Sexual abuse in Catholic Church unpunished more in Latin America

On May 11, the first Sunday of his papacy, Pope Leo XIV appeared at the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica to address the crowd awaiting him. He called on youngsters to answer the call “priesthood and other religious” callings, with a firm and direct appeal: “Don’t be afraid! Accept the invitation of the Church and Christ our Lord!”

Below, in St Peter’s Square, survivors of sexual abuse committed by members of the Catholic Church greeted those words with rejection. “Youngsters are afraid. Victims are afraid and the Pope needs to say, in so many words, that raping children within the Church is a crime and will be punished,” said Sarah Pearson, spokeswoman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests campaign group, otherwise known as SNAP. 

Members of the group were at the Vatican – as they had been during the conclave to select the new leader of the Catholic Church – to demand answers in what would come to be the first days of Robert Prevost’s papacy.

France and Spain are the countries with the highest official recorded numbers of sexual abuse in the world. In the last 80 years, it is estimated that there were over 655,000 victims in these nations. Based on a study conducted by the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM), the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church (CIASE) reported in 2021 that approximately 330,000 minors had been victims of abuse in France since 1950. Another report estimates that approximately 440,000 people in Spain may have been victims of sexual abuse related to the Catholic Church.

Still in Europe, Portugal and Poland have significant figures, the former with an estimated 4,815 sexual abuse cases between 1950 and 2022. This number was reported by the Independent Commission for the Study of Sexual Abuse of Children in the Portuguese Catholic Church in 2023.

In Poland, three reports have been published since 2019. The first one considered 625 cases between 1990 and 2018, mapped by the Polish Episcopal Conference (KEP in Polish). In the second one, dated 2021, 368 new reports were filed, whereas in the last report, presented in 2022, 84 new abuse reports between 1965 and 2022 were added.

In the United States, the most complete report on the subject is the “John Jay Report,” commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and published in 2004, which estimated 4,392 priests involved from 1950 to 2002.

Pope Francis took important steps to combat sexual abuse from the first year of his papacy in 2013. Progress was made in 2019, first with the promulgation of the Vos estis lux mundi (“You are the light of the world” in Latin) motu proprio, which forces clergymen to report abuse and establishes procedure for investigation, and then with the publication of the Vademecum, the manual for investigation of sexual abuse committed by clergymen, which deals with canonical investigation, that is, within the Church, but does not force the ecclesiastic authority who has learnt of the case to report it to civil authorities. 

Activists see a gap for impunity in countries where said report is not legally required, which includes the religious confession privilege.

The late Argentine pontiff also modified the Pascite Gregem Dei (“Tend the flock of God”) apostolic constitution in 2021. Sexual abuse in the chapter entitled “Crimes against clergymen’s special obligations” became “Crimes against life, liberty and dignity of the person.”

 

‘Very concerned’

During the same years that Francis made inroads, SNAP launched Conclave Watch, a global initiative led by survivors of clerical sexual abuse. The observatory was developed on the basis of the analysis of public records, evidence provided by victims and reports of omissions within the Church. 

The project strives to ensure that the new pontiff did not inherit a history of cover-ups and to ensure he implemented, from the outset, a universal policy of zero tolerance.

“I, personally, and here at SNAP, we are very concerned,” said Shaun Dougherty, president of the Board of the network. 

Like many members of SNAP, Dougherty is a survivor of clerical sexual abuse from his childhood. Though he has already talked publicly on the subject many times, he became emotional when talking about a suicide attempt at 24 and his journey to “find joy again” with the help of therapy and activism. 

“I swallowed 300 pills. Fortunately, I survived. But many of my friends did not have the same luck. I buried them. Ten, twenty, maybe more. All of them victims. All of them survivors. All of them dead,” he recalled.

The activist, who lost his mother a year ago, could not go to the wake at childhood parish, where he was raped repeatedly after funeral masses: “They took my faith, my innocence, my dignity.” 

Dougherty rejects the use of euphemisms to talk about his experiences: “Let’s not sweeten it. We shouldn’t say ‘abuse.’ We’re talking about rape. Child rape.”

Another striking testimony among survivors at the Vatican is Sebastián, whose surname we will withhold. 

At 13 years of age, Sebastián was a victim of sexual abuse by a clergyman at the Colegio Marianista in Buenos Aires. “Other children and I were abused at the school,” he said.

Throughout his teens, Sebastián lived in silence, consumed by feelings of guilt and shame. Only a decade on, aged 23, did he report the crime. 

The criminal investigation resulted in the sentencing of an abuser to 12 years in prison. Yet, according to Sebastián, the road to justice was fraught with institutional omissions.

In 2002, he sought out Pope Francis, then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, the archbishop of Buenos Aires, to report the attempt by the Marianist Congregation to silence the victims through non-disclosure agreements. 

Sebastián was referred to Bishop Mario Poli, who expressed institutional support for the school, according to his testimony. “I was only a young man fighting for justice. In Latin America, people are still acting as though we were the Vatican’s back yard, without the same demands for transparency and justice we see in Europe,” he denounced.

 

Survivors’ council

The same day that white smoke appeared out of the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, on May 8, SNAP delivered the Vatican an open letter. It contains principles of justice, with which the new pope must adopt urgently.

The demands include: the creation of a global council of survivors of abuse with the cooperation of the Church; the adoption of a universal zero tolerance policy into canon law; legal support and a repair fund for victims offering psychological and financial support, as well as memory spaces; and the opening-up of the Church’s secret archives.

Pearson, the SNAP spokeswoman, questioned the asymmetry of progress. In Latin America, not enough ground has been made, she argued, in comparison with the United States, where the creation of networks against clerical sexual abuse has been more successful. 

“The victims should not receive unequal treatment. That is, Catholicism must be universal. The Vatican cannot control the laws of the United States, Peru or Italy. But it can control the law of its Church. Therefore, a victim should not be treated better in the United States than a victim in Latin America,” said Pearson.

And though the Holy See has internal guidelines, activists denounce the distance between the statute and its actual application, especially in Latin America.

“The fact that Latin America is the largest Catholic continent affects how much the clerical structure can be disassembled a great deal and how more complex matters are handled,” explained Suzana Regina Moreira, with a master’s in Theology from the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC in Portuguese) of Rio de Janeiro, with a PhD from the same institution. 

“When the matter of sexual abuse during the papacy of Pope Francis began to explode more, with the implementations he tried to carry out in several Latin American countries, the process to take these guidelines and apply them nationwide was very slow. We had Chile, which was one of the most serious cases, also Argentina. In Brazil, it’s an extremely slow process,” she said.

A report – “Justice for survivors of childhood sexual abuse in the Latin American Catholic Church,” produced by the Child Rights International Network (CRIN) in 2019 –shows that, even if it is the most Catholic continent in the world, Latin America has the lowest reporting rate of clerical sexual abuse.

“There’s a very strong silencing of victims, of the victims’ families, especially when they are minors, because when it’s a priest, or, even worse, a bishop, sometimes the family themselves prefer for the child not to report it,” explained Moreira. 

The reasons for silencing may include the core centrality of the figure of priests, bishops, pastors and monsignors as the sole possible representatives of Christ on Earth.

To Moreira, this is the reflection of a historic colonisation process in which missionaries were the main evangelising agents. “When we look, for example, at the United States, it was always a minority religion. It did not have such a colonising aspect as it did here,” she explained.

In Brazil, the setting of abuse and rape committed by clergymen is confusing. The country with the largest Catholic population in the world lacks any systematised data, transparent channels for reporting and clear responsibility policies. 

The comparison with other countries is remarkable: in the United States, state prosecutors have produced reports with over 1,000 names of accused priests, based on deep investigations. In Brazil, something similar has not even been attempted.

 “We can’t even say that we are in an embryonic stage. It just doesn’t exist,” said journalist Giampaolo Braga. 

In collaboration with his colleague Fábio Gusmão, he produced a three-year investigation which exposed an alarming setting of negligence, lack of transparency and of effective public and ecclesiastic policy, which gave rise to the book Pedofilia na Igreja (“Paedophilia in Church”), published in 2023.

During the investigation, the authors tried to contact various instances of the Catholic Church, even the Vatican, in search for answers and data. After two years of frustrated attempts, the official response was protocol and it referred the journalists to a national commission: the Núcleo Lux Mundi, created by the Brazilian National Conference of Bishops (CNBB in Portuguese) in 2019, with a view to implementing Pope Francis’ guidelines from the Vos Estis Lux Mundi motu proprio. However, what they found was disheartening.

According to Braga, “there was no structure to welcome the victims or demands made to dioceses. It was only a commission with guidelines and good practices. It was all still left up to willingness, with nothing effectively done.” Most dioceses do not even publish the names of priests who have been suspended or expelled due to abuse.

Adults for the Rights of Children, an organisation created in 2012, called the difference in the treatment between the Global North and South a “double standard.” Countries in the Global North, such as the United States and European nations, have implemented investigative commissions, public enquiries and reparation systems for the victims, reflecting a more proactive approach in the treatment of abuse.

That is, in addition to the individual pain, there is a systemic pattern: the unequal treatment between victims in the Global North and Latin America. In countries such as the United States, Germany and Ireland, investigative commissions, public enquiries and compensation started to come about after social pressure. 

In Latin America Sebastián’s case is an exception: silence is still the rule.