Report says clergy sex abuse victims need reparations to heal

Pope Leo XIV presides over a Rosary vigil for peace in St. Peter’s Square

The Vatican’s child protection board said yesterday the Catholic Church has a moral obligation to help victims of clergy sexual abuse heal, and identified financial reparations and sanctions for abusers and their enablers as essential remedies.

The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors focused on the issue of reparations in its second annual report. It’s an often sensitive topic for the church, given the financial, reputational and legal implications it imposes on the hierarchy.

The report was significant — an official Vatican publication prepared with the input of 40 abuse survivors from around the world and giving voice to their complaints of how badly the church had handled their cases, and their demands of what they need to heal.

It said monetary settlements were necessary to provide victims with needed therapy and other assistance to help them recover from the trauma of their abuse.

But it said the church owed a debt far greater to victims, the broader church community and God. The hierarchy must listen to victims and provide them with spiritual and pastoral help. Church leaders must apologize for the harm done, tell victims what they are doing to punish those who harmed them and what measures they are taking 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.

Leo signals commitment to commission

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, and that victims need more than financial reparations to heal.

He has signaled a commitment to the commission, which was created by Pope Francis in 2014 to advise the church on best practices to prevent abuse. In its first decade, the commission struggled to find its footing in a Vatican often resistant to confronting the abuse crisis and hostile to endorsing victim-focused policies.

But more recently, the commission has carved out its space in the Vatican bureaucracy and in July Leo named a new president, French Bishop Thibault Verny.

At a press conference launching the report, Verny said it was evidence of the commission’s belief that a culture of prevention in the church requires the active involvement of victims.

The report itself was prepared with victims in a focus group setting who listed priorities for their healing. They identified accountability for church leaders, information about their cases, true reform of church structures to adequately punish abusers and their enablers, and effective prevention strategies.

“The commission is committed to saying to victims and survivors: ‘We want to be by your side,’” Verny said.

A retraumatizing legal process

Significantly, the 2024 report said the church’s way of handling abuse cases internally, according to a secretive process that provides no tangible accountability, was itself retraumatizing for victims.

“We must re-emphasise that the church’s decades-long pattern of mishandling reports, including abandoning, ignoring, shaming, blaming, and stigmatizing victims/survivors, perpetuates the trauma as an ongoing harm,” it said.

It was a reference to the church’s dysfunctional way of dealing with abuse cases according to its in-house canonical code, where the most severe punishment meted out to a serial rapist priest amounts to being fired.

The process is cloaked in secrecy, such that victims have no rights to information about their case other than learning its outcome, which often comes after a yearslong wait. Victims have no real recourse other than going public with their story, which can be retraumatizing.

The report called for sanctions that were “tangible and commensurate with the severity of the crime.” While laicization is a possible outcome for priests who rape children, the church is often loathe to remove priests entirely. It frequently gives out lesser sanctions, such as a period of retreat away from active ministry for even gross cases of abuse.

Even when a bishop is removed for bungling cases, the public is only told that he has retired. The report called for the church to “clearly communicate reasons for resignation or removal.”

The report provided an audit of child protection policies and practices in over a dozen countries, as well as within two religious orders, a lay movement and one Vatican office.

The report found that the Vatican’s missionary evangelization office, which is responsible for the church in Africa, Asia and parts of the developing world, has the resources to handle abuse cases.

But it noted that only a “small number of cases” actually arrive in Rome, suggesting the church in Africa and Asia remains decades behind the West in reporting and handling abuse cases.

The report said the missionary office had only handled two cases of bishops who mishandled abuse cases, a staggeringly low number given the size of the territory involved. NICOLE WINFIELD, VATICAN CITY, MDT/AP