ROME (ITALY)
La Croix International [Montrouge Cedex, France]
November 21, 2024
By Massimo Faggioli
Signs of the times. The abuse crisis in the church continues unabated, with alarming news becoming the “new normal.” While progress is made in safeguarding, much remains to be done, including implementing a zero-tolerance policy and understanding the deep, ongoing consequences of abuse.
One of the most important news reports in the global and “ecumenical” history of the church abuse crisis received little attention in our ecclesial conversations. On November 12, Anglican Archbishop Justin Welby of Canterbury unexpectedly announced his resignation following the publication of the “Makin Report” and its revelations on the handling of John Smyth’s abuse of boys and young men in the 1970s and 1980s. The search will start soon to replace Welby, who is head of the Diocese of Canterbury, Primate of All England, a member of the House of Lords, and the spiritual leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion.
We have barely paid attention to this because the flow of news on the abuse crisis has become constant and a new normal in church life. These are just a few examples, divided in different categories, that made the news in less than 12 months, from January to the middle of November.
1. A few prominent examples at the ecumenical level
This past January, the Lutheran Church in Germany (EKD) published its own report of cases (very few, less than 10,000, according to the report) since 1946. In March, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded an 18-month investigation into whether Southern Baptist Convention leaders were criminally responsible for mishandling an abuse crisis, ultimately deciding not to file charges against the leaders of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
[Further reading: Sexual Abuse: ‘Lies, silence, and contempt for victims are unworthy of the church’]
On June 25, the meeting of the Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church addressed #78 on the agenda—allegations of abuse involving a young collaborator and financial corruption by Hilarion Alfeev, the metropolitan of Budapest and Hungary, who was, until June 2022, one of the closest advisors to the Patriarch of Moscow. Alfeev was temporarily removed from his post pending the conclusions of a commission charged with investigating the situation in the Russian Orthodox diocese.
On November 18, the highest court in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) upheld Nashville pastor Ian Sears’ dismissal from ministry following disciplinary action over sexual misconduct allegations.
2. In local Catholic churches around the world
On February 22, in Australia, Bishop Christopher Saunders of Broome was arrested and released on bail. He was accused of sexual crimes against young men, mostly indigenous, between 2008 and 2014.
In March 2024, Belgium’s Bishop Roger Vangheluwe was reportedly laicized by the Vatican for committing sexual abuse on minors, including two of his nephews — things he admitted at different times several years apart.
On April 30, the Durham University Center for Catholic Studies published the report “The Cross of the Moment” (on England and Wales).
On June 14, following a report of the Washington Post, at the plenary assembly of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the prelates offered their apologies for the maltreatment of minors in the boarding schools for “Indigenous Catholics” run by the Catholic Church.
[Further reading: The sex abuse crisis and the future of the Catholic Church]
In October, the Archdiocese of Los Angeles reached a tentative agreement of $880 million to settle more than 1,000 decades-old claims of childhood sexual abuse. According to experts, the settlement is the highest single payout by an archdiocese and brings Los Angeles’ cumulative payout in sex abuse lawsuits to more than $1.5 billion.
On October 21, a public act of recognition and reparation for victims of abuse in the church took place at the portico of Almudena Cathedral in Madrid. The initiative, promoted by the Catholic Church in Madrid, was announced by its archbishop, Cardinal José Cobo, at the closing of the First International Jordan Congress, organized by the Society of Jesus, which focused on the abuse of power in the church.
3. In the Vatican
On January 30, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith insisted that the definition of “vulnerable adult” include “broader cases than the competence of the DDF, which remains limited, in addition to minors under 18 years of age, to those who habitually have an imperfect use of reason. Therefore, the other cases outside of these cases are dealt with by the competent Dicasteries”. It was the reaffirmation that the DDF has no jurisdiction over anything other than sexual abuse of minors (and the mentally disabled).
On February 21, just steps from the Vatican in Rome, Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, held a press conference to denounce the cover-up of the case involving Father Marko Rupnik, the former Jesuit and artist accused of abuse by at least 20 people.
On June 26, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, issued a statement calling for “pastoral prudence” regarding the dissemination by Vatican offices of artwork by Father Marko Rupnik. This statement came a few days after the prefect of the Vatican Dicastery for Communication, Paolo Ruffini, in a press conference in the United States, defended the choice to continue to use images of Rupnik by Vatican media.
In July 2024, the Knights of Columbus announced the conclusion of a careful and thorough process to review the display of mosaic artwork by Rupnik in worship spaces in Washington, D.C., and New Haven, Connecticut.
[Further reading: Catholic Church’s struggle with abuse crisis reforms]
October 2024 marked the expiration of the one-year deadline set by the decree of the Dicastery for Consecrated Life on October 20, 2023, for Pontifical Delegate Father Amedeo Cencini to implement the dissolution of the Loyola community. The community was co-founded in 1982 by Ivanka Hosta, who was responsible for abuses of power and spirituality as well as tyrannical governance, and by the now-former Jesuit Father Marko Rupnik, who is currently undergoing a canonical trial for sexual abuse.
In April 2024, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors published ten guidelines, divided into criteria and indicators to follow, which were approved at the end of the plenary session in March 2024. On October 17, a statement released by the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors said the body looked ahead to the pilot Annual Report and to strengthening ties with the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
On October 29, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors called for victims of clergy sexual abuse to have greater access to information about their cases and the right to compensation in the first-ever global assessment of the Catholic Church’s efforts to address the crisis. In its annual pilot report on the church in several countries, two religious orders, one charitable agency, and two Vatican offices, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (whose role and status in Rome remain unclear and is still presided over by Cardinal Sean O’Malley, despite his resignation in August as archbishop of Boston due to age limits) issued a series of findings and recommendations. It called for greater transparency from the Vatican’s sex abuse office, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. It was another sign that in the fight against abuse, there is no unity of strategy between different Vatican bodies, despite or because of Pope Francis’ 2022 reform of the Roman Curia.
4. New lay movements and organizations
In March 2024, all members of the interdisciplinary commission of inquiry (created in 2023) into the abuses in the Foyers de Charitè resigned due to a strained relationship with the papal delegates. In a report published on July 17, more female Catholics accused Abbé Pierre, a charismatic priest and popular personality in France who died in 2007. Emmaüs International, an international solidarity movement founded in Paris in 1949 by the Capuchin friar to combat poverty and homelessness, put in place a line of research to record other incidents. In September, there were 17 new testimonies against Abbé Pierre.
Two days later, on July 19, the Dicastery for the Clergy announced the appointment of two apostolic assistants to oversee reforms within the Community of Saint Martin in France over the next three years and investigate allegations of spiritual abuse against its late founder, Father Jean-Francois Guerin.
[Further reading: The clergy sex abuse crisis and the Vatican’s legitimacy on the global stage]
On July 22, an Associated Press report shed light on how much the Vatican knew since the 1950s about the scandal of the Legion of Christ, founded by Marcial Maciel.
On September 25, several members of the “Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana” in Peru were expelled by the pope, as announced by the nuncio, following an investigation into various abuses conducted by Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta and Msgr. Jordi Bertomeu. In October 2024, as part of its ongoing inquiry into abuse and financial corruption within the “Sodalicio,” the Vatican expelled four members accused of abuse and financial corruption, including the exploitation of a church-state agreement to gain tax incentives. In total, 15 members, including its founder, Luis Fernando Figari, were expelled this year from the controversial movement.
On November 11, 2024, the British newspaper The Guardian published a report on women who suffered sexual assaults while completing the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Still, in November, it was revealed that the Vatican found Austrian Father Gebhard Paul Maria Sigl, co-founder of the Family of Mary, a pontifically recognized association, guilty of spiritual and psychological abuse — cases that do not involve explicit sexual misconduct.
5. Developments on the effects of the abuse crisis in the relations between Church and State, religion and politics
In July in New Zealand, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care (public institutions — secular and religious, Catholic and Anglican) published its report after six years of work. On November 12, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Christopher Luxon made a “formal and unreserved” apology in Parliament for the widespread abuse, torture, and neglect of hundreds of thousands of children and vulnerable adults in care (both state and church-run institutions).
Pope Francis’ visit to Belgium in September 2024 was in part overshadowed by the aftermath of the scandals and the unprepared response of the pope to the long history of abuse in both Church and public institutions.
[Further reading: Synodality and the abuse crisis: The Church is still stuck in Trent]
Early in September 2024, it was announced that the Irish government set up a commission to investigate sexual abuse at Irish schools run by Catholic religious orders after a preliminary probe found almost 2,400 allegations of historical abuse.
On November 17, former prime minister Julia Gillard called on Australia’s attorneys-general to urgently consider how to deliver justice to survivors of child abuse after the High Court ruled that a Catholic diocese was not liable for the historical sexual abuse of a young boy in Victoria.
On November 18, the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the UK said his party’s Welsh leader should reflect on her position over her handling of a sexual abuse case when she worked for the Church of England.
“The new normal”
This long and diverse list is also shocking because it is incomplete, and the year 2024 was not particularly different from the last few years. We have become so exposed to small doses of almost daily news on the abuse crisis that we have developed a kind of dangerous immunity and a new form of poisonous and contagious detachment: it’s the new normal. There is good news about the church’s work on preventing and safeguarding in a growing network and awareness. But there is still a lot to do to know and understand the deep roots and ramifications of abuse.
[Further reading: Pope Francis’ efforts to deal with the clergy sex abuse crisis need corrections]
There is also much that the institutional church still needs to do. During the November 18 press conference in Rome with Ending Clergy Abuse, an international group of victims, Father Hans Zollner, SJ, who resigned in 2022 in a disagreement with the pope’s clergy abuse commission and currently heads an institute for safeguarding at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, urged Pope Francis to implement a zero-tolerance law across the global Catholic Church, ensuring that any cleric found guilty of abuse would be removed from ministry.
It is not yet clear what the effects of Pope Francis’s 2019 summit on abuse were. To deal with this new “normal” situation, a new kind of investment in Catholic scholarly and academic circles is also needed. This topic may not fit the mood expected of the Jubilee year 2025, which begins in just a few weeks.
Massimo Faggioli @MassimoFaggioli