For the past two decades,
the Roman Catholic Church has been in the spotlight,
plagued by a child abuse problem it hasn’t resolved.
It’s been a global reckoning, spanning dozens of countries.
A simple question for you: have you sexually abused children?
Pope Francis has held meetings.
Invoking the guidance of the Holy Spirit,
Pope Francis opens a landmark sex abuse summit on abuse...
...calling abusive clergy “tools of Satan.”
And expressed sympathy for the pain of survivors.
The pain and the shame,
the shame that I feel for the irreparable damage.
In 2021, the Vatican enshrined new canon law,
encouraging reporting by survivors and explicitly banning cover-up.
Some saw it as a turning point.
But on the ground, as cases in the US mount,
prosecutors and activists say the church is fighting hard
against survivors.
Some of the dioceses sought to prevent the entire report
from ever seeing the light of day.
In effect, they wanted to cover up the cover-up.
Lobbying against legislation
that would allow more victims to come forward.
We exposed the abuse within the church, and their response,
particularly by some of the bishops
who were engaged in the conspiracy and cover-up,
was to go spend parishioner money to hire lobbyists
to try and make it harder for survivors
to confront their abusers in court.
And using top lawyers to resist the disclosure of documents.
The dioceses and the bishops fight like crazy
in order to keep the release of documents to an absolute minimum.
The originating dioceses will put their hands up and say,
“We didn’t know anything,”
when in fact they probably have
a two and a half inch thick file of allegations.
So why is the Catholic Church
fighting an issue it has promised to resolve?
This is how the world’s largest institution
is inadvertently protecting pedophiles.
[SYSTEM ERROR]
In 2002, the
published a series of stories.
John Geoghan is accused of molesting and raping boys
as young as four years old over a period of 34 years.
The paper uncovered a pattern of abuse and cover-up
in the Archdiocese of Boston.
Thousands of documents, once confidential,
both illustrated and underlined the mistake and tragedy.
It was a watershed moment.
It was like a chain reaction of newsrooms, television stations,
other newspapers, and I was just getting...
I was getting calls literally every day,
sometimes on the hour.
The Spotlight investigation
paved the way for more survivors to come forward.
There are now thousands of allegations against Catholic priests
and clergy members around the world,
and they are mounting.
Right now, here in the United States,
we are averaging an arrest of a clergy member
and/or Catholic staffer
at two per month.
Pope Francis has vowed to root out child sex abuse
and created clear guidelines on reporting cases.
But survivors groups say the church cannot be trusted to police itself.
Throughout the history of this crisis and in every country,
the issue is that the church protects itself and its reputation
first and foremost,
and that reporting structures that are internal
and go from priests to bishop to cardinal up to the Vatican,
they mean nothing.
Law enforcement needs to be brought in
to investigate these claims.
And in many cases, the church has resisted
the involvement and engagement of law enforcement
In the US, it’s political.
Catholic lobbyists are extraordinary in their power.
They were already situated with political ties,
and then the clergy sex abuse scandal hit.
The church has reportedly spent millions of dollars
lobbying against statute of limitations reform,
reform that would allow those with historic abuse claims
to come forward.
They have been consistently the biggest barrier
in every state in which I have testified
in support of statute of limitations reform.
The institution cares about its reputation and its finances,
and so whenever something like legislation comes up
that threatens that,
they fight very hard to prevent it.
Now, as the number of lawsuits increase,
the church is faced with more and more payouts.
If you were sexually abused as a child in New York
and have never pursued a case, don’t wait.
More is coming out, especially here in the United States,
as more states reform their civil statute of limitations
and more survivors are able to come forward
and share their stories of what happened.
That means more settlements will eventually be coming.
When a case is brought forward,
activists say dioceses fight against the release of documents,
which they say could shed light on years of abuse and mishandling.
What you need is all the evidence that the church holds.
Typically, the church has the information needed to prove the case.
They know what happened.
The fact that it has taken so long for many of these dioceses
to release the names of their perpetrators
is an indication of how corrosive
this climate and culture of secrecy is.
And when you add to that well-paid defense lawyers
who are telling the bishop, “Don’t give away any information,”
that you don’t have to,
it’s like two tectonic plates grinding against each other.
Many of the bishops, at least in this country,
are not sympathetic to Pope Francis,
so they’re in the middle of almost a power struggle
between what their lawyers are telling them
and what the pope is saying canon law should now be about.
The church’s tactics can be difficult for survivors.
Here’s the problem: the victims are traumatized by this institution,
which is now telling them that they’re not important enough
to get the truth.
And so this is very difficult for the victims.
Some simply have to say,
“Whatever settlement is possible. This has just got to end.”
No one...
has known more about the abuse cases
than the Catholic dioceses themselves.
For me...
nearly 30 years of my life could have been completely different
had the church protected the sheep
instead of that abusive shepherd.
In October 2021, the French government released a damning report,
estimating that over 330,000 children were sexually abused since 1950
by Catholic priests and lay members in France.
Investigators say not only did the church there not stop the abuse,
it didn't even report it.
The pope told bishops it should never happen again.
I encourage the bishops and religious superiors to continue to make every
effort so that similar dramas will not be repeated.
But in the weeks that followed,
comments by a top French bishop
reignited a key debate between church and state.
The bishop suggested priests were not obliged to report sexual abuse
if it was heard about in confession.
The government was quick to respond.
There is nothing stronger than the laws of the Republic in our country.
For thousands of years,
the seal of confession has been fiercely protected,
and priests are forbidden to break it.
The tragedy is that whether it’s the priest or the victim,
the confessional privilege
will not permit the priest to report it to the authorities.
That information is crucial.
How many individuals has that perpetrator already harmed?
And how many more are still left to be harmed in his or her career?
The Vatican stands firm on the issue,
but campaigners say it undermines important progress
made on children’s rights.
We have really worked hard to increase mandated reporting
so that professionals like clergy,
who hear this kind of issue all the time,
will report to the police.
Sadly, this clinging to the confessional privilege
is letting a tremendous amount of knowledge about child sex abuse
continue to run right under the radar.
For years, the church’s response to abuse allegations
was to shuffle accused priests on to different parishes
and even different countries.
There have been a lot of cases
where priests have not only been moved state to state,
but they’ve been moved overseas.
The world is filled with this problem
because of the sheer size of the Catholic Church.
With an international arrest warrant
for sexually abusing children in France
hanging over his head,
now in refuge in Lebanon.
Or this one, an Italian wanted for sexually abusing eight boys,
transferred to Mozambique.
Perpetrators may well go on to abuse further.
But not all countries have the resources to investigate allegations.
It’s plain to see that enforcement agencies in many developing countries
are just absolutely nowhere near where we are,
and we [in the UK] are not dealing with it properly.
Globally, there are still huge blind spots about the scale of the problem.
Latin America has the world’s largest Catholic population,
but no country there has carried out an independent inquiry.
Public investigations in several European countries,
including Italy and Spain,
are also still to take place.
In some Catholic majority countries,
it can feel impossible for survivors to speak up.
Churches, they become so integral to our way of life, faith,
and what we believe and the community that it creates.
And so in places where that is so much more tied to
the very fabric of where you are
versus a place like Australia, which is more secular and more open,
it’s going to make it so, so much harder for someone who’s been hurt
to come forward and accuse that institution that matters so much
to everyone around them.
After years of silence,
many survivors are coming to terms with their abuse.
For those affected, the trauma can last decades.
I came across a picture of myself with my perpetrator
at the age of 48, and everything came flooding back.
I just didn’t want to be here anymore.
It affects me every day.
There are things throughout the course of the day
where it can absolutely just seize you up.
So I cannot let it define me.
I have to learn how to cope with it.
As more comes to light,
the future of the church hangs on its leadership.
This is now a crisis that is going into its second generation.
I don’t think we’ve seen the structural change
that is warranted by a crisis of this magnitude.
I don’t see how the church will really get out of this.
Until they change the culture of the priesthood at the root,
I'm afraid we're going to see more of these cases.