Few could have predicted that a comment Pope Francis made during a 2018 visit to Chile would blow up into the most important crisis of his papacy, and one which eventually set the Catholic Church on a latest path of accountability for clergy sexual abuse.
Francis was asked by a TV reporter a couple of Chilean bishop who had been accused by victims of getting covered up the crimes of Chile’s most notorious pedophile. Francis had been defending the bishop for years and shot back that there was “not one shred of proof against him. It’s all slander. Is that clear?”
His irate response struck a nerve in Chile, which was just starting to come back to terms with a horrific legacy of clergy abuse, and it prompted Francis’ top child protection adviser to sternly rebuke the pope for his harmful words.
But then something remarkable happened: Rather than dig in, Francis commissioned an investigation, realized he was mistaken, apologized to the victims he discredited, and got your entire Chilean hierarchy to supply to resign. It was considered one of the best midcourse corrections of the trendy papacy.
“He recognized his mistakes,” said papal biographer Austen Ivereigh. “He learned from them. He said ‘sorry.’ And he put it right.”
Initial questions on abuse. Then got here Chile
When Francis was elected history’s first Latin American pontiff in 2013, abuse survivors and their advocates initially questioned whether he “got it” about abuse, because he freely admitted he had never handled cases of accused priests as archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Francis did create a sex abuse commission early on to advise the church on best practices and placed a trusted official, Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley, in charge. But the commission lost its influence after a number of years and its crowning advice — the creation of a tribunal to guage bishops who covered up for predator priests — went nowhere.
And then got here Chile.
During the now-infamous visit to Iquique, Chile, Francis was asked about Bishop Juan Barros, whom he had transferred to a southern diocese over the objections of the local faithful. Their grievance? Barros had been a priest under the sanctioned Rev. Fernando Karadima, and was accused by Karadima’s victims of getting witnessed and covered up the crimes.
Francis had defended Barros because considered one of his friends and advisers, Chilean Cardinal Javier Errazuriz, also had defended the bishop.
After being pressed on the plane home by journalists about his Barros defense, Francis commissioned an investigation into the Chilean church and realized he had been misled by Errazuriz and others.
Juan Carlos Cruz, considered one of Karadima’s victims who received the pope’s personal apology that 12 months, later developed a private friendship with the pontiff.
“He sincerely desired to do something and he transmitted that,” Cruz said.
A turning point for Francis in 2018
Years later, Francis acknowledged 2018 was the turning point, or “conversion,” in his understanding about abuse, and he credited journalists, including The Associated Press, with enlightening him.
“I couldn’t imagine it. You were the one on the plane who told me, ‘No, that’s not the best way it’s, Father,’” Francis told AP in a 2023 interview. Making a gesture that indicated his head had exploded, the pope continued: “That’s when the bomb went off, after I saw the corruption of many bishops on this.”
By mid-2018, Francis had largely atoned for the Chile scandal. But then the subsequent crisis hit.
A U.S. cardinal is enveloped in scandal
In July of that 12 months, Francis removed once-influential American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick after church investigators said an allegation that he groped a teenage altar boy within the Nineteen Seventies was credible. Subsequently, several former seminarians and priests reported that that they had been abused or harassed by McCarrick as adults.
It was apparently common knowledge within the U.S. and Vatican leadership that “Uncle Ted,” as McCarrick was known, slept with seminarians, but he still rose steadily within the church’s ranks.
Having removed McCarrick and approved a canonical trial against him, Francis must have emerged because the hero within the saga since he righted the mistaken of St. John Paul II, who had promoted McCarrick despite his popularity.
But Francis’ get-tough victory lap was cut short when a former Vatican ambassador to the U.S. accused the pope himself of participating within the McCarrick cover-up.
In an 11-page denunciation in August 2018, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano claimed he had told Francis in 2013, firstly of his pontificate, that McCarrick had “corrupted a generation” of seminarians and priests and that Pope Benedict XVI had eventually sanctioned McCarrick for his sexual misconduct. Vigano claimed Francis disregarded his 2013 warning and rehabilitated McCarrick. He called on Francis to resign.
Francis didn’t initially respond. But he authorized a two-year investigation into McCarrick, finding that bishops, cardinals and popes over three many years played down or dismissed multiple reports of sexual misconduct against him. The report largely spared Francis and as an alternative found that Vigano had failed in monitoring McCarrick while he was U.S. ambassador.
McCarrick died earlier this month; Francis excommunicated Vigano last 12 months for schism.
Francis holds the hierarchy accountable
The crisis prompted Francis to take even bolder motion to carry the hierarchy accountable for covering up abuse. In 2019, he summoned the heads of bishops’ conferences from all over the world to the Vatican to impress on them the necessity to act to forestall abuse and punish offending priests.
He modified church law to remove the “pontifical secret” covering abuse cases and passed a law requiring church personnel to report allegations in-house, although to not police. He approved procedures to analyze bishops who abused or covered up for his or her pedophile priests, in search of to finish the tradition of impunity for the hierarchy.
Ivereigh, the papal biographer, said those reforms were the results of Francis’ learning curve on abuse.
“I believe he understood that at the basis of the sex abuse crisis was a culture and a mindset which he continually called clericalism, a way of entitlement, and which led not only to ultimately to abuse of power and sexual abuse, but its cover up,” Ivereigh said.
More questions on abuse remain
But questions continued to dog Francis even after the scandal passed.
One case that haunted him for years was that of Argentine Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, who was accused, and eventually convicted, in an Argentine court of abusing his seminarians. Francis had created a job for Zanchetta on the Vatican after he had been accused of misconduct, spiriting him out of Argentina for purported “health” reasons.
Francis never responded to questions on the Rev. Julio Grassi, who was Argentina’s most notorious clerical sexual abuser. While Francis was archbishop of Buenos Aires, he commissioned a study into Grassi’s conviction that concluded he was innocent, that his victims were lying, and that the case never must have gone to trial. Argentina’s supreme court upheld the conviction.
“Before Pope Francis can enact accountability for bishops and other church leaders, he has to come clean with the harm he himself caused victims in Argentina,” said Anne Barrett Doyle of the web resource Bishop Accountability, which pressed Francis to get even tougher about abuse and cover-ups throughout his pontificate.
