Pope Leo Becomes First Pontiff to Meet with Catholic Sex Abuse Victims Group

While other popes have met with victims, Leo XIV's encounter marks the first-ever papal meeting with an organized group of abuse survivors and advocates.

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For the first time in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church, a pope sat down officially with a coalition of clergy sex-abuse survivors, listened to their personal testimonies, and heard their proposals for reform.

This week’s hour-long meeting with six End Clergy Abuse representatives — hailing from North America, Europe, Africa, and Latin America — was described by participants as “historic and hope-filled.”

“Survivors have long sought a seat at the table, and today we felt heard,” said Gemma Hickey of ECA, calling the encounter a meaningful step toward “justice, healing and genuine change.

Building on Benedict and Francis

This landmark meeting builds on incremental steps taken by Pope Leo’s predecessors.

In 2008, Pope Benedict XVI became the first pontiff to meet privately with victims of clerical sexual abuse, breaking a long-held Vatican silence.

Pope Francis went further in the legal realm — he was the first to overhaul Vatican norms on abuse by expelling prominent offenders (such as ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick) and by abolishing the secrecy that had shrouded abuse cases.

Francis removed several bishops who were complicit in cover-ups and changed Church laws to hold bishops accountable for negligence. Yet even as Francis made the abuse crisis a priority, his results were often seen as mixed.

The hard truth is that decades of abuse scandals had badly eroded the Church’s credibility, costing it the trust of the faithful and hundreds of millions in legal settlements.

Coming of Age Amid the Scandal

As someone who came of age during the eruption of the U.S. Church’s abuse crisis, I carry a personal understanding of what is at stake.

I was one of Pope Francis’s biggest cheerleaders in the media — yet I did not shy away from criticizing his record on this issue.

In a 2018 TIME op-ed, I warned that Francis’s very legacy “is at stake” in his approach to the sex-abuse scandal, along with “the viability of the Catholic Church itself.”

That alarm was born of experience: the 2002 revelations of widespread abuse and cover-ups in the American Church emptied our pews and shattered the faith of countless Catholics.

As a millennial Catholic in the United States, I witnessed how the scandal nearly destroyed my community’s trust in its pastors. It’s with that sobering experience that I now look to Pope Leo XIV with both hope and urgency on this front.

Towards Global Zero Tolerance

The most important step Pope Leo could take is to go well beyond the initial moves of Benedict and Francis — by making “zero tolerance” a truly universal policy in the Church.

In the United States, the bishops’ 2002 Dallas Charter mandated that any priest who commits even one act of sexual abuse is permanently removed from ministry.

That zero-tolerance rule, born out of the Boston Globe revelations and known in every American parish, remains local Church law in the U.S. but is not yet the global standard.

There is no good reason why a child in one country should be less protected than a child in another.

The survivors’ coalition that met Pope Leo this week urged him to enshrine a universal zero-tolerance law, emphasizing the need for consistent global norms and survivor-centered policies.

I share that hope. Pope Leo XIV’s willingness to meet an activist survivors’ network — something no pope before has done — is an encouraging sign.

But it will only become truly historic if he follows it with concrete action: a Vatican-backed, worldwide zero-tolerance policy that holds abusers and their enablers accountable everywhere.

Such a reform would not only build on the work of his predecessors; it would help restore the moral credibility of the Church for generations to come.

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