How Pope Francis did — and didn’t — address the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis
By Ian Prasad Philbrick, Boston Globe, April 21, 2025
Pope Francis attends a ceremony at the Karatepe refugee camp on the Aegean island of Lesbos, Greece, Dec. 5, 2021. (Alessandra Tarantino/Associated Press)
Francis, who died yesterday, did more than past popes. But he didn’t do nearly enough, some victims’ advocates say.
Pope Francis, who died yesterday at 88, never visited Boston. But he was a presence in the city throughout his 12-year papacy in part because of how he approached the problem of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy — a crisis that rocked the Boston Archdiocese.
In some ways, Francis was an innovator. He apologized to victims and enacted policies meant to catch abusive priests. Yet his limited reforms disappointed many, and he sometimes doubted victims’ stories or sided with the accused.
Francis’s death has left people who hold both perspectives mourning. Some who think he made progress on clerical abuse note that the next pope may not continue it. And those who think he did too little lament his papacy as a missed opportunity to do victims justice. Today’s newsletter explains.
Beyond his predecessors
In March 2013, one day before Francis became pope, James Carroll, a former priest and columnist for this newspaper, compared the church’s sex abuse crisis to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown.
The crisis, he wrote, was “spreading radioactive moral ruin.” And if the scandal was Chernobyl, Boston was its festering core. In a now-famous series in the early 2000s, the Globe’s Spotlight team had uncovered hundreds of victims in the area who were abused as children, and church officials’ systematic efforts to conceal that abuse. Journalists, lawyers, and victims’ rights groups later found victims in scores of cities and countries.
Francis wasn’t the first pope to act on those revelations. In 2002, John Paul II accepted the resignation of Bernard Law, the Boston archbishop who failed to oust priests he knew were abusing children. Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, defrocked hundreds of accused priests.
Yet Francis, with his liberal-reformist reputation, seemed to promise tougher action. In some ways, he delivered. He convened a first-of-its-kind summit during which bishops learned how to investigate abusive priests, required clergy to report allegations, and created a Vatican office to discipline abusers. Francis also defrocked Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the highest-ranking church official expelled for sex abuse.
Many remembrances of Francis have focused on his empathy — for migrants, Palestinians, people of other faiths, and more. At times he seemed to approach abuse victims in the same spirit. During a 2018 visit to Chile, Francis apologized to victims and pledged to support them “as we take steps to ensure that this never happens again.”
“It sounds trivial to say, but his heart was in the right place,” said Francis X. Clooney, a Jesuit priest and professor at Harvard Divinity School who likened the pope’s reforms on sex abuse — though imperfect — to his other efforts to make the clergy more welcoming, more diverse, and less doctrinaire. “And he was also trying to change the church to get the church’s heart in the right place.”
Not enough, advocates say
Francis’s reforms weren’t sufficiently expansive or enforced, argues Sarah Pearson, a spokeswoman for the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP.
Francis required clergy to report abuse — but to church higher-ups, who could have conflicts of interest, not to police. And while US priests can be removed for even a single act of abuse, Francis didn’t push to make that zero-tolerance policy a global edict.
There’s also Francis’s own history. While serving in Argentina as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the future pope commissioned a report that concluded that a convicted priest was innocent, even though the country’s top court later upheld the conviction. Francis also met with Law, the disgraced former Boston cardinal, shortly after becoming pope.
Like Francis’s waffling remarks on gay people last year, his impulses have sometimes conflicted. Returning from Chile in 2018, he seemed to cast doubt on abuse victims’ claims, defending a bishop whom many Chilean Catholics accuse of protecting a pedophile priest. Francis later apologized but repeated his defense, calling the bishop “innocent.”
Who’s next?
Francis appointed most of the cardinals who will meet in the coming days to elect his successor. Several contenders would likely continue Francis’s approach to many of the issues facing the church. But others could tack in a more conservative direction.
“I don’t think there’s any guarantee that the next pope is going to be exactly in the line of Francis, or more progressive than Francis, or do the things Francis didn’t,” said Clooney, of Harvard.
Pearson wants to ensure they do. She and other victims’ advocates from SNAP will travel to Rome today to urge cardinals to pick someone who will prioritize accountability for abusers. SNAP has launched Conclave Watch, a database that tracks possible successors’ records on sex abuse.
When I asked what her goal was, Pearson told me about Beatriz Varela, an Argentine mother who alleged that a local priest abused her son in 2002. When Varela went to confront Cardinal Bergoglio — the future Francis — she says his staff threw her out.
“How did she feel when she first saw the news that this person, whose office she had been escorted out of by security, was now the head of the Catholic Church?” Pearson said. “In a month or so, most likely, there’s going to be another pope. And what we want to avoid is somebody else reading the news of who that person is and feeling the same way that that mother felt.”