Survivors Urge Cardinals to Discuss Sex Abuse Crisis in Choosing Next Pope

Cardinals are not the only ones who have arrived in Rome for the conclave to pick Pope Francis’ successor.

Since Francis’ death last month, survivors of sexual abuse and those who monitor the Roman Catholic Church’s handling of abuse cases have also arrived, hoping to persuade cardinals to make the issue a priority when considering who should next be pope.

“I think it’s very important to remind them that we will not go away,” said Matthias Katsch, a Berlin-based board member of Ending Clergy Abuse, an advocacy group that represents survivors from 20 countries.

Matteo Bruni, the Vatican spokesman, said on Friday that during pre-conclave meetings this past week the cardinals had discussed sexual abuse in the church, and considered it a “wound to be kept open” so that awareness of the problem remained alive and concrete paths for healing can be identified.

When Francis was elected in 2013, he inherited a church profoundly unsettled by the clerical sex abuse crisis, which had damaged its reputation and in some places was depleting its pews. Twelve years later, critics describe his legacy on the issue as mixed.

Francis is credited with taking some steps that were decidedly stronger than those of his two predecessors, who caught the first wave of outrage when the clergy abuse scandal exploded. But Francis stumbled, too, and clerical abuse remains a ruinous issue that his successor will inherit.

When Francis summoned the world’s bishops to the Vatican in 2019 for an unprecedented meeting that sought to make the protection of children a global priority, it was a sign that the Vatican was finally treating clerical sexual abuse as a global crisis rather than the failing of any particular country or culture. He also met face-to-face with survivors on many of his international trips to signal that the church was aware of their pain.

He issued and then broadened the church’s most comprehensive law to confront the crisis to hold clerics, from seminarians to cardinals, accountable if they sexually abused children, minors or vulnerable adults, or covered up abuse.

However, he disappointed many abuse survivors and their advocates by not requiring that cases be reported to the civil authorities or made public. Full transparency is essential if the church is going to be taken seriously in its actions, they say.

Accounts of clerical abuse and cover-ups continue to emerge — from individual cases to as many as hundreds listed in reports commissioned by national bishops’ conferences.

Critics say that the main obstacles to eradicating the scourge are inside the church itself, both at a local level and within the Vatican hierarchy.

“In many countries in the non-Western world, abuse is still looked on as the Western problem,” said Marie Collins, a former member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, which Francis set up in 2013 to advise him on the issue of clerical sex abuse. At the time, the creation of such a group was seen as a forceful sign that Francis was aware of the impact of the abuse crisis on the faithful.

But Ms. Collins, an Irish survivor of sexual abuse, recalled how the commission faced roadblocks. It was underfunded and understaffed, she said, and Vatican officials were reluctant to interact with commission members.

“There are very strong forces in the church, not just in the Vatican, that are still of the traditional view that can’t confront this issue because it destroys the reputation of the church,” she said. “It’s clericalism at its worst,” she added, referring to the dynamic — often denounced by Francis — of clergy regarding themselves as superior to and isolated from their flock.

Ms. Collins quit the commission in 2017, citing “cultural resistance” from the Vatican.

The Rev. Hans Zollner, a German Jesuit who is an expert on the church’s anti-abuse efforts, said in a telephone interview that the church had “come a long way” under Francis in dealing with the sexual abuse of children, through new guidelines and “changes and integration into general canon law.”

But the church has not uniformly embraced the changes, and the rules are “applied in some places, but not in all,” said Father Zollner, who quit the commission in 2023.

Cardinals meeting before the conclave begins should also be aware of and “address possible concerns when it comes to candidates” for the papacy, he said.

Survivors’ groups say that in the pre-conclave meetings, the cardinals should be blunt and demand a yes-or-no answer to the question “Will you enact a true universal zero-tolerance law?” — the “one strike and you’re out” policy that advocacy groups demand.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, a group known as SNAP, says that the cardinals should also be aware of how each papal candidate has dealt with abuse allegations. Last month, the organization launched Conclave Watch, a project that scrutinizes how some cardinals handled abuse cases.

The organization has assembled dossiers calling for the Vatican to investigate the records of 20 cardinals, including some frequently cited papal contenders. The list also includes cardinals who are not widely regarded as candidates, but whose handling of abuse cases has received media attention, especially in the United States.

Any cardinal who “mismanaged or covered up for sex crimes, he shouldn’t be the pope,” Peter Isely, a SNAP leader from Milwaukee, told a news conference in Rome on Wednesday. “This seems like reasonable and relevant criteria that should be the priority” for voting cardinals, he said.

None of the cardinals who have been publicly accused of mishandling cases have spoken to representatives of the survivors groups to address the allegations.

Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, an archive and advocacy group, said the church’s reassurances that it is paying attention to the issue had been “seriously undermined” by the presence at the cardinals meetings of a Peruvian cardinal, Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, on whom Francis had imposed sanctions in 2019 after an accusation of sexual abuse — which the cardinal has denied.

“It sent a terrible message,” said Ms. Barrett Doyle.

The Vatican has declined to respond to questions about whether the cardinal should have been present at the meeting. At 81, he is not eligible to vote in the conclave.

“Is abuse taken seriously?” asked Ms. Barrett Doyle. “I just can’t tell. I don’t know if it’s still just pretend for them, P.R. for them or if they really feel shook up by it.”