Catholic Church must do more to help sexual abuse survivors and hold church leaders to account, hard-hitting report says

By Christopher Lamb, CNN

(CNN) — A Vatican commission for the protection of children has said the mishandling by the Catholic Church’s leaders of sexual abuse allegations involving clergy is causing “ongoing harm” to victims, in a hard-hitting report released Thursday.

The report also called out parts of Italy and Africa for failing to implement robust anti-abuse measures.

The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, which released its second annual report on October 16 called for greater transparency from the Vatican and noted with “concern” that survivors often perceive the church’s central administration as “lacking in sensitivity.”

The report is the first to be released since the election of Pope Leo XIV and it sets out the scale of the challenge for the American pope in tackling the scourge of sexual abuse of children and vulnerable people inside the Catholic Church. His predecessor, Pope Francis, took some important steps to tackle the abuse crisis but experts and survivors have said he could have gone further.

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

Instead, the report calls for the Church to offer “reparations” for damage done by abuse, including psychological and financial support, sensitive listening to survivors, public and private apologies and reforms to how abuse is handled.

It includes scathing statements from survivors, who describe “denial and dismissal” from church authorities and even “disturbing accounts of retaliation” taken by bishops and other leaders when victims came forward. Survivors also talked about a “lack of psychological care” for those affected and “strong resistance to safeguarding reforms” in churches at the grassroots level. A “lack of accountability” from the hierarchy was frequently cited as an issue.

“Figures of authority within the Church who perpetrate or enable abuse have perhaps viewed themselves as too essential and important to be held accountable. The Church’s response to abuse should not repeat the same mistakes,” the report states.

On accountability, the commission calls on the Vatican to start communicating the reason for a bishop’s resignation or removal if this is related to “cases of abuse or negligence.” The current practice is for the Vatican to simply announce when a bishop has resigned without elaborating.

The commission is led by French archbishop Thibault Verny and includes a mixture of church leaders and experts, among them Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, a Dutch lawyer and former UN Special Rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children who led the compilation of the report.

The 200-page document provides an assessment on how churches in various parts of the world are dealing with abuse, including on the pope’s doorstep in Italy. Catholic groups and victims have long argued that the Catholic Church in Italy has yet to face up to abuse scandals and needs to entrust this to an independent body.

n its report, the pontifical commission highlights failures in the Italian church. While it cites “significant progress” on child protection, it warns that “substantial cultural resistance in Italy to addressing abuse” remains. Pointedly, it said it “regrets” that significant portions of the church leadership have not even met with the Vatican’s abuse commission and that several dioceses did not provide information to the commission about their safeguarding work.

Meanwhile, in Africa, protocols for dealing with abuse were frequently found to be severely lacking, the commission said. In Equatorial Guinea, the report said, it could not find “any mention of procedures for receiving complaints” and in Ethiopia it cited “resistance” from leaders to take “direct responsibility” for abuse. Meanwhile in Kenya, the report added, bishops in the country said “cultural taboos make reporting very difficult for victims/survivors.”

The commission also calls on the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization, a department which deals with churches in the developing world, to invest more in the drawing up of anti-abuse policies, noting a “lack of sufficient resources” when it comes to vetting the safeguarding records of candidates to become bishops.

The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors was established by Pope Francis in 2014 and in 2022 he asked them to draw up an annual report on how the church was dealing with abuse and safeguarding. The first report was published last year.

Since his election on May 8, Leo XIV has said it is “urgent to ingrain throughout the Church a culture of prevention that does not tolerate any form of abuse,” while praising journalists for uncovering abuse scandals.

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