Leo XIV forces out 21 bishops in 15 months as Pontiff

In his last two years in office, Pope Francis forced out 36 bishops. Overall, Francis forced out a total of at least 87 bishops, including other similar disciplinary measures.

In his first 15 months in office, Leo XIV outpaced his predecessor’s rate of early bishops resignations, a proxy to gauge the scale of sexual abuse and other issues in Catholicism.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

The early resignation of bishops remains one of the few relatively easy-to-spot “symptoms” of structural trouble in any given Catholic diocese, as the adage goes. “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

Even if up until now a bishop in the Catholic Church still holds an almost unchecked power in his diocese, its patrimony, and symbolic capital, before 1966, episcopal appointments were virtually for life. Following the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), Pope Paul VI issued the 1966 so-called motu proprio, a decree-like document, titled Ecclesiae Sanctae (Holy Church).

The document sets norms to limit that unbound tenure by requiring every bishop to offer his resignation upon reaching age 75, among other specific reforms that were later expanded by John Paul II’s 1983 Code of Canon Law. While “non-age resignations” were originally intended as exit ramps for health-related cases, they have evolved into a catch-all tool for managing troubled dioceses.

Over several installments, this series has used the early resignation “symptom” to figure out what has happened in dioceses deeply affected by clergy sexual abuse cases and some of their correlates, most notably but not limited to the misappropriation of Church funds.

It has been a necessity rather than a preference, as the Catholic Church does its best to minimize acknowledging the very existence of troubles, and even the very statements regarding early departures from office are often wrapped in cryptic language, with little or no details as to what actually prompted the decision.

Over more than one hundred cases that this series has been able to track, there is a trail of the sudden end of a bishop’s run often paired with a so-called apostolic visitation, the Catholic Church equivalent of an inspection, often leading also to the appointment of an apostolic administrator, that is to say, a figure other than a resident, full time bishop, who must deal with the issues leading to the early resignation of a bishop, as the story linked after this paragraph told early in this year.

Back in 2025, before Pope Francis’s admission to the Gemelli hospital in Rome, this series was able to track down a total of 30 so-called, “early” or “forced” resignations of bishops over 2023, 2024, and the first weeks of 2025.

At the time, what prompted the account, was the early resignation of Dominique Marie Jean Rey (see the story linked above), a member of the Emmanuel Community, a movement popular in the French-speaking Catholic world, as the story linked after this paragraph told a few months ago.

Before that, the series was able to track down a total of one-hundred “early resignations” dating back to Pius XII’s pontificate, as the piece linked after this paragraph, from 2023, told then.

This time around the series goes over what has happened on the issue of early resignations during Leo XIV’s first 15 months as Bishop of Rome, as he prepares for his visit to France in September, and then, in November for his much-anticipated trip to Uruguay, Argentina and, above all else, to Peru.

One must be aware, in any case, that when Francis asked Robert Francis Prevost to leave the diocese of Chiclayo, Peru, to become the prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops he was already giving him a say in deciding when it was necessary to call out, before reaching 75, any given bishop in the Catholic Church, as much as a major role in figuring out who should be promoted to such position.

To be clear, an early resignation, that is to say, a resignation accepted before reaching 75 is not on its own a sign of trouble. There are cases where the resignation actually is the consequence of an illness.

However, over many cases all over the Catholic world, there is enough evidence to say that when a bishop resigns his position before that age, it is because the Vatican has already detected some trouble, even if only an actual health consideration, and it is trying to control the situation before it escalates.

Also, it should be told that, by the time talk of a potential early resignation emerges, it is because members of the clergy in that bishop’s diocese are actively, even if secretly or at least discreetly, campaigning to remove the bishop, or because there is already a scandal in the local civil media.

Sadly, the Vatican is anything but transparent or accountable when dealing with this kind of situations. This series has gone over some of the most recent examples of how far the Catholic Church will go to pretend that nothing is amiss when it comes to the conduct of its own bishops.

Opacity, not transparency or accountability is the unwritten prime directive of how the Catholic Church deals with these cases, even if there are some exceptions. One of such exceptions was the way the Catholic Church in France was willing to provide some context for Jean-Paul Gabriel Émile Gusching’s resignation. He served for over eleven years as head of the Diocese of Verdun.

He was forced out of office when details about a relationship with an adult female were leaked and became the source of scandal in France, where the Catholic Church has been facing intense scrutiny over repeated abuse scandals. Unlike what usually happens elsewhere in the Catholic world, in France the Apostolic Nunciature issued a statement about the reasons behind Gusching’s resignation.

Oddly enough, almost simultaneously, on the other side of the world, in Peru, Ciro Quispe López was the main character of an even more explosive scandal. As the story linked after this paragraph told at the time, while in Paris the Nunciature to France explained the reasons behind Gusching’s early resignation (at 71), in Lima, the Nunciature to Peru, never offered an explanation of why Quispe López followed a similar path.

It was up to the local media in Peru to provide an account of Quispe’s seemingly endless sexual appetite, engaging with at least ten females in his diocese. Something similar could be said about Emmanuel Hanna Shaleta, who used to commute from his offices in the Chaldean Catholic diocese, an eparchy, on Jamacha Way, in San Diego, California, to the Hong Kong Gentlemen’s Club and other brothels operating in Tijuana, Baja California.

We know what he did not because the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the Nunciature in Washington, D.C., or some other entity in the Catholic Church in the United States was willing to come forward with details about how Shaleta used to spend the alms of the faithful of the Chaldean Catholic rite in California at a “house of ill repute” in Baja California.

The available information exists because the U.S. authorities were willing to provide details about a deep investigation into how Shaleta preached the beauty of the Gospel in the United States, to the members of what is, by all accounts a religious community mostly migrant, while being in Mexico a consumer of sexual services.

The way the Catholic Church deals with these specific cases, the seemingly everlasting opacity, allows for Gusching, Quispe and Shaleta to style themselves up to this day as “emeritus bishop.” It is as if the leaders of the Catholic Church were doing their best to protect colleagues who, at least in Shaleta’s case, are still under investigation by the authorities.

Neither Gusching, Quispe López nor Shaleta seemed to have any qualms about their disregard for the allegedly rigid sexual morals endorsed and promoted by the Catholic Church. In Gusching’s case, he was seemingly willing to challenge the restrictions set by Rome on him, and that prompted the Nunciature’s statement about the real reasons behind his exit from his former diocese.

In allowing them to keep an official title associated with their tenure as bishop, the Catholic hierarchy seems intent to keep protecting them despite their troubled record, but also protecting the Church’s own image. In doing so, as Gusching’s case proves, the Catholic Church also harms its chances to learn from its own mistakes.

Had Gusching had it his way, he was intent on pretending nothing ever happened, as he was more than willing to go back to what he perceived as his “normal life,” without taking into consideration the effects of his behavior on others and the fact that his superiors had already set restrictions on his behavior as an extremely light penalty he was willing to disregard.

That is also a major source of trouble when priests with standing accusations of abuse actively try to avoid acknowledging the consequences of their acts, revealing, on the one hand the darkest aspects of clericalism: the idea that the interests and preferences of clergy must prevail, while, on the other, it also shows how hard it is for the Catholic Church to enforce its own penalties on accused priests.

The most notable example of it comes from the last days of Fernando Karadima’s life. On the one hand, he was arrogant enough to dismiss the restrictions set on him. Such restrictions denied him the chance to preside over public Masses and other similar rituals, something he was willing to do so by using a “private” chapel of a women religious order in Santiago, where he would preside over Masses private only in name, as there was access to the public. On the other, his superiors in the Archdiocese of Santiago were unwilling to actually prevent him from having access to sacred spaces to preside over such rituals.

The available data

What follows is the analysis of the data available derived from the last resignations forced out by Pope Francis in the very last months of his life and over the first 15 months of Pope Leo XIV’s tenure. When Pope Bergoglio asked bishop Prevost to leave his position in Chiclayo, he was granting him a major role in any future decision on any of the over five thousand active Catholic bishops worldwide.

In that regard, it is almost impossible to think of any of those 30 “early” or “forced” resignations of bishops in the last couple of years of Pope Francis’s papacy without the input and opinion of then bishop Prevost and current Pope Leo.

Overall, it was possible to identify 41 Catholic bishops or their equivalents spanning 20 months or so, from January 2025 through August 2026, but some of them are not under consideration as there was enough evidence to acknowledge reasons other than the clergy sexual abuse crisis for the decision to end their tenures.

And yet, there is a shift occurring under Pope Leo XIV. To appreciate it, one must look past raw totals and evaluate the average rate of forced or non-age or “early resignations” per year in office.

While Pope Francis oversaw a larger absolute volume of early exits over his twelve-year pontificate, Leo XIV is currently accepting resignations at more than double the annual pace of Francis and nearly twenty times the rate of John Paul II. The table inserted after this paragraph summarizes the available data regarding these “early resignations,” going back to Pius XII’s (1939-1958) pontificate.

The available data reveals that, under Francis, forced exits targeted sitting ordinaries after years of accumulated governance or cover-up scandals. Under Leo XIV, vetting failures have moved upstream: candidates like Krzysztof Dukielski (Radom, Poland), Matthew Choi Kwang-hee (Seoul, Korea), and Gerardo Fortich Saco, Jr. (Tagbilaran, Philippines) resigned before their episcopal consecrations, although similar cases were already happening during Francis’s tenure, as in the case of Carlos Eugenio Irarrázaval Errázuriz, from Santiago, the capital of Chile, back in 2019.

When a priest is named bishop-elect and then abruptly resigns/vanishes before consecration, it almost always points to a rapid, last-minute discovery of severe canonical disqualifiers during the final background screening or immediately after public announcement.

The fact that during his first 15 months in office Leo XIV has already handled three cases of priests forced out of their consecrations as bishops could be cast on a positive light, as a major scandal was somehow avoided, but it also should be interpreted as a symptom that the way the Catholic Church selects bishops needs major improvements, that will not come easy as bishops see the promotion of their own associates as a way to advance their own careers.

One must look at the current debates around the so-called synodality in the Catholic Church as a proxy for the kind of resistance that changes to the way bishops are appointed create within that religious institution, with the most conservative wings of it decrying their potential loss of influence and control over the future of their church.

Silence and secrecy as prime directives

Despite shifts in papal style or geographical focus, institutional transparency has remained stagnant across pontificates. With both Francis and Leo, over 70% of non-age exits occur without the Vatican offering a public explanation.

The fact that, up until today, more than forty years into the clergy sexual abuse crisis the only official Vatican, publicly available, report is that concerning the criminal career of the late Theodore McCarrick is a telling sign of how hard it is for the Vatican and its dioceses all over the world to actually acknowledge the scale of the crisis and to offer some explanation of what McCarrick did.

The fact that the report emerged after there was an effort from Carlo Maria Viganò, the now excommunicated former Vatican nuncio or ambassador to the United States, is also a sign of how transparency for the Catholic Church is a last-resort response, not a procedure.

The German Catholic Church has been publishing over the last five years or so a stream of diocesan reports after the attempt at publishing a national report ended up in a major rift in the German Conference of Bishops, but even the Austrian and Swiss Catholic dioceses shy away from following the German example.

While Francis’s resignations purges were heavily concentrated in the Western hemisphere (United States, Argentina and Chile making up over 40% of his total), Leo XIV’s exits have been mostly European (42.9%) and increasingly spread across Francophone Africa and East Asia (33.3%), reflecting a globalized reliance on that type of administrative intervention.

Whatever transparency there is, comes at the expense of local civil media. Catholic media, with the exception of the U.S. National Catholic Reporter, British outlets such as The Tablet, French media such as La Croix and Religión Digital from Spain and what Katholisch.de publishes about developments in the German-speaking Catholic world, similar to what it is possible to find more recently in Vida Nueva Digital when it deals with cases from Spain.

For the most part, the rest of the coverage from Catholic media is heavily biased along ideological and language-sphere lines, as the story on how different is the coverage on issues related to the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Vatican News depending on what language one reads.

It is almost impossible to forecast what will happen in what, by all accounts, will be a long pontificate, potentially longer than John Paul II’s but, so far, whatever hope there is for a change in how the Catholic Church addresses the key defining feature of today (the clergy sexual abuse crisis) hangs on the ability to execute simultaneous changes, ranging from the need to reform seminary education to the need to figure out better practices to select bishops.

Sadly, the Catholic Church confronts a silent revolt led by its most reactionary wings. So far, they have been able to undermine Pope Francis’s already weak legacy of reforms.

One year after the appointment of Thibault Verny as president of Tutela Minorum, there are no signs of true commitment from the national conferences of bishops to, at the very least, comply with Francis’s instruction to set up at least a commission to prevent clergy sexual abuse in each diocese.

More troublingly, there are no signs of the Tutela Minorum commission itself seeking the required teeth any watchdog requires to enforce regulations when stakeholders are unwilling to comply.

The main drivers of change, so far, come from European countries such as France, Germany and Spain, confronting a major crisis revealed in the jaw-breaking polls and studies about religious practice becoming an increasingly private issue, leaving the pews empty and turning Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance Cathedrals into something closer to museums than to actual, operating, places of worship.

In Latin America, bishops seem to be intent on maneuvering through each clergy sexual abuse case, one at a time, betting on survivors being unwilling to come forward to face a sterile confrontation with the intricacies of the arcane, inhumane systems of justice in each of the Latin American republics, still willing to abide by the statute of limitations and accept some of the many tricks in the portfolios of criminal practice lawyers.

One only needs to look at the current case unfolding in Aguascalientes, Mexico, where Juan Antonio Ávila Salas’s victims are willing to keep going forward, using whatever means at their hand to challenge Ávila Salas and the bishop there, Juan Espinoza Jiménez.

Instead of settling the real, objective grievances, as real as to prompt the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to laicize or defrock Ávila Salas on June 6, Bishop Espinoza Jiménez complains about alleged biases in the local media coverage of the case and the slow response from his own diocese to the issue, while trying to dismiss the institutional responsibility of the diocese in the abuses perpetrated by the now former priest Ávila Salas.

In the United States, there is still a tendency among some members of the clergy to go into a judicial blaze of glory, burning small fortunes in the defense of predatory priests, as the story from a couple of weeks ago, linked after this paragraph shows.

What many bishops seem to be unwilling to acknowledge is how the clergy sexual abuse crisis is, when one sets aside the pain and suffering of the victims, above all else, a crisis of trust in the ability of the Catholic Church itself to guarantee its own future.

A young Mexican mother, happy about the incoming celebration of her daughters’ First Communion, told me how sad it is for her to be worried about potential risks for them while attending the required course to access the sacrament at her parish.

As her father recently passed, she recalled how her parents were able to send her to Catechism with no worry about her wellbeing, an experience she has been denied now as a mother because of the risk of her daughters becoming the target of a predator.

You can access the Excel file with the data here at Scribd. I suggest to pay attention to the sheet titled "Updated DB English 2026." The file is bilingual in English and Spanish.

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