One of the most pressing issues facing Pope Leo XIV is tackling sexual abuse by clergy in the Catholic Church – and campaigners say he has a mixed record.
Two victims’ rights groups, SNAP and Bishop Accountability, issued statements following his election as the first pope from the United States on Thursday, questioning the 69-year-old’s commitment to lifting the lid on the scourge.
As head of the Augustinian order worldwide and then as bishop of the Peruvian diocese of Chiclayo between 2015 and 2023, “he released no names of abusers,” Bishop Accountability’s Anne Barrett Doyle alleged.
The same was true of his two years as head of the powerful Dicastery for Bishops, a key Vatican department that advised Pope Francis on the appointment of bishops, she said.
“Prevost oversaw cases filed… against bishops accused of sexual abuse and of cover-up. He maintained the secrecy of that process, releasing no names and no data,” Barrett Doyle added.
“Under his watch, no complicit bishop was stripped of his title.”
“Most disturbing is an allegation from victims in his former diocese in Peru that he never opened a canonical case into alleged sexual abuse carried out by two priests,” she added.
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), for its part, said that when Leo was bishop of Chiclayo, three victims reported their accusations to the diocese but nothing happened.
The trio went to the civil authorities in 2022.
“Victims have since claimed Prevost failed to open an investigation, sent inadequate information to Rome, and that the diocese allowed the priest to continue saying mass,” the group said.
As provincial head of the Augustinians in the Chicago area, SNAP added, the future pope also allowed a priest accused of abusing minors to live in an Augustinian friary near a school in the city in 2000.
‘Opened the way’
Yet Bishop Accountability also highlighted positive reports of Leo’s role in exposing the scandal of abuse and corruption against Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (SCV), an ultra-conservative lay congregation in Peru dissolved by Francis this year.
Survivor Pedro Salinas – a journalist who wrote an expose against the group – last month included Prevost among five bishops who played an “extremely important role… on behalf of the victims.”
That case “gives us reasons to hope,” Barrett Doyle said, adding: “We pray we see more of this decisive action by Prevost when he is pope.”
On Thursday, the head of the Peruvian Bishop’s Conference, Carlos Garcia Camader, also defended the new pope’s record.
As bishop, he “opened the way here in Peru to listen to the victims, to organise the truth commission” in the SCV scandal.
First accusations of abuse emerged in the early 2000s, but the case exploded in 2015 with a book citing victims that detailed “physical, psychological, and sexual abuse” carried out by the movement’s leaders and founder, according to the Vatican’s official news outlet.
After a seven-year investigation, Pope Francis dissolved the group just weeks before he died, after expelling 10 members.
About 36 people, including 19 minors were abused, according to Vatican News.
In January, Prevost joined Francis in a meeting with Jose Enrique Escardo, one of the first victims to denounce the religious movement’s abuses.
“We reject the cover-up and secrecy, that does a lot of harm, because we have to help people who have suffered because of wrongdoing,” Prevost told Peruvian daily La Republica in an interview in June 2019.
