Advocates question — and defend — Pope Leo XIV’s record of managing clergy sex abuse cases

Advocacy groups representing victims of clergy sexual abuse swiftly called on new Pope Leo XIV — the first American to assume the role — to take aggressive action to address the long-standing crisis, while some raised concerns about how he handled instances of alleged abuse before he was elected leader of the Catholic Church.

Leo — formerly Cardinal Robert F. Prevost, a Chicago native and graduate of Villanova University — has an opportunity to lead the church toward a culture of accountability and reform, Gemma Hickey, board president of the group Ending Clergy Abuse, said in a statement Friday.

“Let this Pope be remembered not for the global abuse crisis he inherits, but for how he ends it,” Hickey said.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), meanwhile, said in its own statement that it had “grave concern” about how Prevost managed allegations of abuse while serving as a church leader in Chicago and Chiclayo, Peru, and questioned whether he took sufficient action to protect victims.

The diocese in Chiclayo denied that Prevost mishandled the episode there, and a Peruvian journalist said the allegations against Prevost were “false” and leveled by members of a now-dissolved wing of the church that Prevost opposed due to its own abuse scandal.

How Leo confronts the lingering global crisis could be of particular interest to Catholics in the Philadelphia region, where local and state prosecutors over the years have filed lengthy court documents alleging decades of abuse by priests and cover-ups by church officials.

In New Jersey, the state attorney general’s office just last month asked the state’s Supreme Court to overrule a request from the Camden diocese to block an investigation into decades of sexual abuse across the state’s five dioceses. (Camden’s new bishop has since said he no longer wishes to inhibit the probe).

Here are some notable points about Prevost‘s history of handling allegations of clergy abuse.

One of the episodes that concerned SNAP was the living situation of the Rev. James Ray in Chicago in the early 2000s, when Prevost was serving as an Augustinian leader in the city.

Ray had been accused of abusing children more than a decade earlier, and the church in 1991 pulled him from parish duty and forbid him from being alone with minors, according to a letter SNAP sent to Vatican leaders in March.

But between 2000 and 2002, SNAP said, Ray was allowed to live at an Augustinian building near an elementary school. And local church leaders, including Prevost, not only approved the arrangement, they also did not inform anyone at the school about it, SNAP said, a decision the group said “endangered the safety of children” being educated nearby.

Church officials in Chicago later defended Prevost, telling the Chicago Sun-Times in 2023 that long before it had become the general law of the church, he’d helped create protocols “to guide all members in the different aspects of promoting child protection.”

In a more recent incident, in 2022, Prevost — then the bishop of Chiclayo, Peru — was accused by three victims of failing to take action after they told him they’d been abused by two priests beginning in 2007. SNAP, in its March letter, said evidence suggests Prevost may have failed to open an investigation at first, then submitted misleading documents to the Vatican.

“The allegations of the victims indicate that under the leadership of Cardinal Prevost, the Diocese of Chiclayo did not investigate their abuse claims and misrepresented their testimony,” SNAP said.

But the Chiclayo diocese in 2024 denied allegations of inaction. And Peruvian journalist Pedro Salinas said he believed the victims’ assertions were “absolutely false.”

Salinas wrote a book that helped lead to the recent downfall of Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a secretive Roman Catholic society in Peru whose members were accused of sexually abusing young recruits. In an interview this week with the news outlet Religión Digital, Salinas said he believed group members made the false claims against Prevost as part of a campaign to discredit him for supporting the group’s victims.

“He always put the victims first and was one of those who defended the survivors and victims against the [group’s] attacks,” said Salinas.

News accounts about the episodes in Chicago and Peru did not include comments from Prevost.

But in an interview with the Vatican News in 2023, the future pope did discuss his views on the issue of clergy abuse overall, saying that although the church had taken some steps to address it, “I believe that there is still much to learn.”

“I am talking about the urgency and responsibility of accompanying victims,” he said. “One of the difficulties that many times arise is that the bishop must be close to his priests, as I have already said, and he must be close to the victims. Some recommend that it not be the bishop directly who receives the victims; but we cannot close our hearts, the door of the Church, to people who have suffered from abuse.”

He later said it was “urgent and necessary that we be more responsible and sensitive to this.”

“Silence is not the solution,” he said. “We must be transparent and honest, we must accompany and assist the victims, because otherwise their wounds will never heal.”