenzo who Fernández supported by publishing a letter on the archdiocese’s website in 2019 in which Lorenzo declared his innocence and visiting the accused priest’s parish to concelebrate a special mass with him. When global survivors, including a victim of Lorenzo, called on the pope to remove Fernández from the DDF and rescind his promotion to cardinal, Francis opted instead to urge Fernández to focus on doctrinal matters, leaving abuse cases, which typically comprise 80% of the DDF’s work, to “competent professionals.” 

​

In response to media inquiries regarding the DDF’s delay in resolving the case against Fr. Rupnik, Cardinal Fernández said last month, “I think of many other cases, including others that are worse but less publicized.”

Recent events lead survivors and advocates to ask, “What has changed since 2013?”

What has changed since the abuse continued at the Provolo boarding school for the deaf until 2016, even after Francis was informed by victims’ letters in 2013 and 2014 and in person in 2015?

What has changed since Francis admitted he made a “grave mistake” in Chile in 2018 when he called the accusations against Bishop Barros “all slander?"

What has changed since Francis referred to those who “spend their lives accusing, accusing, accusing” as relatives of the devil on the eve of his 2019 summit on abuse in the wake of the devastating Pennsylvania Grand Jury report and the revelations of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s long history of abuse?

Not much, it seems. 

 

The failure of Francis’ reforms

 

A false impression has been created that reforms instituted by Pope Francis are sufficient to address the ongoing catastrophe of sexual abuse and its institutional concealment in the Catholic Church. 

• Francis’ signature clergy abuse law Vos Estis Lux Mundi has been billed as an overhaul in the way the Vatican holds bishops and religious superiors accountable for their management of sexual abuse cases. Cardinal Blase Cupich called it “revolutionary.” Vos Estis is a half-measure that puts investigation of bishops in the hands of their fellow bishops, with no duty to report to the public or notify civil authorities if it is not required by local law. Promulgated in the wake of the McCarrick scandal, not one other bishop found guilty of abuse or cover-up has been defrocked or lost their title. Furthermore, the Vatican has not published records and findings from their investigations. 

• In 2019, Francis abolished the pontifical secret, a move that would allow the Vatican to share abuse documents with civil authorities and give victims updates on the status of their cases. Although it has been hailed as a major achievement in bringing about transparency surrounding sexual abuse and cover-up in the church, it has not changed the Vatican practice of withholding critical documents and evidence from investigations of abuse.  

• On February 22nd, the Dicastery for Legislative Texts published a September 2024 letter that instructed dioceses to avoid publishing lists of credibly accused clerics calling Francis’ own statement on the matter its "indispensable legal basis.” US Catholic dioceses and religious orders, each setting their own standard for publication, have largely made these disclosures in the wake of Pennsylvania’s Grand Jury report that named more than 300 abusive priests. Citing canon law prohibiting “slander,” especially that against deceased clergy, and claiming determinations of credibility “require a relatively low standard of proof,” the dicastery neglects that bishops make these determinations based on their own records, in many cases, records that include an admission of guilt by the accused clergy. 

• Since 2014, when Francis formed the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors as an advisory group, it has received consistent criticism for being ineffective and refusing to implement its recommendations - leading many of its own members to resign in protest. In the 11 years since its formation, the commission has only released a single report. Despite claims of its independence, in 2022, the commission was placed under the authority of the DDF, a Vatican office with a history of consistently covering up abuse that is currently led by Cardinal Fernández who has a history of covering up abuse. Their memorandum of understanding does not include measures for ensuring that abuse cases are handled properly or any powers to enforce this within the dicastery. 

 

The abuse and cover-up system is still fully intact, and despite continual exposure by abuse survivors and advocates, the Vatican allows bishops and religious order provincials to keep known abusers in ministry, transfers them to new parishes (and frequently, new countries), intimidates survivors into silence, and uses the full extent of their political and social power around the world to suppress outside intervention at any cost, withholding and destroying abuse-related documents and evidence and lobbying against any law that could empower survivors in the fight for accountability and reparations for what they have suffered. 

 

The failure of the last conclave

 

Through four decades of continuous exposure to sexual abuse by clerics and its concealment by the Catholic hierarchy, three popes have led the global Catholic Church. There is documented proof that Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis have all enabled abuse by covering up for offenders and allowing them to remain in ministry. 

The next pope must not have a history of concealing abuse. 

Pope Francis has never possessed the credibility to lead the global Catholic Church through a truly transformative era in terms of the Vatican’s management of sexual abuse cases because of his record on this issue in Argentina. 

 

Then Cardinal Bergoglio stated in a book of interviews published in 2010, “In my diocese, it never happened to me, but a bishop called me once by phone to ask me what to do in a situation like this and I told him to take away the priest’s faculties, not to permit him to exercise his priestly ministry again, and to initiate a canonical trial.”

However, the pope’s record, uncovered through the testimony of Argentine victims and their families, made public by Argentine media, and thoroughly researched and compiled by BishopAccountability.org, demonstrates that he indeed dealt with cases of abuse and did not follow the steps he prescribed in the interview. 

• After Fr. Julio César Grassi’s 2009 conviction for assaulting a boy from the Fundacion Felices los Niños (the Happy Children Foundation), a rescue mission for street children, Bergoglio, then president of the Episcopal Conference of Argentina, hired a criminal law scholar to prepare a two-volume book intended to exonerate Grassi, claiming that no such abuse occurred - even going as far as to compare Grassi’s trial to witch trials of the Middle Ages. The book was distributed to Supreme Court judges in Buenos Aires in an attempt to exert pressure during Grassi’s appeal process. It is believed Bergoglio’s intervention kept Grassi out of prison for four years following his conviction. 

• When the mother of a 15-year-old boy who was assaulted by Fr. Rubén Pardo in 2002 met with Bishop Stöckler of Quilmes for the second time, he told her Pardo had admitted to the abuse and had been sent out of the diocese without any report to civil authorities. When the mother learned Pardo had AIDS, she tried to report Pardo to an inter-diocesan ecclesiastical court in Buenos Aires. She then went to the Metropolitan Curia, Bergoglio’s former residence, to attempt to meet with him and was escorted off the premises by security. Soon after, the mother learned Pardo had been assigned to live in a vicarage owned by the Office of the Archbishop of Buenos Aires and presided over by Bergoglio, where Pardo heard children’s confessions and taught at a primary school.

• In 2000, Br. Fernando Enrique Picciochi, S.M., was criminally charged with repeated “corruption of minors.” Though Picciochi was placed in protective custody, he managed to escape Argentina and flee to the United States. One of Picciochi’s victims sought the help of Bergoglio in lifting the gag order imposed by the Marianists, meeting twice with Auxiliary Bishop of Buenos Aires Mario Poli. Poli soon after ceased contact with the victim, and Picciochi was not extradited to Argentina until 2010. Poli was named Bergoglio’s successor as Archbishop of Buenos Aires and made a cardinal in 2014. 

• Though Rev. Mario Napoleón Sasso had been instructed to have no contact with children after his release from a church-run treatment center for pedophilia, in 2001, Bishop Rey assigned him to work at an impoverished parish in Pilar where he sexually assaulted at least five young girls. Although a woman from the parish soup kitchen had notified Bishop Rey and other church officials, Sasso wasn’t arrested until the woman took the case to law enforcement. In 2006, when families of the victims asked to meet with Bergoglio, then president of the Argentine Bishops conference, he did not respond.

• In 2001, the parents of two young girls filed a criminal case against Rev. Carlos Maria Guana, a diocesan priest under the direct supervision of Bergoglio, for sexual assault. A church spokesperson stated, “This individual has many years of priesthood and never was there a complaint,” but promised that the matter would be handled by Bergoglio. Research by Bishop Accountability demonstrated that as of 2017, Guana had still been in active ministry, having served as a deacon and hospital chaplain, indicating Guana may have been demoted by Bergoglio, rather than removed from ministry. 

​

When the Catholic cardinals of the world inevitably gather in Rome to select the next pope, the new pontiff will have no credibility with survivors if he has a history of having enabled sexual abuse by concealing it from the public and allowing perpetrators to remain in ministry in any capacity.

The conclave must select a leader who is prepared to enact a binding and universal zero-tolerance law on day one - a law that immediately removes all abusers from ministry, mandates transparency, and includes independent oversight of bishops to ensure compliance.

​

Survivors terrified of repeating history

The pope cannot completely prevent abuse from occurring, but he is the one with the primary authority and responsibility to ensure that it is not covered up. This is only possible if there is a universal zero-tolerance law within the church that is binding across the globe.

SNAP President Shaun Dougherty said, “As we await the eventual passing of one pope and the election of another, the bishops of the world—including the 138 who will choose the new pope—collectively possess knowledge of thousands of priest offenders serving in parishes and schools around the world. A true zero tolerance policy would require these bishops to remove these offenders from ministry immediately, preventing them from committing further abuse.”

The best way to stop the next sexual assault of a child is to intervene before it occurs.

If Pope Francis survives his current health crisis, he may have a final chance to do what justice requires of him.

If he does not do this, his successor must.

​