Survivors of clerical sexual abuse denounced Francis' cover-up
By La Izquierda Diario, April 22, 2025
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests mentions in its statement the abuses at Provolo in Argentina and Francis' cover-up.
The US-based SNAP organization, made up of survivors of sexual abuse by priests, issued a statement Monday stating that "due to his history of covering up abuse in Argentina, Francis never had the credibility necessary to review the Vatican's handling of sexual abuse cases" and that, in anticipation of the new Conclave, "we do not need another pope who has covered up sexual crimes."
In a statement issued this Monday, members of SNAP (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests) affirmed that "we do not need another pope who has covered up sexual crimes," referring to the pontiff who must be chosen to replace the deceased Argentine.
SNAP is an international umbrella organization for victims of sexual abuse by clergy. This is a key problem within the Church. This scourge, which primarily affects children and adolescents, became a matter of open public discussion two decades ago, following the events in Boston, which were depicted in the film "Spotlight" (2015). Since then, accusations and criticism of the actions of the Church leadership have intensified.
Commenting on the pope's death, Peter Isely, one of the founders of SNAP , said, "This is the third pope in the modern era since this matter became public knowledge… thanks to survivors decades ago." He added, "Each of those popes, including Francis, covered up sexual crimes before becoming pope. I'm not speculating. This is demonstrable and proven. Unfortunately, we only learned about it after they became pope."
Isely also stated that "Francis began his papacy promising us and the world that he would end clerical abuse and cover-up. If we had known then what we know now—that he himself covered up sexual crimes in Argentina before he became pope and that, for twelve years, he failed to exercise his authority to implement a universal zero-tolerance policy—we would have had a very different view. That's why we launched Conclave Watch: to make sure that survivors and the public know exactly who these papal hopefuls are, what they've done, and whether they can ultimately be trusted to deliver on the promises of reform that Francis broke."
SNAP launched "Conclave Watch ," a database tracking Catholic cardinals' records in handling abuse cases, he said. "We don't need another pope who has covered up sexual crimes," he said. "I don't know how the Church can survive morally if we involve a fourth papacy in this . "
In a statement released Monday by SNAP, they noted that "The next Pope must do what Francis refused to do: enact a universal zero-tolerance law on abuse and cover-up."
Among the points that detail the next papacy are:
The next pope must institute a zero-tolerance law on sexual abuse that immediately removes abusive clerics and leaders who have covered it up from ministry and requires independent oversight of bishops. He must exercise his authority to enact fundamental institutional changes that end the systematic practice of sexual abuse and its concealment.
The next Pope must have no history of covering up sexual abuse.
Because of his history of covering up abuse in Argentina, Francis never had the credibility to review the Vatican's handling of sexual abuse cases.
None of Francis's reforms or initiatives have produced a truly "zero tolerance" for abuse or ended the culture of extreme secrecy and control that enables it.
SNAP has launched Conclave Watch (ConclaveWatch.org), a project designed to vet Catholic cardinals according to our established criteria.
Thou Shalt Not Abuse .
A 2017 documentary by La Izquierda Diario about abuse within the Church.
We publish the SNAP statement below.
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 requiring universal zero tolerance for sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Twelve years later, in the face of continued revelations of sexual abuse and cover-ups from around the world, there is still no law requiring universal zero tolerance for sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.
Pope Francis attempted to rewrite history. In 2019, the pontiff told CNN Portugal that the Catholic Church had "zero tolerance" and that he was "responsible for this not happening again." Responding to media questions about abuse in 2022, Francis said, "Now everything is transparent." Recent history proves this to be unequivocally false.
Years after allegations of serial sexual and spiritual abuse against Slovenian priest Marko Rupnik became public and after his 2020 defrocking 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 received into ministry in the Diocese of Koper in 2023. More than a year after public outrage finally pressured the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) to investigate Rupnik’s case, Rupnik is still free to exercise his ministry while victims feel “betrayed” by the Vatican’s delay and lack of transparency.
Following the harsh criticism of Bishop Rosario Gisana in 2021, when Italian media reported on a police-intercepted call in which he told the now-convicted priest Father Giuseppe Rugolo, “The problem is mine too, because I buried this story,” Francis went out of his way to praise Gisana in 2023, saying, “He was persecuted, slandered, but he remained steadfast, always, just, a just man.” Only in January of this year, after a prosecutor ordered Gisana to stand trial for false testimony in the Rugolo case, did the Vatican send an apostolic visitor (another Italian bishop) to Sicily to assess the allegations.
Abuse survivors and their advocates were stunned when Francis appointed Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez as head of the DDF in July 2023. In his recent history, Fernandez had mishandled serious sexual abuse cases in three instances, most notably that of Eduardo Lorenzo, whom Fernandez supported by posting 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’s, called on the pope to remove Fernandez from the DDF and rescind his promotion to cardinal, Francis instead chose to urge Fernandez to focus on doctrinal matters , leaving abuse cases, which typically comprise 80% of the DDF’s work , to “competent professionals.”
Responding to media questions about the DDF's delay in resolving the case against Father Rupnik, Cardinal Fernandez said earlier this year : "I'm thinking 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 letters from victims in 2013 and 2014 and in person in 2015?
What has changed since Francis admitted to having made a “grave error” 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 revelations of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s long history of abuse?
Not much, apparently.
The failure of Francis' reforms
A false impression has been created that the reforms instituted by Pope Francis are sufficient to address the current catastrophe of sexual abuse and its institutional concealment in the Catholic Church.
Francis's landmark clergy abuse law, Vos Estis Lux Mundi, has been presented as a sweeping overhaul of how the Vatican holds bishops and religious superiors accountable for their handling of sexual abuse cases. Cardinal Blase Cupich called it "revolutionary ." Vos Estis is a half-measure that leaves the investigation of bishops to their fellow bishops, with no obligation to inform the public or notify civil authorities unless required by local law. Enacted in the wake of the McCarrick scandal, no other bishop found guilty of abuse or cover-up has been removed or lost his title. Moreover, the Vatican has not made public the records or findings of its investigations.
In 2019, Francis abolished the pontifical secret , a measure that would have allowed the Vatican to share documents about abuse with civil authorities and keep victims updated on the status of their cases. While hailed as a major achievement in transparency surrounding sexual abuse and cover-ups in the Church, it has not changed the Vatican's practice of withholding crucial documents and evidence from abuse investigations.
On February 22, the Dicastery for Legislative Texts published a September 2024 letter instructing dioceses to avoid publishing lists of clerics with credible accusations, considering Francis's own statement on the matter as their "indispensable legal basis." Catholic dioceses and religious orders in the United States, each with its own publication criteria, have made these disclosures largely in the wake of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report, which named more than 300 abusive priests. Citing canon law that prohibits "calumny," especially against deceased clerics, and claiming that credibility determinations "require a relatively low standard of proof," the dicastery ignores 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 faced constant criticism for its ineffectiveness and refusal 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 published a single report . Despite claims of its independence , in 2022, the commission came under the authority of the DDF, a Vatican office with a history of consistently covering up abuse that is currently headed by Cardinal Fernandez, who also has a history of covering up abuse. Their memorandum of understanding does not include measures to ensure abuse cases are properly handled or any powers to enforce this within the dicastery.
The system of abuse and cover-up remains fully intact, and despite continued exposure by abuse survivors and their advocates, the Vatican allows bishops and provincials of religious orders to keep known abusers in ministry, transfers them to new parishes (and often, new countries), intimidates survivors into silence, and uses the full extent of its political and social power around the world to suppress outside intervention at all costs, withholding and destroying documents and evidence related to the abuse and lobbying against any law that might empower survivors to fight for accountability and reparations for what they have suffered.
The failure of the last conclave
Over four decades of continuous exposure to clerical sexual abuse and its concealment by the Catholic hierarchy, three popes have led the global Catholic Church. There is documented evidence that Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis have facilitated the abuse by covering up for abusers and allowing them to continue in ministry.
The next Pope must not have a history of covering up abuse.
Pope Francis never had the credibility to lead the global Catholic Church through a truly transformative era in terms of the Vatican's handling of sexual abuse cases because of his record on the issue in Argentina.
Cardinal Bergoglio then declared in a book of interviews published in 2010 : “It never happened to me in my diocese, but a bishop once called me to ask what to do in a situation like this, and I told him to remove the priest’s faculties, not allow 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 the Argentine media, and exhaustively researched and compiled by BishopAccountability.org, demonstrates that he did indeed address abuse cases and failed to follow the steps prescribed in the interview.
Following Julio César Grassi's 2009 conviction for assaulting a boy from the Felices los Niños Foundation, a rescue mission for street children, Bergoglio, then president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference, hired a criminal law expert to prepare a two-volume book seeking to exonerate Grassi, claiming that no such abuse occurred , even going so far as to compare Grassi's trial to the witch trials of the Middle Ages. The book was distributed to the judges of the Buenos Aires Supreme Court to apply pressure during Grassi's appeals process. Bergoglio's intervention is believed to have kept Grassi out of prison for four years after his conviction.
When the mother of a 15-year-old boy assaulted by Rubén Pardo in 2002 met with Bishop Stöckler of Quilmes for a second time, he told her that Pardo had admitted to the abuse and had been removed from the diocese without informing civil authorities. When the mother learned that Pardo had AIDS, she attempted to report him to an interdiocesan church tribunal in Buenos Aires. She then went to the Metropolitan Curia, Bergoglio's former residence, to try to meet with him and was escorted away by security . Shortly thereafter, the mother learned that Pardo had been assigned to live in a vicarage owned by the Buenos Aires Archbishop's Office and presided over by Bergoglio, where Pardo heard children's confessions and taught at an elementary school .
In 2000, Fernando Enrique Picciochi, SM , was criminally charged with repeated "corruption of minors." Although Picciochi was taken into protective custody, he managed to escape Argentina and flee to the United States . One of Picciochi's victims sought Bergoglio's help in lifting the Marianist censure order, meeting twice with the auxiliary bishop of Buenos Aires, Mario Poli . Shortly thereafter, Poli broke off 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 cardinal in 2014.
Although Mario Napoleon Sasso had been instructed not to have contact with minors after his release from a Church-run pedophilia treatment center , in 2001 Bishop Rey assigned him to work at a low-income parish in Pilar, where he sexually assaulted at least five girls . Although a woman at the parish soup kitchen notified Bishop Rey and other church officials, Sasso was not arrested until the woman brought the case to the police. In 2006, when victims' relatives asked to meet with Bergoglio , then president of the Argentine Bishops' Conference, he did not respond.
In 2001, the parents of two girls filed a criminal complaint against Carlos María Guana , a diocesan priest under Bergoglio's direct supervision, for sexual assault. A church spokesperson stated, "This individual has many years of priesthood, and there has never been a complaint," but promised that Bergoglio would handle the matter. A Bishop Accountability investigation showed that, as of 2017, Guana was still exercising ministry, having served as a deacon and hospital chaplain, indicating that Bergoglio may have demoted him rather than removed him.
When white smoke rises from the Sistine Chapel, the new pontiff will have no credibility with survivors if he has a history of condoning sexual abuse by hiding 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, universal zero-tolerance law from day one: a law that immediately removes all abusers from ministry, requires transparency, and includes independent oversight by bishops to ensure compliance.
Survivors fear history repeating itself
While no pope can prevent all cases of abuse, the pope has the primary authority—and the moral responsibility—to ensure that abuse is not covered up and that abusers have no place in ministry. This is only possible if there is a universal zero-tolerance law within the Church, applicable worldwide.
In preparation for Pope Francis’ passing and the upcoming conclave, SNAP launched Conclave Watch last month , a new initiative demanding that the next pope have a record of no abuse cover-ups and a demonstrated commitment to zero tolerance. Conclave Watch rigorously evaluates papal candidates based on their handling of abuse cases, with the goal of ensuring the next pontiff has the credibility to lead the Catholic Church into an abuse-free future.
SNAP President Shaun Dougherty stated, “The world’s bishops, including the 137 cardinals who will elect the next pope, collectively know of thousands of abusive priests still serving in parishes and schools. A true zero-tolerance policy would involve immediately removing these abusers and holding bishops accountable to keep them in ministry. That’s why we launched Conclave Watch: to ensure the next pope is someone who has never participated in the cover-up. We cannot afford another papacy that makes promises but offers no real protection for children or justice for survivors.”