Clergy sexual abuse in October 2026: The priority that has never been

In both Argentina and Peru, Leo XIV will have to confront Pope Francis’s pending issues when it comes to the clergy sexual abuse crisis.

The Pope’s representative in Argentina will handpick victims of clergy sexual abuse who have followed the “canonical track,” while in Lima, Pope Prevost will have to deal with his own legacy regarding the handling of abuse in Chiclayo.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

This week, while still waiting for the third yearly report on clergy sexual abuse by Tutela Minorum, Leo XIV’s upcoming visit to South America is already showing similar issues to those he already confronted during his visits to Spain and France.

If that was not enough, news from Bolivia about a new request from the survivors of the large-scale sexual abuse system built there by members of the Society of Jesus, the so-called Jesuits, aims at forcing the Catholic Church to offer a clear response beyond the boilerplate statements so common from the Vatican, to the large metropolises of Catholic Latin America, all the way down to the smallest and poorest parishes.

As for the pastoral visit to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru, the Holy See, the bishops’ national conferences and other Catholic entities have been doing their best to pique interest. Even other national institutions have joined the enthusiasm. On Thursday, Argentina’s top national university, the Universidad de Buenos Aires (content in Spanish), announced it will bestow an honorary Ph.D. on Pope Prevost to commend his efforts to promote peace.

Even the rather improbable idea of cancelling the trip played a role, after the Pope’s surgical intervention that found early symptoms of lung cancer. The fact remains: the visit as such was never actually called off, or if one pays enough attention, was never really at risk of such a possibility.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the 71-year-old head of the Secretariat of State, was the only voice willing to talk about the issue—perhaps in an attempt to protect the Pope by creating diplomatic room to maneuver.

Yet the sharp reaction against his rather sober and contained statement revealed less about a real risk to the tour than about how quickly Rome turned on him, highlighting how isolated Parolin has been since last year when he confirmed the old Italian adage about those who enter a conclave as Pope only to exit it as Cardinal. It was during the rather short telenovela of a potential cancelation of the trip, that in Rome emerged news about a meeting with victims in both Argentina and Peru.

Perhaps because of what happened in Spain, where the meeting with survivors of clergy sexual abuse turned into an ugly affair, one leading María Teresa Compte Grau, from Acogida Betania, a nonprofit working there, to chastise the way the meeting was handled, forcing victims to compete with each other, the Argentine Network of Survivors—the oldest of its kind in the Spanish-language sphere—was quick to declare it had no intention or interest in having a meeting with Leo XIV, as told in the story linked below.

Argentine gambit

That a meeting in Argentina carries risk, has been implicitly acknowledged by the Vatican itself. Unlike what happened in both Spain and France, where the local bishops decided who would have the chance to meet with the Pope, following strikingly different approaches and outcomes, in Argentina the decision will fall on the recently appointed nuncio, U.S.-born prelate Michael Wallace Banach.

How wise it is to ask Banach to carry out such a task is anybody’s guess, as he barely presented his Credential Letters to President Javier Milei on July 31, 2026. On the one hand, one would expect that a U.S. prelate would have absorbed some of the experience the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has developed over more than 40 years of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.

On the other, it is really hard to know how familiar Banach already is with a country as complex, especially on this issue, as Argentina, where Pope Francis’s efforts to promote change on this subject collided with his own willingness to protect rather obscure prelates.

Despite the fact Pope Bergoglio must be credited with setting up Tutela Minorum, the entity tasked with preventing clergy sexual abuse, and promoting a modicum of accountability by forcing it to offer a yearly report, about to be published this year, the Argentine pontiff also brought to Rome at least one bishop accused of abuse to ultimately protect him from scrutiny and the potential effects of judiciary probes in Argentina, a rather grim rhyme of what John Paul II did to help Bernard Law avoid consequences for his mishandling of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Boston back in 2004.

The prelate is Gustavo Óscar Zanchetta, a now emeritus bishop at the “tender” age of 62, who was one of the earliest “Pope Francis’s bishops,” as he was appointed barely five months after Jorge Mario Bergoglio emerged to the main balcony of Saint Peter’s square as the then newly elected Pope.

Whatever hope there was about Zanchetta becoming the vanguard of a broad renewal of the Argentine and Latin American episcopate propelled by a generation of bishops aligned with Francis’s priorities, was soon dispelled. Four years after his appointment as bishop of Orán—a rather isolated diocese in northern Argentina, 880 miles or 1,420 kilometers north of Buenos Aires—Zanchetta was moved to an obscure position in Rome, as official of the Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See.

His transfer to such a role was already an admission of defeat, as the alleged merits that made him a “shepherd with the smell of his sheep”—a colloquial Spanish phrase Pope Francis brought to the Catholic lexicon aimed at emphasizing how deeply bishops were supposed to be embedded among the faithful—proved entirely useless.

Soon after, the reason behind his exit to Rome became apparent as allegations of abuse emerged. The story linked after this paragraph is an interview with one of Zanchetta’s victims, a former seminarian at the diocese of Orán, who offers details about what happened there.

Under pressure from the victims back in Argentina, Zanchetta would eventually be dismissed as official of the Administration with little or no actual explanation. He now lives in the kind of canonical and judiciary limbo that makes it so hard to believe in justice for victims of clergy sexual abuse in Argentina or elsewhere in Latin America.

Golden cages

At least on paper, Zanchetta was found guilty but, with the help of friends in Argentina, claiming to be affected by a seemingly endless string of illnesses that are rather hard to believe for a man his age, he has been able to avoid incarceration and has spent much of his rather inconsequential sentence in the proverbial “golden cages:” first, having access to European-class healthcare, and then, when it was impossible to avoid going back to Argentina, in a facility managed by the Catholic Church itself.

As such, the facility, described by the Catholic hierarchy as “a convent,” lacks oversight and even if he is allegedly forced to spend his days there, there is no actual accountability about the enforcement of any measure to restrict his freedom to move, a far cry from the kind of conditions Argentine criminals face in local prisons. More tellingly, there is little in the form of a meaningful acknowledgement of what happened in his diocese and even less willingness to compensate his victims.

It should come as no surprise that far-right “media” outlets that waged a ten-year war on Pope Bergoglio, like Infovaticana in the Spanish-language world or Catholic Herald in the English-language sphere frequently invoked Zanchetta’s case as an example of how selective Francis’s efforts were—both in reining in sect-like organizations with a known record of abuse, like the Peruvian Sodalitium of Christian Life, and in advancing his broader reform program based on synodality.

Granted, Banach is an experienced Vatican diplomat, already in his fifth tour of duty as nuncio in countries or international organizations all over the world, but is he really aware of who he will invite to meet the Pope? Is he taking into consideration the effects of who does or does not receive such an invitation?

The main problem for many nuncios is that they are trained for the most part to deal with the peculiar intricacies of Church-State relations in any given country, making them well-suited to negotiate the details of diplomatic agreements in the halls of power, whether in the Casa Rosada, the seat of the Argentine Presidency in Buenos Aires or in any palace of government in Paris or Berlin, but ill-equipped to step into survivors’ shoes and comprehend the kind of living hell they have endured for years.

As Matías Montes, the Argentine survivor who came forward to testify against Zanchetta, recounts in the aforementioned story, many of the people who used to praise him after he entered the seminary in Orán would attack and even curse him and his family after he “spilled the beans” about his experience as a seminarian.

In France, the only meaningful invitation issued by the national conference of bishops to the private meeting with Pope Leo XIV was sent to Jean-Marie Delbos, a survivor of the large-scale abuse at the Bétharram Catholic school, at the eleventh hour—more as a damage control exercise to avoid the kind of snafu that happened in Madrid weeks before than as an acknowledgment of the many mistakes made by several dioceses in France over the last 40 years or so when handling clergy sexual abuse cases.

A couple of months before Leo XIV’s visit to France, there was little or no expectation of actual change as far as the clergy sexual abuse crisis was concerned, as the interview with Camille Rio, a French Catholic priest available after this paragraph, reported.

The rather loose information released over the last weeks of October seemed to imply that the potential guests to the meeting in Argentina will only be those survivors willing to go over the arcane “canonical track,” instead of the civil and/or penal tracks, where survivors have a chance to at least follow the details of their process. In that regard, it should not be surprising if again, as it happened in Spain and France, the meeting will be logged as “private,” and as such kept out of the official itinerary as if it never happened.

If that was not enough, the context in which Leo XIV’s visit to Argentina takes place is hardly the best. On the one hand, there is the issue of extreme polarization in the public sphere, with Milei frequently insulting not only the political left, but at least when he was a candidate to the Presidency, Pope Francis himself.

Even if some were willing to dismiss those attacks and assume that Pope Francis himself was kind enough to reconcile himself with Milei back in February 2024, as the story, published only in Spanish linked after this paragraph told then, or you can read an automatic translation to English here, the attacks against the kind of Catholicism promoted by Bergoglio are hardly over.

Although Milei these days avoids the kind of insults and attacks he used against Pope Francis, calling him at one point during an interview “the representative of the Malignant on Earth,” his surrogates are more than willing to attack Jorge García Cuerva, Francis’s successor in the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires.

Tellingly, to do so they use the kind of dogwhistles one finds in the United States from Donald Trump and his surrogates when attacking Francis and, more recently, when dismissing Pope Prevost as “soft on crime” or, more broadly, as “weak” because of his opposition to the death penalty, his unwillingness to join Trump “Peace Council” or his criticism of Trump’s inhumane migration policies.

In that regard, it is unclear what the goals of a meeting with survivors handpicked by Banach are—a prelate who, again, no doubt has the credentials to be the nuncio in Buenos Aires, but hardly possesses the knowledge of the intricacies of Argentine politics or the "muscle memory" of why Francis ultimately avoided returning to his home country.

On the other side of the Andes

Although nothing similar has happened in Peru, over the last week of October a network of survivors there published a rather harsh statement summarizing how tired they are of the lack of actual progress in the many clergy sexual abuse cases there, but also of how the meetings with survivors provide little or no actual resolution to the issue.

The e-card published in the social media post above states across three paragraphs how happy they are about his visit to his adoptive country, while explicitly recalling how survivors were handpicked by bishops in Spain, concluding in the final paragraph in red ink: “victims want changes in the Catholic Church, not pictures.”

More tellingly, the statement came after what used to be Twitter became a battlefield where José Enrique Escardó Steck played a leading role. Escardó was one of the earliest voices to denounce the abuse he and many other persons suffered as aspirants to become members of the Sodalitium of Christian Life in the first year of this century.

As such, he has been at the vanguard of a battle to tell the truth about what happened there, one that has been happening in a context far harder than the ones, much less regulated in Mexico or Argentina, or where the rights of survivors allow the media to run news without the perpetual fear of being hit by notices to “cease and desist” or the threats of actual litigation.

That is why, over his threads over social media Escardó frequently reminds how hard it has been for him and other survivors and journalists to report about allegations of abuse, much less to publish testimonies.

More recently, Escardó led the charge against the rather absurd decision of the Vatican’s Sala Stampa to issue credentials to cover Leo XIV’s Peruvian leg of his South American tour to La Abeja (The Bee), a website known for its radical support for the idea that no abuse ever happened at the Sodalitium of Christian Life and that the very notion of something similar to a clergy sexual abuse crisis in Peru (or anywhere else) is “fake news.”

La Abeja belongs to the radical conservative Catholic “media” ecosystem that, to this day, renders its church as the perpetual victim of a far and wide conspiracy that legitimizes the attacks on survivors and their families that Matías, the Argentine survivor, talks about.

La Abeja is a Spanish-language website that appears to be a news media operation but that in actuality belongs to a broader network of websites and organizations waging what in several Latin American countries is described as a “cultural battle,” sometimes even a “cultural war,” against a rather loose enemy broadly identified, following Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s example by deploying the vague notion of “cultural Marxism.”

Like the culture wars in the United States, the “cultural battle” in Latin America is fought with abortion as a political cleavage, the sole criteria to pick a side, and with no mercy for whoever challenges a full, absolute ban, on what is not even accepted as a legitimate medical procedure in some cases, but is often described as homicide.

It should be noted that “cultural Marxism” is by no means a scientific category. It was part of Peterson’s contribution to the cultural wars affecting Canada and the United States in the first decade of this century. It is a loose, catch-all category, that has been easily weaponized to encompass whatever person, group or organization the leaders of the “cultural battle” decide to pick a fight with.

A key figure of the Peruvian version of the “cultural battle” over the last ten years or so has been Giuliana Caccia. She has the “distinction” of being the target of an unusual form of excommunication issued by Pope Francis after Caccia and a surrogate went to the Nunciature to Peru to file a false report of abuse against a survivor of clergy sexual abuse at the Sodalitium.

Their real target was not that victim, who they were willing to revictimize for the sake of discrediting a priest and officer in the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Jordi Bertomeu Farnós, a Spaniard monsignor who has played a major role in the probes regarding the Chilean super predator Fernando Karadima and the one dealing with the Sodalitium of Christian Life. The story linked after this paragraph detailed, at the time, how and why Pope Francis issued an excommunication decree that included a fine against Caccia and her partner in that (canonical) crime.

It is unclear what the Sala Stampa’s goal was when issuing credentials to La Abeja, more so as the site repeatedly targeted Robert Prevost, the then bishop of Chiclayo, when he was the head of the committee within the Peruvian Conference of Bishops dealing with clergy sexual abuse.

Was it a way to “bury the hatchet” with La Abeja and what that website represents in Peru and Latin America at large? Was it an attempt at building a bridge with the most radical Peruvian and Latin American far-right? To achieve what goals? Or was it a sign of things to come at the Sala Stampa as the new prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, María Montserrat Alvarado—the former top executive of EWTN—takes over?

What is clear is that the decision to issue credentials to La Abeja backfired and forced more questions about what kind of criteria the Peruvian Conference of Bishops will use when issuing invitations to the meeting with survivors.

Over the last few years, this series has been following the specifics of the suppression of the Sodalitium, which still stands as an unknown. The latest of that subseries was published a few months ago when Cardinal Carlos Castillo Mattasoglio, the current head of the Archdiocese of Lima presided over a Mass and public apology issued by him and sadly limited number of Peruvian bishops, as the story linked below told.

None of the current leaders of the Peruvian Conference of Bishops attended the ceremony, which is, on its own a grim reminder of how hard is to actually suppress predatory and sect-like organizations as the Sodalitium.

The context is the key

The issue is ever more complex in Peru as both the current president of the conference and the former general secretary of the body have been named in the scandals involving their own dioceses.

Antonio Santarsiero Rosa, the bishop of Huacho, is the former general secretary of the episcopate. His case was featured in some detail in the story linked after this paragraph and, like Zanchetta in Argentina, he has been accused of abusing seminarians in his own diocese.

The current president of the conference is Carlos Enrique García Camader, the bishop of Lurín, who is accused of shielding Omar Sánchez Portillo, a celebrity-priest in his diocese with a profile of social activism and radical conservative and anti-abortion public statements, mixed with an unflinching disposition to use pictures and videos of himself “helping” marginalized people in his diocese and elsewhere in Peru to raise his social media profile.

Their complex relationship—where Sánchez Portillo commands a far larger social media reach than the combined accounts of García Camader and the diocese of Lurín—was the subject of the installment linked after this paragraph.

Also, it should be noted, as both stories about Santarsiero and García did, that both bishops were promoted to their current rank by the emeritus archbishop of Lima, Juan Luis Cipriani Thorné. Besides being the first member of Opus Dei ever to become a Cardinal, Cipriani was subject to a “disciplinary measure” by the late Pope Francis for the abuse of an underage male when Cipriani was a priest.

Sadly, following decades of secret practices and a misguided expectation that Cipriani had acknowledged his own mistakes, the “disciplinary measure,” the proverbial slap on the wrist, was only publicized after Cipriani was willing to disregard the sitting Pope’s authority to issue such penalties, as the section “Lima-Madrid-Rome Axis” in the story linked after this paragraph told back in January 2025.

On the invitation of fellow Opus Dei member and mayor of Lima, Rafael López Aliaga, Cipriani made public appearances in clerical garment during his days in Lima early in 2025, weeks before Pope Francis’s death. Soon after, media in both Madrid and Lima published a leaked report with the details of Pope Francis’s “disciplinary measures.”

Far from acknowledging any wrongdoing, Cipriani doubled down his challenge to the authority of the Pope and, following to the dot the victimization template used by many other predators before, the so-called DARVO strategy (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender), the former archbishop of the Peruvian capital portrayed himself as the victim of an attack.

After Pope Francis died, Cipriani went to Rome to participate in the public funerals of the dead Pontiff, dismissing again the “disciplinary measures” set on him by Pope Bergoglio.

If that was not enough, there is the pressing issue of Robert Prevost’s own record as bishop of Chiclayo when dealing with clergy sexual abuse cases there. This series published an installment when Prevost was still the prefect of the Dicastery of Bishops and, as such, the president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, linked after this paragraph.

As far ahead of the curve as Prevost was compared to his fellow Peruvian bishops on the issue of prevention, as he translated and adapted to Spanish and the specific circumstances of his diocese materials already developed by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the subject of prevention, there has been little or no advance on the side of reparation for the victims of abuse in the diocese of Chiclayo.

One of the most notable cases from Chiclayo is that of Ana María Quispe Díaz who, with two of her sisters, was the victim of a former priest of Chiclayo. She has become a reluctant celebrity, forced to revisit her case over and over again and confront how feeble the response of both civil authorities and the Peruvian Catholic hierarchy has been, as detailed in the story linked after this paragraph.

Moreover, there is no clear report on the kind of penalties, if any, that have been set on the clergy implicated in such cases. All that remains is the perception of an attempt to let the issue “die away,” as happens with so many other cases of clergy sexual abuse in Peru and across Latin America.

Post Data

Although Pope Leo XIV will not visit Bolivia this year, chances are his teams, especially those with some degree of specialization in the Andean region must be very active reporting about the latest developments in that country.

There the survivors of the large-scale abuse at the John XXIII Catholic School and Home, a facility run for many years by the Jesuits, are asking the Catholic Church to actually punish, with penalties up to excommunication, those clergy responsible for the abuse there. Sadly, even if such possibility exists, the chances of Rome pulling that kind of gun on the predators are rather slim.

As convoluted as it could be, if Rome was willing to issue such punishment, Rome also loses one of the few leverages it has over predatory or abusive clergy. One only needs to look at the behavior of those who have incurred such punishment—which, one must keep in mind, is only symbolic.

After John Paul II excommunicated bishops Marcel Lefebvre and Antônio de Castro Mayer, the two bishops who on June 30, 1988, were willing to consecrate Alfonso de Galarreta, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Bernard Fellay and Richard Nelson Williamson, any actual communication with the leaders of the Society of Saint Pius X ended and even if Benedict XVI wasted lots of time and effort on seeking some kind of reconciliation, none was ever achieved and three of them were willing to do the same as recently as earlier this year.

Sadly, the way Rome deals with survivors of clergy sexual abuse frequently puts them into corners where they end up asking for measures that even if able to carry some cultural and symbolic impact, would eventually help the predators, as they would be free of their obligations as clergy in the Catholic Church.

The Bolivian survivors’ request is meaningful, but ultimately would help the Catholic Church dismiss any potential future responsibility regarding the individuals named by the survivors as targets for such punishment.

Finally, in Mexico the national conference of bishops had the general secretary of Tutela Minorum, Luis Manuel Alí Herrera, a former auxiliary bishop in Bogotá, Colombia whom Pope Prevost appointed, in January, as “apostolic vicar” of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome.

Ali Herrera’s visit to Mexico, October 27-28, was to participate in a national meeting of the diocesan commissions responsible for the prevention of clergy sexual abuse in that country. More than the meeting as such, what deserves attention is the fact that the Mexican Conference of Bishops redesigned the microsite where one finds some information about such commissions.

Although now they claim that 95 dioceses are in full compliance, the information is still insufficient. In some cases, the PDF files with the data from each diocese have been misplaced; in others, instead of offering the actual names of the members of each diocesan commission, the CEM microsite links to random pages within the very same domain; and, in others, it links to diocesan websites that fail to provide the required information.

A more detailed analysis of the recent changes will be offered in the coming weeks, including how many members of such commissions are clergy themselves, rendering such commissions a hard-to-believe proposition, as the expectation is that clergy will be monitoring predator clergy.

The key issue for Leo XIV’s Latin American trip is not whether he meets with survivors in Argentina or Peru, nor whether bishops in Bolivia or Mexico are willing to issue new statements, redesign websites or convene new commissions. Those things are easy enough to do. The harder question is why, after decades of revelations, scandals, reports, reforms, apologies and promises, survivors across Latin America continue to describe so many of the same frustrations.

Now, the Bolivian survivors petition what could be the ultimate punishment for a good practicing Catholic, but who expects sexual predators who systematically violated the sanctity of the sacraments to be tamed by such purely symbolic punishment?

From the struggle over who gets invited to speak with the Pope, to the uncertainty about penalties, reparations and transparency, the pattern remains remarkably familiar. As Tutela Minorum prepares to publish its third annual report, the challenge facing the Catholic Church is no longer understanding the crisis. It is demonstrating, through actions rather than declarations, that clergy sexual abuse has finally become the priority it has so often claimed to be.

Perhaps that is why, despite the many changes of the last twenty years, the crisis remains so difficult to leave behind. The debate is no longer about whether clergy sexual abuse exists or whether reforms are necessary. The question is whether the issue has truly become a governing priority for the institution. Across Latin America, the evidence remains mixed at best.

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A summary of this piece is available as audio after this paragraph.

Note on production: The text of this summary was written and edited solely by the author. The delivery of the audio summary was achieved using a high-quality, text-to-speech engine Microsoft Word for Web. The AI was used for voice generation only, not content creation.