What happened in August 2026 in the clergy sexual abuse crisis?

Abuse in organizations like Schönstatt, the Sodalitium or the Heralds of the Gospel has a systemic nature nurtured by the sectarian practices that set them apart.

Such practices evolve from notions of obedience, loyalty and discipline, limiting the ability of their faithful to acknowledge the risk of becoming victims of abuse.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

As the year progresses, it is really hard to keep track of the many developments affecting a crisis that is not exclusive to a single religious organization, region or country. Some of the most recent developments have already been covered in this series, but some other are almost impossible to detail, but also would be dangerous to dismiss.

The most notable of them all came from Brazil in the last days of August. There, a public prosecutor decided to declare herself unable to go after an order-like organization that has been considered in several installments of this series, the so called Arautos do Evangelho, Portuguese for Heralds of the Gospel.

Following the most faithful possible translation the Brazilian public prosecutor office decided to cease any further probe and to send the file to the archives (arquivamento) due to lack of criminal jurisdiction. It was not even, as it has happened recently in Chile and Argentina, following the route of the statute of limitations (prescrição).

Although, as it has been the case in Chile with Felipe Berríos, it was neither an acquittal nor an absolution. It only acknowledges the restrictions set on the stone of the Brazilian understanding of justice to go after said leadership. Given the gravity and complexity of that case, the next week’s installment will be entirely devoted to it.

Putting that case aside it should be noted that as Leo XIV’s tour of France approaches, there is a mix of news coming from there. Last week this series went over the proposal made by a group of survivors of clergy sexual abuse. Sadly, as it is usually the case, when proposals or statements like that do not come with some pressure from media, legacy or otherwise, the disposition of the Catholic hierarchy in both Rome and Paris is far from present.

At the same time, tellingly, Mouv’Enfants is mobilizing against the event (their website is available in French here). The organization’s name is a contraction of the words for movement and children in French and they are aiming, in the context of the Pope’s visit, to prevent the celebration of what some expect would be a massive public Mass at a centric Parisian location: the Place de la Concorde, near the southern-most tip of the Champs Elysees.

Mouv’Enfants demand stresses one of France’s oldest political cleavages: that of the limits set already by the Third French Republic through the 1905 so-called Laicité Law on public displays of religious faith and practice.

It is a deeply sensitive issue in contemporary France; invoking strict laïcité is the same legal and political lever historically pulled in debates to restrict public Islamic practices, such as bans on face-covering veils, the so-called burkas. By turning this same secularist doctrine against a high-profile Papal Mass, Mouv’Enfants demonstrates how contention over religious presence in the French public square can be deployed from multiple political angles.

In that respect, even if choosing the Place de la Concorde, could be seen as an attempt by the Vatican and French authorities to allow for the celebration of this Mass as a sign of harmony, Mouv’Enfants and the NGOs challenging the permits (content in French), are hinting how contentious the issue is, more so as Mouv’Enfants came to exist within the context of the sexual abuse crisis testing the efficiency of the French judiciary system, not only on cases related to clergy abuse, but also of abuse within family and school contexts.

The Instagram posting after this paragraph is part of Mouv’Enfants current campaign to prevent the Mass from happening in that public space.

The Mass is scheduled for Saturday, September 26 as Leo XIV’s last public activity in the French capital before heading to the Basilica of Our Lady of Lourdes, near the border with Spain, as detailed in the revised itinerary available over the Holy See’s website here.

Notably, the itinerary now registers a private meeting on Sunday with the contemplative religious sisters that live in a Carmelite monastery located within the complex of the Basilica. The private meeting with the nuns will happen at 16:45 local time, after the Mass to be celebrated in the gardens of the complex and another meeting with the staff working there and the ill people seeking, as it is usually the case, to recover their health through the intercession of Our Lady of Lourdes.

Sadly, unlike the private meeting with the Carmelite nuns or the meeting the Pope will have with the French Conference of Bishops at 9 AM that day, the meeting that allegedly will happen with French survivors of clergy sexual abuse remains out of the official itinerary in one of many contradictory signs sent by both the Holy See and the leaders of the Catholic Church in France.

Such decision is harder to understand when one takes into consideration that one of the many developments in the clergy sexual abuse crisis over the month of August was the announcement made by the aforementioned leaders of a new entity responsible for accepting the claims made by potential victims of sexual abuse in Catholic settings.

The need to drop the “clergy” from that reference to abuse is not of style. It reflects a pattern evident in many other countries and regions. Abuse in Catholic contexts is not limited to those officially acknowledged as clergy, whether by religious leaders or by the authorities of any given country.

It often includes religious or consecrated individuals, both females and males, seminarians, who technically are only aspiring members of the clergy, and laypersons who occupy powerful positions in religious structures. More on this kind of cases when dealing with the latest developments in Argentina further down.

The new entity in France is the successor of the efforts leading originally, during the previous decade to the so-called Sauvé Report. The report has been frequently cited in this series as the most consistent success in any European country by the Catholic Church to figure out what actually happened in its sacristies, parochial houses, schools, orphanages and charities.

It was with the algorithms offered by the Sauvé Report that, back in 2023, this series was able to offer a global estimate of the scale of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in countries with populations of at least one million Catholics, as the story linked after this paragraph shows.

It played a major role in uncovering, among many other cases, that of the so-called Abbé Pierre, a charismatic priest who was, already during the II World War a major figure in Catholic-led initiatives in France and all over to world to address, with some success, major issues, as the story linked after this paragraph told back in 2024.

The new French entity was briefly identified as Renaître (Rebirth) and it will take over the duties of the so-called National Entity of Acknowledgment and Reparation (INIRR after its French name as Instance Nationale Indépendante de Reconnaissance et de Réparation, content in French).

The chair of the former INIRR is Marie Derain de Vaucresson. She has explained the change as an attempt to acknowledge the need to go from initial hearing and discovery of the scale of the crisis to a stage focused on “sustained organizational oversight” and reparations which remain, all over the world a major concern for survivors.

Back in March the entity published a summary report of their 2025 activities. During that year, they handled 270 cases and during that same year they started 306 new processes of what in Catholic circles is called accompaniment, which in this specific context refers to a process that includes hearing a victim’s complaints or accusations and trying to figure out a solution when it is possible to reach an agreement on how to address the issue.

A trend already evident in other countries is that the old story of clergy sexual abuse as an issue allowing the Catholic Church to attack gay men as if their sexual identity was, per se, the reason for the sexual abuse of minors, is no longer sustainable. Not only one third of the 1,786 total victims acknowledged as such by INIRR are females, but in many cases the victims were not necessarily underaged, although nine of each ten victims in the INIRR “sample” were minors when the abuse begun.

The March 2026 INIRR report is available, although only in French, as a PDF after this paragraph.

It should be noticed that the very issue of how to call the new entity in the French Catholic Church became contentious almost immediately. By the time the name of the chair of the new entity, the former judge Sophie Darbois (content in French and behind a paywall), was known, it had gone from Renaître to the National Independent to Accompany Victims in the Church, (INIAVE, after its original French Entity Instance nationale indépendante d’accompagnement des victimes dans l’Église).

Given Leo XIV’s unwillingness to acknowledge his meeting with French survivors of sexual abuse in Catholic settings it is really hard to bet big on the future of the new French entity, although it would be infantile to dismiss the fact that Darbois is not a canonical judge.

One is able to find her name and to trace her career going all the way back to 1990 in French government sources. That year she got a major appointment to the national bench available, although only in French, here.

In that respect, when looking from a distance it is easy to praise the steps taken over the last ten years by the French Conference of Catholic Bishops, as they have gone from commissioning what is up until now the most complete survey on sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise in France, to acknowledging the scale of the abuse and now appoint a former judge to preside over the entity commissioned with moving forward the issue.

Sadly, if one goes over the social media of many of the associations of victims in France the advantages of the French model are not easy to find, and there are French survivors pushing hard to follow the example set by the Argentine Network of Survivors of Clergy Abuse of dismissing and even rejecting any potential encounter or dialogue with the hierarchy of what, for many of them is already their former church, as there is a perception of betrayal, double-talk and gaslighting that, with the unavoidable cultural and linguistic differences is almost the same whether one goes over cases in the United States, Argentina, Mexico, Germany or France.

Despite these feelings, evident in many of the postings shared by survivors all over the world, it should be noted that rather late on Friday September 4, the account of one of the groups of survivors of the massive, systematic, and multigenerational abuse at the now defunct Catholic school of Bétharram, published a brief message over Facebook sharing the news of the participation of one of their members in the private, off-schedule, meeting Leo XIV is having in the complex of the Basilica of Our Lady of Lourdes.

The news was more relevant as, a few hours before, they were hit with a negative response to their claim, as reported originally by French media (content in French).

The message is only available on a private Facebook group, but it reads: “We are pleased to learn that a victim of sexual assault by the Priests of Bétharram will be among the seven victims received by the Pope. This is a recognition for all of them.”

The news was confirmed later by local French media in the Pyrenees region, as can be seen here at Sudouest (content in French).

Whatever one may think of the shortcomings of the French model and how the Vatican has handled the visits to Spain and France, labeling the meetings with survivors as “private” while acknowledging other “private” meetings as worth of being included in the official itinerary, the decision to entrust the new entity to a career judge rather than a Church official is itself evidence that the French bishops understand the crisis cannot be managed exclusively through internal church structures and procedures.

On Saturday night in France, local media informed (content in French) that the sole survivor of the large-scale abuse at the now-defunct Catholic school of Bétharram to attend the private meeting will be Jean-Marie Delbos. In 2025, Camille Rio, a French Catholic priest recently interviewed in this series, published an article in Los Ángeles Press offering details, among other topics, on how Delbos became a key figure in speaking out and bringing resolution to the demands of the survivors from that Catholic school. The text is available after this paragraph.

On the other shore

On the other side of the Atlantic, things are far from smooth, even if the governments of both Argentina and Peru do their best to out perform each other. So far, sadly, the most outrageous bid is one reported on Friday by El Comercio, one of the papers of record in Lima, the capital of Peru.

On their front page they have a story about what is up until now a proposal to build a 14-meters (45-feet) tall statue (content in Spanish) to celebrate the return of Robert Prevost Martínez, the former bishop of Chiclayo, to his adoptive land.

There was already since 2025 a proposal to build a 5-meter (16-feet) statue to celebrate the election of the “first Peruvian Pope,” to be placed on a public space in what used to be his diocese, in Chiclayo (content in Spanish).

Oddly enough the new, larger, statue is scheduled to be placed in El Callao, a rather posh region near Lima where, back in 2020, Prevost was appointed as apostolic administrator after Pope Francis forced out of office José Luis del Palacio y Pérez-Medel.

The main problem is how Leo XIV will respond to this. In France, as bad as the situation is due to his unwillingness to acknowledge the private meeting as an official act of his pontificate, at least the French Conference of Bishops are willing to move forward the debate by appointing a former judge to the new entity dealing with the consequences of clergy sexual abuse.

In Peru, there is nothing similar, and even his own tenure in Chiclayo has been the target of several unresolved questions. Before he was elected Pope, this series was already documenting the issues affecting his tenure, as proven by the story linked before this paragraph.

It is true that Eleuterio Vázquez Gonzáles, the priest accused of attacking the Quispe Díaz sisters in Chiclayo (see the story linked after this paragraph), has been already defrocked, but so far that is the only measure taken by the Peruvian hierarchy and by Leo XIV himself, but it should not be hard to understand that as good as preventing that now former priest from performing as such is, that is not enough.

What is then the message that the Vatican will send to the Peruvian, Latin American and other global survivors if, instead of at least following the lead set by the French bishops, the great debate in Peru these days is who will build the largest, the tallest statute? What is the limit? Is five meters enough, is 14 meters the limit?

This is even more relevant as neither Pope Francis nor Leo XIV have ever been straight-forward as to what happened in Callao during Robert Prevost’s tenure as apostolic administrator there.

Although Del Palacio avoided originally a conflict with Francis and then bishop Prevost, lately Del Palacio has come forward over his social media with criticism of the way Francis forced him out of office.

The story linked after this paragraph, from January, offered more details of how that appointment happened, and how it fits the patterns described in that piece of using apostolic administrators as an ad-hoc solution when something wrong happens in any given diocese.

As told there, Del Palacio is a member of the so-called Neo-Catechumenal Way an order like organization in the Catholic Church with a long record of documented abuses.

In the English-speaking world the most notable was that of the head of the archdiocese of Agaña, the capital of Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific Ocean. As it happened with Del Palacio, Anthony Sablan Apuron, originally a Capuchin friar who also is a member of the Neo-Catechumenal Way, was forced out early from his duties, although in his case there was more clarity about the reasons behind his early resignation.

A measure of how endemic is abuse in the Neo-Catechumenal Way, whose members are usually known as “Kikos” in the Spanish-speaking world, only last week Pope Leo XIV expelled from the priesthood a Costar Rica-born priest who has made most of his career in the United States after, back in 2025, a court in Idaho found him guilty of sexual abuse of a minor.

Robert Méndez Esquivel’s penal trial in Idaho was finalized a year ago, as reported by local media, but it was only last week that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith shared the news about his defrocking.

How far the Peruvian political elites will take the “game of statues” is anybody’s guess. Keiko Fujimori appointed as the liaison to coordinate the Pope’s visit to his adoptive country none other than Rodrigo Boluarte Chávez (content in Spanish).

He is a Peruvian career diplomat, a signal that it is business as usual in the land of the Inca and, on top of the appointment, the Fujimori administration already declared Pope Leo XIV’s return to Peru a matter of “national interest” so, unlike what one sees in France, with specific challenges to the very legality of a public mass, in Peru the sky is the limit as far as how far the public displays of religious practice will go, statues included.

It is not as if Peru is exempt from the bitter experience of clergy sexual abuse. As bad as the Kikos have been in Guam, Idaho, Spain and elsewhere in the Catholic world, Peru is anything but short of dangerous predatory religious organizations.

This series has been tracking the development of the crisis at the Sodalitium of Christian Life. As told in the story linked after this paragraph, the most recent on that issue, the crisis in that formally dissolved order-like organization, is far from solved.

The dissolution or canonical suppression is only a fraction of the problem when considering the fact that, on top of the abuse, sexual and otherwise, perpetrated against the aspiring members of that group, there is also the issue of the land grabs performed with the complicity of a well connected web of Peruvian politicos and entrepreneurs who were “wise” enough to cover their bases and build a complex enough structure that the Vatican suppression has no practical effects on it.

That, not to mention the fact that the risk of the Sodalitium becoming a series of diocesan associations of the faithful in Denver, Philadelphia and in dioceses in Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Peru is still as clear and present as it was when, with the last beats of his heart, Pope Francis signed the paperwork to suppress that organization.

In other words, when comparing at the ways France and Peru get ready to welcome Pope Leo XIV, it is unavoidable to wonder, while as imperfect as the French response is, why Peru invests so much energy in commemoration, image management, monuments, and symbolism while accountability questions remain unresolved and even unaddressed?

As the stories linked above and below prove, there is little or no expectation of a major change coming from the leaders of the Peruvian Conference of Bishops as both the current president and the former general secretary face serious accusations of failing to address the clergy sexual abuse crisis there, while pushing hard a pastoral model promoting political radicalization, conspiracy theories and other maladies of contemporary political populism.

Other developments

Finally, there are new developments in Argentina and Colombia. In Argentina, one of the most atrocious cases in the country, that of the Próvolo Institute, a school where deaf underaged kids were victims of sexual abuse at the hands of priests, nuns and lay personnel working there was reopened by the judge dealing with the case of Kumiko Kosaka, a nun who was originally acquitted in 2023.

On August 24, the Superior Tribunal in the province of Mendoza, in western Argentina, revoked the not-guilty ruling of a lower court. The nun was declared guilty of at least two instances of clergy sexual abuse as Horacio Corbacho’s accomplice and of at least three additional instances of sexual abuse on her own.

A similar outcome, although still in the first, local, court came from the trial of Patricio Cruz Viale, a priest and member of the so-called Schönstatt Fathers, an order originally born in Germany, with deep influence and wide presence in Argentina and Chile. Besides Cruz Viale, who was convicted for the abuse of a victim, their most noted predator is Francisco José Cox Huneeus, the former head of the Archdiocese of La Serena, Chile, who was the main character in the story linked above.

Cruz Viale’s case proves, as if it was necessary, that abuse in organizations like Schönstatt, that put a premium on a sectarian understanding of reality, including the Catholic Church itself, is a systemic problem, nurtured by notions of obedience, loyalty and discipline, able to inoculate their members’ ability to make decisions on their own and, because of that, protect predators like Cox Huneeus who only at the very end of his life faced something similar to a punishment, inasmuch as he was laicized or defrocked.

The role of obedience in facilitating abuse has been widely documented in the literature on sexual abuse at large. It was recently the subject of a piece by Hermina Nedelescu, a scientist and survivor of clergy sexual abuse at her Christian Orthodox Church, available at Prosopon Healing here.

Some details of Cruz Viale’s case were first mentioned in this series in the story linked before this paragraph in the section titled “Schönstatt, again,” and most recently on the one linked under this paragraph in the “And Latin America too” section.

Moving north, to Colombia, the news is not so encouraging as the new government of Abelardo de la Espriella appointed as its minister of Education a member of Cepromelat, the so-called Center to Protect Minors of the Latin American Council of Bishops.

Ilva Miriam Hoyos Castañeda is a lawyer close to both the Colombian Conference of Bishops and Opus Dei, as she earned a doctoral degree from the flagship university of that order-like organization in the Catholic world, the Universidad de Navarra in northern Spain.

A previous installment in this series, linked above, offered some details of Hoyos Castañeda’s attitudes towards the issue of clergy sexual abuse in Catholic contexts when going over Cepromelat’s role in dealing with the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Latin America.

As told there, Hoyos Castañeda has gone as far as to portray herself as a victim of journalist Miguel Ángel Estupiñán (available here in Spanish) who, based on the existing legislation in that country, has shed some light on some of the many cases of sexual abuse, which are reported in a book titled El archivo secreto (The Secret Archive), published in Colombia.

The story by Estupiñán that provoked that reaction in someone who is also an advisor to the national Colombian Conference of Bishops is available here (content in Spanish).

What Hoyos Castañeda’s appointment will mean for the clergy sexual abuse victims in Colombia is not hard to imagine as she is a hardliner, ever dismissive of accusations, with a taste for inserting herself in the most radical corners of the Latin American Catholic right and in close proximity with Opus Dei.

On that note, the order-like organization founded by Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer once again grabbed worldwide headlines as El País published the contents of a couple of letters written by the late Pope Francis that describe the difficult relation they had with Ángel Javier Pérez Pueyo, the bishop of Barbastro-Monzón, Spain, as the story linked after this paragraph told back in October 2025.

One must keep in mind that De la Espriella sees himself as promoting the so-called “cultural battle,” which is how the Latin American far-right justifies its own brand of politics nowadays in ways all too similar to those of noted members of the Peruvian Sodalitium, as in the case of Giuliana Caccia, a leader of that order-like organization with the dubious honor of having earned an excommunication from Pope Francis.

She did so after going to the Nunciature in Lima to pretend she was the victim of a member of that same organization, the Sodalitium, who had filed a credible accusation of clergy sexual abuse against his superiors (see the story linked after this paragraph).

Moving further north, to Sacramento, California, a law recently approved has the potential to prevent victims of sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise, from coming forward. SB577 has the potential to make it almost impossible for victims over 40 to come forward, tell their stories and seek a solution.

According to the data revealed by the Sexual Predator Accountability Institute, an advocacy NGO specialized on these issues, the average age at which survivors of sexual abuse find the required strength to come forward is 52. They are calling California Governor Gavin Newsom to veto the bill.

You can go over SPAI position on the issue in their social media or at their website, where you can get additional information about how to support their efforts to ask Newsom to veto the bill.

Finally, moving further north, to Canada, over the last day of August, there was news about the trial of Cardinal Marc Armand Ouellet. He was acquitted by the courts, which ordered the woman who originally named him to pay him $100,000 Canadian and ruled that her identity will be officially revealed.

According to Justice Martin Castonguay, Paméla Groleau’s accusations against Ouellet were unfounded and lacked credibility as Groleau changed her story several times, going further to say that she would be the “only one” to classify their interactions as sexual abuse.

According to a paragraph in the ruling, Castonguay found the allegations described Groleau as “false.” Pamela Groleau accused Ouellet of touching her without consent on three occasions between 2008 and 2010, while she was training or working as a lay pastoral agent for the Catholic Church in Quebec.

As soon as the ruling was public, Ouellet claimed he was going to donate the money coming from Groleau, while Vatican News immediately told the story of the trial’s outcome in pieces in at least four languages (English, French, Spanish and Italian), with Catholic outlets in the French and English-speaking worlds amplifying the news.

Ouellet is particularly sensitive for the Catholic Church in Canada and all over the world because he was a powerful figure during Popes Benedict XVI’s and Francis’s tenures as he presided the now Dicastery for Bishops, and as such he presided over the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.

He was Robert Prevost's predecessor there and, as such, he played a major role in bishops’ appointments in Latin America and all over the world.

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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.