Pope Francis has been accused of opposing reforms that would seriously address the problem of clerical sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults, while “turning a blind eye” to priests who assault nuns and force them to have abortions.
Francis promised to “spare no effort” to bring to justice paedophile priests and the bishops who covered up their crimes at an unprecedented summit in February 2019, an event that was supposed to mark a turning point in the handling of a scandal that has embroiled the Catholic church for decades.
A week before the summit, Francis became the first pontiff to publicly admit that priests had also sexually abused nuns, some of whom shared testimony during the event, and pledged to do more to fight the problem.
Three months later, the Vatican established procedures for every diocese to report allegations of abuse and foster accountability for the actions of bishops and cardinals. Francis also abolished the rule of “pontifical secrecy” – a kind of code of confidentiality – in an effort to improve transparency in sexual abuse cases.
Five years on, activists for the survivors of clerical sexual abuse say Francis has failed to fulfil his promises and the new rules have made little impact.
On Tuesday Anne Barrett Doyle, a co-founder of BishopAccountability, which tracks alleged clergy sexual abuse cases, cited 10 cases since 2019 that allegedly show the pope favoured accused bishops and clerics over their victims. The cases include that of Marko Rupnik, who was excommunicated in 2020 after accusations of sexual and psychological assault against nuns dating back three decades, but in 2023 was accepted into a diocese in his native Slovenia.
“It would be one thing if we were coming here to talk about an overall good record with an occasional inconsistency, but we’re not, we’re talking about a continued pattern of the pope backing accused abusers,” Doyle told reporters in Rome. “It’s not that this pope doesn’t have his heart in reform or is maybe being blocked by other members of the curia. I believe he is opposed to reform – his measures have been designed to produce little impact.”
Meanwhile, the Vatican had been aware of the abuse of nuns by priests for decades before the public acknowledgment by Francis, but “nothing has come of his commitment” to fight the issue, said Doris Reisinger, an activist and survivor of clerical sexual abuse who authored a research paper on the girls and women impregnated by priests and their subsequent forced abortions.
“While the pope publicly condemns abortion, comparing it to hiring a hitman, he turns a blind eye to the priests who force nuns into having abortions,” said Reisinger.
Reisinger said that while some nuns had come forward about abuse since 2019, they were mostly too afraid to speak out. There is scant care for abused nuns, many of whom have been thrown out of their orders and made homeless, and under canon law they “have no status at all”, she said.
“The pope has admitted abuse of nuns but he has not acted on it,” said Reisinger. “And we have never heard a pope or bishop acknowledge coerced abortion at the hands of priests. They always treat abortion as a female issue yet they have never spoken about priests forcing abortions, despite knowing it is going on.”
In her research, Reisinger had come across cases in which the priest paid for an abortion, including one occasion when money from the offertory collection was used.
The Catholic Church must end celibacy and the bar on married priests or there will be none left in the western world in 30 years time, former President Mary McAleese has said.
Mrs McAleese, currently chancellor of Trinity University, was speaking after a highly influential figure within the Vatican suggesting revising the requirement that priests be celibate.
Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, an adviser to Pope Francis, said: “If it were up to me, I would revise the requirement that priests have to be celibate. Experience has shown me that this is something we need to seriously think about.”
Archbishop Charles Scicluna
He told the Times of Malta: “This is probably the first time I’m saying it publicly and it will sound heretical to some people.”
“I am delighted he came out and said it because he is regarded very, very highly by pretty much everybody in the church,” said Ms McAleese, a canon lawyer and also a supporter of ordaining women.
Archbishop Scicluna first came to prominence in 2018 when he was tasked with investigating allegations of a sexual abuse cover-up in Chile.
This followed what Ms McAleese described as one of Pope Francis’ worst visits of his papacy, during which he essentially denied there was any evidence supporting the allegations of a cover up by senior clergy.
After their investigation in Chile, Scicluna and colleague Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu delivered a 2,600-page dossier which prompted the Pope to apologize for mishandling the issue.
“It established his credentials and integrity….when he speaks, people listen,” said Ms McAleese.
Many within the Vatican agree here are no theological arguments in favour of celibacy and that the bar on priests was introduced a millennia ago in order to protect the property rights of the church.
Pope Francis
Pope Francis has agreed there is no formal church doctrine on celibacy and marriage, and admitted a future pontiff may change the rules, but he has decided not to do so, Ms McAleese said, adding she believes the most “interesting possibilities” for the next Pope are from the “excellent leadership” in Belgium and Germany.
Proposals in recent years, ruled out by the Pope, include allowing elderly married men in the Amazon to be ordained to cover a chronic shortage in remote areas and to let the previously ordained who have married to return to church duties.
The latter are still regarded as ordained but Ms McAleese said proposals to allow older men to become priests or for ones to return “does not really solve anything”.
An entirely new cohort of eligible, younger, men are needed, she said, adding a warning if the status quo is maintained the church will be “looking at the western world in 30 years where there will not be any priests”.
Opposition to married priests – and ordaining women – is strongest in the more conservative “global south”, where the church is still growing and it is argued celibacy allows a man to devote himself entirely to the church.
Ms McAleese is not impressed, comparing the situation to Ireland 100 years ago. Young men, often surrounded by poverty, saw the church as a route to education, a job, status and influence, Ms McAleese said.
With the help of a woman Anglican bishop, a Salesian sister and a consecrated virgin, Pope Francis and his international Council of Cardinals devoted the first morning of their February meeting “to deepening their reflection, begun last December, on the role of women in the church,” the Vatican press office said.
Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican press office, said Feb. 5 the pope and cardinals heard from Bishop Jo Bailey Wells, deputy secretary-general of the Anglican Communion; Salesian Sister Linda Pocher, a professor of Christology and Mariology at Rome’s Pontifical Faculty of Educational Sciences “Auxilium,” and Giuliva Di Berardino, a consecrated virgin and liturgist from the Diocese of Verona, Italy.
The pope and council were to continue meeting the afternoon of Feb. 5 and all day Feb. 6, focusing on other themes, Bruni said.
The Vatican has not shared details about the discussions on the role of women in the church nor the texts of presentations made at the meeting.
Cardinal Gérald C. Lacroix of Québec was present at the meeting; in Jan. 30 video message said he would “temporarily withdraw from activities in my diocese” after he was accused in a civil lawsuit of inappropriately touching a 17-year-old girl on two occasions in the 1980s. He has denied the allegations.
The Vatican press office did not comment on the cardinal’s participation in the council meeting.
In addition to Cardinal Lacroix, those at the February meeting included Cardinals Juan José Omella Omella of Barcelona; Seán P. O’Malley of Boston; Fridolin Ambongo Besungu of Kinshasa, Congo; Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state; Oswald Gracias of Mumbai, India; Sérgio da Rocha of São Salvador da Bahia, Brazil; Fernando Vérgez Alzaga, president of the commission governing Vatican City State; and Jean-Claude Hollerich of Luxembourg.
Bishop Rolando Álvarez speaks to the media in Managua, Nicaragua, in May 2022. On Sunday, the Nicaraguan government released Álvarez and more than a dozen priests from prison.
Nicaragua’s government released two jailed Roman Catholic bishops and 15 other priests who had been detained during one of the world’s harshest crackdowns on the church, according to a communiqué Sunday.
The most prominent of the detainees is Bishop Rolando Álvarez, 58, an outspoken critic of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. The bishop of the central province of Matagalpa had been held for more than a year, and in recent months was locked up in solitary confinement, according to U.N. human rights rapporteurs. His imprisonment was the subject of a November hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives. The State Department had called his detention “unconscionable.”
The other prelates freed Saturday night had been detained in December during what came to be known as “Black Christmas” — a round of arrests of Catholic leaders, including Bishop Isidoro Mora of Siuna. Many of them apparently angered the government by calling for prayers for Álvarez.
The priests and bishops were released after negotiations with the Vatican, and flown to Rome, according to the statement from the Nicaraguan government. Two seminarians who had been jailed were also included in the prisoner release. Ortega’s government thanked Pope Francis and his team for the “very respectful and discreet coordination.” It did not respond to a request from The Washington Post for more details.
Ortega has conducted an unprecedented offensive against the church in this majority-Catholic country. In August, his government revoked the legal status of the Jesuit-run Central American University and seized the campus. He’s stripped the registration of more than 300 religious organizations — including Mother Teresa’s missionaries. The Vatican closed its embassy in Nicaragua last spring after the government proposed suspending relations.
During the recent Christmas holidays, the government banned traditional Catholic processions known as “posadas.” Priests say they’re routinely spied on and harassed. More than 100 Catholic priests have fled, been kicked out of the country, or denied reentry to Nicaragua. In October, the government freed 12 other Catholic priests from prison and sent them to Rome, under a deal with the Vatican.
The Rev. Uriel Vallejos, an exiled priest, wrote Sunday on X, formerly Twitter, that the government “wants to leave Nicaragua without priests.”
Ortega was a leader of the leftist Sandinista revolution that toppled U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. The former guerrilla served as president of Nicaragua from 1985 until 1990 and returned to power in 2007. He was sworn in to a fourth consecutive term in 2022, after jailing all his significant competitors.
Ortega has focused his ire on the Catholic Church since 2018, when a wave of anti-government protests swept the country. He’s accused the church of siding with the demonstrators, an accusation it has denied.
Álvarez was placed under house arrest in August 2022. The following February, he declined an offer to join 222 political prisoners who were freed and flown to Washington. Friends said he preferred to remain in jail in his homeland rather than go into exile. He was subsequently sentenced to 26 years in jail on charges of treason and spreading false information.
His detention has been the subject of growing international alarm. In November, a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee held a hearing titled “An Urgent Appeal to Let Bishop Álvarez Go.” The State Department has designated Nicaragua a “Country of Particular Concern” because of religious repression, adding it to a watch list including Cuba, North Korea, China and Iran.
The crackdown on the church and civil society organizations has contributed to soaring irregular migration. About 139,000 Nicaraguans were detained at the U.S. border in 2023. A recent study by AmericasBarometer found that about half the population wanted to emigrate.
Pope Francis is facing some of the most vociferous objection to papal authority in decades, in language that might have stunned past popes.
German Cardinal Gerhard Müller derided the pope’s new guidance allowing priests to bless same-sex couples as “blasphemy.” One Italian priest found himself rapidly excommunicated after he referred to Francis in his New Year’s Eve homily as an “anti-Pope usurper” with a “cadaverous gaze, into nothingness.” Still holding on to his title is Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who recently dubbed the pontiff a servant of Satan and announced a seminary to train priests free from the “deviations of Bergoglio” (Francis’s name before becoming pope).
Some of this resentment is long-simmering. Almost as long as he’s been pope, Francis has been confronted by dissenting church traditionalists. Viganò, for one, has previously called for Francis’s resignation.
The death of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI had been widely expected to clarify any muddiness about the hierarchy in Vatican City, leaving just one figure wearing papal white within its ancient walls. A year later, the voices questioning Francis’s basic authority have only grown louder, at the same time that bold, legacy-cementing moves by the 87-year-old pope have prompted broader backlash within the church.
Francis is experiencing a level of reproach that some observers say is the fiercest since Pope Paul VI reaffirmed the church’s ban on artificial birth control in 1968. Today’s criticism is further amplified by social and digital media. An even more striking distinction, though, may be the overt disdain some clerics are showing to a man seen by Catholics as the Vicar of Christ atop the Throne of Saint Peter.
“What we’re seeing under Francis is to a very high degree [the kind of dissent] we saw in 1968,” said Austen Ivereigh, the pope’s biographer. “But what’s new is the lack of respect, the lack of deference to papal authority, which has become somehow permissible in this pontificate in a way that I’ve never seen before.”
>The opposition to Francis is “unprecedented,” said John Carr, a former longtime lobbyist for the U.S. bishops conference who founded Georgetown University’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life. “It is strong, it is narrow, and it is about power — ecclesiastical, economic and political power.”
“They didn’t say John Paul [II] wasn’t pope. They didn’t say Benedict was illegitimate. This is part of a larger project to undermine his credibility.”
The rise in anti-Francis rhetoric doesn’t seem to reflect or have affected his public standing — his popularity remains the envy of politicians in many countries. But the barrage of criticism presents a direct challenge to his papacy and renews an age-old question for the Roman Catholic Church: How far is too far when you fault a pope?
Blessings for same-sex couples
A same-sex couple receives a blessing outside Cologne Cathedral on Sept. 20. Clergy in Germany began bestowing such blessings before the pope’s recent guidance.
The number of Catholic clerics loudly and proudly announcing their intent to disregard the pope grew last month after Francis shifted Vatican guidance and authorized priestly blessings of same-sex couples and other “irregular” relationships, as long as those benedictions are kept separate from marriage.
Some clerics heralded the decision as long overdue, a move that puts Francis’s past statements about a more welcoming church into practice. The declaration “is a step forward,” wrote Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, “and in keeping not only with Pope Francis’s desire to accompany people pastorally but Jesus’s desire to be present to all people who desire grace and support.”
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — at times an epicenter of criticism of Francis — was muted in its reaction, saying in a statement that the pope was simply affirming that “those who do not live up to the full demand of the Church’s moral teaching are nevertheless loved and cherished by God.”
Even some bishops loyal to Francis, however, appeared genuinely confused over how such blessings were meaningfully different from condoning same-sex unions, and how the Vatican could support same-sex blessings while maintaining that homosexual tendencies are “intrinsically disordered” and homosexual acts immoral. The Vatican’s stance is that the new ruling marks an expansion of the role of blessings in the church rather than any acceptance of homosexuality, and that the seconds-long benedictions by no means validate the legal or sexual relationships of same-sex couples.
And then there were those who rejected the guidance outright. TheAfrican bishops conferences issued an extraordinary joint statement on Thursday, attesting to their allegiance to Francis but at the same time saying members could not carry out the blessings he suggested without “exposing themselves to scandals.” Two bishops in Kazakhstan, in a letter forbidding their priests to obey the Vatican edict, “respectfully” said the pope was not walking “uprightly according to the truth of the Gospel.”
“Of course, it is a crisis of authority,” one of those bishops, Athanasius Schneider, said in an interview with The Washington Post. He is critical of bishops who show outright disrespect to Francis, such as Viganò. But, he added, “the pope is losing the firmness of his words and authorities.”
He continued, “If I will be punished for [saying] this, it will be for me an honor, because I will be punished only for the truth.”
The Vatican released an extraordinary “clarification” last week, stating that while bishops and priests could exercise personal judgment in offering such blessings, there were no grounds to consider the declaration approved by the pope “heretical, contrary to the Tradition of the Church or blasphemous.”
And yet two days later, Cardinal Robert Sarah, a senior cleric from Guinea, wrote in apparent defiance: “We are not opposing Pope Francis, but we are firmly and radically opposing a heresy that seriously undermines the Church, the Body of Christ, because it is contrary to the Catholic faith and Tradition.”
Unusually public criticism
Participants in the Synod of Bishops follow Pope Francis on monitors in the Paul VI Hall at the Vatican on Oct. 4.
Seen as the heirs of Saint Peter, popes possess “supreme, full, immediate, and universal” authority, according to doctrine, over what is today a church of 1.3 billion Catholics. Despite widely held perceptions that Catholics consider popes infallible, they are viewed as such in very rare instances — with the last universally accepted time being in the 1950s, when Pope Pius XII declared the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven, body and soul, as a fundamental article of Catholic faith.
Under church norms, clerics may question the pope — albeit in respectful, reasonable ways.
Francis has shown significant tolerance for dissent, but his patience may be wearing thin. In recent months, one critic, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Tex., was stripped of his diocese. Another, Cardinal Raymond Burke, who frequently spoke at conservative conferences that excoriated Francis, lost his pension and Rome apartment.
“In the case of both Strickland and Burke, the amazing thing is that [Francis] took so long to do it,” said Ivereigh, the biographer. “No previous pope would have put up with anything like that.”
John S. Grabowski, a professor of moral theology and ethics at Catholic University in D.C., said that such criticism is hardly unique in papal history. Consider the 11th-century split between the Roman and Eastern Orthodox churches, he said. That was a severe break far greater than anything Francis faces now.
The more frequently cited point of comparison is the 1960s, when the majority of a papal commission on artificial contraception advised approving its use. Shortly afterward, Pope Paul VI, wrote “Humanae Vitae,” a high-level papal document reiterating traditional teaching and classifying the use of the birth-control pill and other artificial contraception as a sin. Some bishops conferences and theologians rejected the document, saying Catholics should honor their own consciences.
The 1968 contraception ruling “was the last big time when we had such a strong disagreement with something that came out of the Vatican,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a political scientist and longtime journalist who has written several books about the inner workings of the Catholic Church. “But bishops did not criticize [Pope Paul VI] so publicly, the way that some of them are with Pope Francis.”
“I’m stunned at the criticism of Pope Francis by conservatives,” said John McGreevy, a historian of Catholicism and provost at the University of Notre Dame. This extremely public nature of papal criticism, he said, is totally new and modern. As contributing factors, he cited a changed media landscape that provides a platform for outspoken critics such as Strickland or Viganò, as well as the rise of populist impulses around the world.
“The attacks on the institution are symbolic of a populism you would have thought Catholicism would be immune to, because it’s the ultimate bureaucratic institution,” he said.
Some experts said the fact that Benedict is no longer around to temper conservative dissent could be working against Francis.
Same-sex blessings were “the first important action [Francis] took after Ratzinger’s death,” said Alberto Melloni, a Rome-based church historian, referring to Benedict by his pre-papal name. “But this time Ratzinger is no longer there to tell the others: ‘Who cares if you don’t like it, he is the pope and you need to obey.’”
The pushback from dioceses on the same-sex marriage ruling stands somewhat apart from the cluster of fringe extremists who have scandalized even lesser critics of the pope with their incendiary language.
The Italian priest excommunicated on Jan. 1, for instance, is part of a group of Roman Catholic priests, many of them now excommunicated, who hold an almost Trumpian belief that Benedict remained the “true pope” even after his retirement, and that Francis has never been legitimate.
In an interview, the priest, Ramon Guidetti, said he had received emails from U.S. lawyers volunteering to appeal his case within the Vatican.
“I’m no expert on geopolitics but I can grasp something,” he said. “There will be presidential elections soon in the U.S., so basically all those Catholics who are against Bergoglio, who do not recognize him as a Roman pontiff, possibly connected to Trump’s movement, have seized on the chance to offer their support.”
