Pope Leo XIV Adopts Hands-Off Approach to Promotion of Predator Priests

Pontiff maintains public silence as fresh explosion of clerical sex abuse scandals makes headlines

Pope Leo XIV is embracing a non-interventionist policy in tackling clerical sex abuse, even in prominent cases when a bishop has promoted a convicted predator priest and the Vatican has reinstated a cleric convicted of child pornography.

While Leo is drawing thousands of tourists to papal audiences at his summer residence, a fresh eruption of clerical sex abuse scandals in Europe is prompting victims and their advocates to question Leo’s inaction on the issue of sexual misconduct among priests.

Leo has yet to respond to a leading German victim support organization asking him to include laymen and women in the Dicastery for Doctrine of the Faith to help deal with abuser priests; the 18 priests in the DDF, they say, “cannot prosecute cases of abuse all over the world.”

Eckiger Tisch, who expressed outrage over the Cologne archdiocese’s refusal to compensate Melanie F, a girl whom Fr. Hans Ue adopted as foster daughter and repeatedly raped, resulting in two abortions, has also asked Leo to open the Vatican archives to inquiries.

“This will be a mammoth task, as information on thousands of cases of abuse from all over the world has been collected in Vatican records over decades,” Tisch stated. Advocates look forward to Leo’s papacy with “cautious optimism” and with “clear expectations” of him.

Clergy Sex Scandals Rock France

In a July 11 op-ed, The Pillar questioned Leo’s non-intervention after Catholics expressed outrage over the promotion of Fr. Dominique Spina, a French priest who was sentenced in 2005 to four years in jail for raping a 16-year-old boy in the early 1990s. The Vatican did not defrock Spina.

The archbishop of Toulouse, Guy de Kerimel, sparked headlines after he promoted Spina as archdiocesan chancellor on June 2. Kerimel defended Spina’s elevation to the top position in the diocesan bureaucracy, claiming that he had “chosen the path of mercy.”

Spina forced a high school student from an abusive home, who wanted to become a priest and who relied on him as a spiritual guide, into oral sex and other acts.

“As the archbishop doubles down in the face of criticism, the case seems almost certain to find itself on the desk of Pope Leo XIV, whose judgment on the case would speak volumes about what the Church can expect of the pontiff’s approach to safeguarding,” The Pillar’s editors observed.

Spina’s promotion comes in the wake of the high-profile case of the late Fr. Henri Antoine Grouès, a celebrity priest known as an advocate of the poor and founder of Emmaus International. He sexually assaulted multiple women between the late 1970s and 2005.

An independent report published July 9 revealed 12 new accusations of assault were levied against Grouès, bringing the number of accusers up to 45. Seven of the latest accusations were allegedly committed against minors. Grouès, popularly known as Abbé Pierre, died in 2007.

On July 2, a French parliamentary inquiry published its report about rape, sexual abuse, and violence at Notre-Dame de Bétharram, a private Catholic school in southwestern France. It is thought to be the biggest school child abuse scandal in French history.

The 330-page report is a result of 200 complaints filed since February 2024, accusing priests and staff of abuse from 1957 to 2004. A victim named Boris, who was sexually assaulted on his fourteenth birthday by principal Fr. Pierre Silviet-Carricart, labeled the school “a supermarket for sexual predators.”

Predator Priest on Leo’s Doorstep

Meanwhile, the Vatican has given a job and housing at the residence for papal ambassadors to another predator priest, who was previously sentenced to five years in prison for possession and exchange of child pornography, InfoVaticana reported.

According to Spanish media, Fr. Carlo Alberto Capella, a former Vatican diplomat to India, Hong Kong, and Washington, is living “just a few meters from where Pope Leo XIV himself resides.

“If [Leo] truly wants to break this network — and not just with generic declarations — he will have to start by explaining why a convicted priest like Capella remains under the Vatican roof.”

The spotlight has fallen even more clearly on Leo amidst accusations that his religious order, the Augustinians, remains reluctant to increase transparency and reform when it comes to the clerical sex abuse of minors, according to the Chicago Sun Times.

Last year, the Augustinians produced a list of priests credibly charged with sexual abuse who are currently on active duty or retired. But that came only “after a drumbeat of negative news coverage” over sex abuse and child pornography charges against Fr. Richard McGrath, the head of Providence Catholic High School in New Lenox, but McGrath’s name was not on the list, it reported.

A Chicago-area priest told the Sun Times: “What really bothers me about this new pope is that no matter what his theological background, just like other priests and bishops, he housed predators near a school.”

Even in Leo’s adopted country of Peru, the archbishop of Lima is boasting that he enjoys the pope’s confidence and expects to remain in office for five more years despite accusations of bungling the case of Fr. Nilton Zárate Rengifo. Zárate is accused of sexually harassing a nun, solicitating sexual favors in the confessional, asking her for intimate pictures, and seeking mutual masturbation during a phone call. He has not been subject to a formal canonical disciplinary procedure.

Victims and Advocates Warn of Leo’s Inaction

In a BBC interview, clerical sex abuse survivor Chris O’Leary addressed Leo directly, saying: “Talk is cheap. Show me.” In a post on X, O’Leary wrote: “When it comes to (child) sexual abuse and the Catholic Church, things will NOT get better under Pope Leo, who, as I told the BBC (World Service), is a clericalist, priest supremacist, worst-case scenario pope.”

In another post, he wrote, “Why wasn’t Fr. Dominique Spina laicized? Clericalism. Priest supremacism. The same clericalism and sense of priest supremacy that Pope Leo XIV appears to have embraced. So I will be REALLY surprised if Pope Leo does the (obviously) right thing. Priests are supreme (to him).”

Monsignor Gene Gomulka, a sex abuse investigator and writer, told The Stream that Leo’s “inaction in the case of several recent cases of predator priests leads me to believe that the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests was prescient when it filed a Vos estis lux mundi complaint against Cardinal Robert Prevost before his papal election, documenting a history of ‘mishandling cases of sexual abuse committed by priests.

“What the media has not reported is how Pope Leo promoted Washington Cardinal Robert McElroy, knowing that he not only covered up abuse in San Diego, but that he is currently covering up abuse allegations by former seminarians against two of his priests, Fathers Adam Park and Carter Griffin.”

Gomulka, a former naval chaplain, also said that Leo has yet to probe and discipline the recently retired Omaha Archbishop George Lucas, accused by Lisa Roers of covering up her abuse and engaging in multiple other immoral acts mentioned in lawsuits in New York State and St. Louis that were reported in the documentary Clerical Orgies: The Rome Connection.

While Leo has been praised for ordering the abusive ultraconservative Sodalitium Christianae Vitae to disband just weeks before he was elected pontiff, he has been accused of failing to sufficiently investigate claims by three women that priests had abused them as children.

The women and their advocates say that Leo, while serving as bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, conducted a superficial investigation that led the Vatican to close their case relatively quickly. He also did not stop one of the accused priests, Fr. Eleuterio Vásquez, from public ministry during the inquiry.

Leo then appointed Fr. Julio Ramírez to counsel the women. But Ramírez warned them that they should not expect Rome to bring down the hammer on the accused priests because their abuse had not involved “penetration,” The New York Times reported.

“Survivors don’t trust him,” said Peter Isely, a founding member of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. “He’s going to have to prove his trustworthiness, and he’s going to have to bend over backwards to prove it.”

Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni told The New York Times that Prevost’s investigation went “beyond the requisites” and included receiving a written report from the women and searching the archives of the diocese for similar accusations against Vásquez.

Critics have said Leo’s recent appointment of French archbishop Thibault Verny as the new leader of the Vatican’s commission on clergy sexual abuse is only cosmetic.

In 2001, a 2,500-page report based on church, court, and police archives as well as interviews with witnesses revealed that 3,000 priests and lay leaders abused around 330,000 children in the French Catholic Church from 1950 to 2020.

Originally published in The Stream.

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Dr. Jules Gomes (BA, BD, MTh, PhD) has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.