Pope Leo XIV celebrated the first mass of his papacy Friday morning at the Sistine Chapel at The Vatican in Rome. The former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was close to the late Pope Francis, and is expected to focus on some of the same themes Francis did, including advocating for migrants and caring for the poor.
But what remains unclear is what the new leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics might do or say about the church’s generations-long mishandling of clergy sexual abuse.
During his tenure, Pope Francis acknowledged the church's failure to protect children, apologized for it, and abolished "pontifical secrecy" in abuse cases. He also established church law that required reporting abuse, created steps towards defrocking abusers, and established steps to hold leadership accountable for being negligent in how they handled cases of abuse.
While acknowledging those steps by Francis, Eduardo Lopez de Casas told Houston Matters with Craig Cohen the late pope did not go far enough. Lopez de Casas leads SNAP Houston, the local chapter of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, and he is also the vice president of the national organization.
He said SNAP wants to see zero tolerance for abuse, and he believes that does not yet exist within the structure of the Catholic Church — something he’s looking to Leo to set it in motion.
“There are many people that think that with all of the scandals that have happened in the Catholic Church, they just assume that there is zero tolerance. And there isn’t,” Lopez de Casas said. “We are truly advocating that they do this as a canon law so that we can really, really make a dent on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church.”
SNAP and organizations like it argue Pope Leo is among a number of Catholic leaders who looked the other way in past instances of abuse and should have done more to ensure priests who were credibly accused of abuse were not allowed to continue to operate within the church.
“It’s not so much that we are calling some of these cardinals out because they didn’t do enough. We are calling these cardinals out because they turned their head to abuse,” he said. “They knew about it, and they didn’t do anything about it. And that’s a big difference.”
Lopez de Casas thinks the actions Pope Francis took on this issue were largely symbolic.
“We at SNAP don’t see that it has made any difference at all,” he said. “It is totally symbolic to us.”
He cited instances where allegations were made and his organization submitted complaints against church officials, including locally, where he said “nothing was done.”
SNAP has responded to Pope Leo’s election by offering a roadmap of actions the new pope could take in his first hundred days to affect real change on this issue that includes:
- The creation of an independent “Global Truth Commission” addressing the issue with full Vatican cooperation
- A “Zero Tolerance Law” adopted into canon law
- International legal agreements mandating transparency and accountability
- A survivor-funded reparations fund supported by church assets
- The creation of a survivors council with the authority to enforce compliance
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