MEXICO CITY/LIMA, Oct 31 (Reuters) – As Pope Leo prepares to return to South America, Peruvian abuse survivor Pedro Salinas sees reason for both hope and unease in the pope’s record confronting clerical abuse.
For a decade, Salinas watched as the Catholic Church investigated Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, the Peru-founded Catholic community he helped expose. Then, in the final days of Pope Francis’ papacy last year, the Vatican dissolved the group and its branches.
“What was achieved, nobody, absolutely nobody, could even have imagined. It was inconceivable. But it happened,” said Salinas, 63, a journalist and former member whose reporting helped expose allegations of sexual, physical and psychological abuse inside the group.
Robert Prevost, as Leo was known when he was a bishop in Peru and later a Vatican cardinal, quietly worked with survivors and advocates, Salinas said, attending meetings, gathering information and communicating by WhatsApp and email.
“Without him, the needle didn’t move,” Salinas said.
The first US-born pope will travel through Uruguay, Argentina and Peru November 6 to 17, ending with six days in Peru, where he arrived as a missionary in the 1980s and later became a citizen and served as bishop of Chiclayo. The Vatican said he will meet clergy abuse survivors there, as he has done on other recent trips.
Survivors say they wonder whether Leo’s approach in Peru, which they credit with helping bring about the rare step of dissolving a Catholic community, can translate into broader change across a Church where they say accountability is uneven.
“What is lacking are bishops everywhere in the world committed to this issue,” Salinas said.
Peru is preparing for a tourism bonanza during Leo’s visit. José Enrique Escardó, 56, president of a Peruvian survivors network, views the excitement from a different perspective.
While Escardó acknowledged that some survivors credit Leo with helping dissolve Sodalitium, he said the Church’s actions have not delivered sufficient justice, accountability or reparations.
“Survivors have grown tired of being told things, of being promised things, but nothing being done,” Escardó said. “We feel more abandoned. We feel deceived.”
He wants survivors to become involved in shaping Church policy and wants reparations to include psychological care and education.
The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
‘TIP OF THE ICEBERG’
Francis, the first Latin American pope, left a complicated legacy, survivors say. Juan Carlos Cruz, the survivor whose case became central to Francis’ 2018 reckoning with abuse in Chile, credits Francis with changes including revisions to canon law, removal of the pontifical secret — the Church’s highest level of confidentiality — surrounding abuse cases and Vos Estis Lux Mundi, a Vatican framework for bishops accused of abuse or cover-up.
“We’re still at the tip of the iceberg,” said Cruz, whom Francis appointed in 2021 to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. “The commission has been working for years on universal safeguarding guidelines and those standards need to be applied around the world.”
Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the watchdog group BishopAccountability.org, which tracks Catholic Church abuse allegations worldwide, called Vos Estis the most significant action Francis took on abuse. But she said the Vatican rarely makes clear whether an accused bishop’s resignation represents punishment.
“The public is left in the dark,” she said.
Barrett Doyle said the Vatican has not released global disciplinary data comparable with figures it provided to a United Nations committee in 2014. Her group relies on public records, media reports and investigations by prosecutors, governments and commissions to track cases.
She wants Leo to make permanent removal from ministry the universal rule for priests found under canon law to have sexually abused children, extending worldwide a policy adopted by US bishops in 2002.
“To say that no child molesters should be out to practice as priests is just such a no-brainer,” she said. “It’s a step that Leo could take now.”
Vatican officials have previously cited the difficulty of creating a single abuse reporting law across all countries and argued that removing priests can put them beyond Church supervision.
Angela Walker, executive director of the US-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said survivors increasingly turn to civil authorities because of the Church’s “incredible failure” to police itself.
“There needs to be more transparency, more openness, and more accountability,” she said. “I will believe it when I see it.”
SURVIVORS’ LONG WAIT
In Mexico, survivors pressed the Vatican on clerical abuse decades before it became a defining crisis across Latin America. Among the most notorious cases was that of Marcial Maciel, the Mexican priest who founded the Legion of Christ order and whose accusers took allegations to the Vatican in the 1990s. The Vatican ordered Maciel in 2006 to withdraw from public ministry. He died in 2008, without ever facing his accusers.
The scale of his abuse became clearer after his death. In 2019, the Legion reported that Maciel had abused at least 60 minors, among 175 instances of child abuse the order documented involving 33 priests over eight decades.
José de Jesús Barba Martin, 87, alleged Maciel abused him when he was studying for the priesthood in the 1950s. He recalled survivors struggling to be heard by Church and state authorities in the late 1990s and said an appeal he sent Pope John Paul II went unanswered.
Decades later, that experience has left him with little expectation that another appeal to Rome would bring change.
“The Church is made up of two types of men: good and bad, courageous and cowardly,” he said. “It will take a long time, and the issue will not be addressed under this pope nor the next.”
Alberto Athié, 72, a former Mexican priest who pursued clerical abuse cases from inside the Church before leaving the priesthood in 2003, sees Leo’s visit as another opportunity to push for transparency.
“I do have hope,” he said. “But my hope fades just the same … Things have to be fixed within the Church.”
Abuse survivor Sebastian Cuattromo said the Argentine Church should have been “at the international forefront” of confronting abuse under Argentine Pope Francis, but fell short of what he had hoped to see.
“There is a major outstanding debt,” Cuattromo said.
Argentina’s Episcopal Conference declined to comment.
(Reporting by Cassandra Garrison in Mexico City and Marco Aquino in Lima; additional reporting by Lucila Sigal in Buenos Aires and Joshua McElwee in Vatican City; editing by Rod Nickel)
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