The newly elected Pope Leo XIV, the first North American to ascend the papal throne in the Catholic Church’s 2,000-year history, has begun his pontificate under a cloud of scandal, amid mounting accusations that he turned a blind eye to credible child sex abuse claims during his time as a bishop in both Chicago and Peru.
Robert Prevost, the former Bishop of Chiclayo in northern Peru and a Chicago native, was selected on Thursday by a conclave of 135 cardinals to succeed Pope Francis, who resigned earlier this year citing ill health.
But within hours of white smoke billowing from the Sistine Chapel, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) issued a blistering statement, as reported by Newsweek, condemning the choice and warning that Prevost’s election risked further undermining the Church’s credibility in the fight against clerical abuse.
“You can’t cover up sexual abuse and be a good priest,” said Lopez de Casas, a clergy abuse survivor and national vice president of SNAP. “Staying silent is a sin. It’s not what God wants us to do.”
SNAP claims it raised concerns about Prevost’s alleged inaction well before the conclave convened, sending detailed documentation to voting cardinals. At the centre of the claims is the case of Father James Ray, an Augustinian priest accused of molesting minors in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Despite being removed from public ministry, Ray was allowed to reside at the St. John Stone Friary in Hyde Park – less than 200 yards from a Catholic elementary school – during Prevost’s tenure as provincial superior.
Church records later obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times revealed that officials had downplayed the friary’s proximity to St. Thomas the Apostle School, asserting there was “no school in the immediate area” – a claim SNAP and local parents have disputed vigorously. “He [Prevost] should have informed the school and the community,” said Lopez de Casas. “Instead, they chose secrecy over safety.”
The organisation further accuses Pope Leo XIV of failing to initiate any formal canonical investigation into separate abuse allegations levelled at two priests in the Diocese of Chiclayo, which Prevost led from 2014 until 2023. In both cases, SNAP asserts, the complaints were sufficiently detailed to warrant immediate inquiry, yet no public action was taken.
Sarah Pearson, a SNAP spokesperson, expressed deep concern over the election. “These are serious allegations by three women, and their complaints deserve to be investigated. Now that he’s pope, we’re gravely concerned,” she told Newsweek.
On Thursday, as Prevost emerged onto the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica as Pope Leo XIV, the group released a six-page open letter urging the new pontiff to adopt a “truly universal zero-tolerance law” for clergy abuse and cover-up, something Pope Francis pledged but never fully implemented across the global Church.
The letter bluntly states: “With the title comes a grave reckoning.”
The Vatican has not yet responded directly to the accusations, and the Pope himself made no mention of the issue during his inaugural address, which focused on unity, peace, and “restoring trust in the sacred.” Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni declined to comment, saying only that “His Holiness is aware of the gravity of his responsibilities and the wounds that remain in the Church.”
Observers say the allegations are likely to dominate the early months of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate, particularly as abuse survivors, advocacy groups, and the international media scrutinise his past record. “This election may ironically become a turning point,” said one senior Vatican analyst. “The fact that these issues were known and raised before his election means they can’t simply be brushed aside. There will be pressure for transparency like never before.”
For SNAP, there is grim hope that the public scrutiny may force overdue reforms. “If this pope is serious about accountability,” said Lopez de Casas, “he must start by facing his own past – and proving he can be better than the men who looked away.”
Whether Pope Leo XIV will take the radical steps needed to rebuild the Church’s credibility remains to be seen. But for now, the world’s first American pontiff finds himself not in a moment of triumph, but in the eye of a storm – one the Church can no longer afford to weather with silence.
Europe’s Enduring Scars: The Clerical Abuse Scandals That Still Haunt the Catholic Church
The controversy now surrounding Pope Leo XIV is not a rupture in an otherwise clean record. It is merely the latest chapter in a grim chronicle of clerical abuse and institutional failure that has battered the Catholic Church across Europe for decades — nowhere more so than in Ireland.
Beginning in the 1990s, Ireland was rocked by a series of state inquiries that exposed a pattern of systemic sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of children at the hands of priests, nuns, and lay staff in Catholic-run institutions. The 2009 Ryan Report, perhaps the most damning of them all, detailed horrifying accounts of children beaten, raped, and degraded in industrial schools and orphanages from the 1930s to the 1990s. It concluded that Church authorities consistently placed the preservation of institutional reputation above the protection of children.
This was followed by the Murphy Report, which examined the Dublin Archdiocese’s handling of abuse allegations from 1975 to 2004. It found that Church leaders operated “a culture of cover-up” and failed to report offenders to civil authorities, enabling serial abusers to move from parish to parish. One bishop even maintained a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with regard to paedophile priests.
Public trust in the Irish Church, once the country’s most revered institution, collapsed. Vocations plummeted, churches emptied, and the moral authority once wielded by the Catholic hierarchy all but evaporated. In 2010, Pope Benedict XVI issued a pastoral letter to Irish Catholics apologising for the abuse — yet victims’ groups said it fell short, offering words but not justice.
The rot, however, was not confined to Ireland. In Germany, more than 3,600 children were reportedly abused by Catholic clergy between 1946 and 2014, according to a report commissioned by the German Bishops’ Conference. Among the most high-profile cases was that of Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich, who apologised for “failures at all levels” after a 2022 report found that even Pope Benedict himself had failed to act against abusive priests while serving as Archbishop there in the late 1970s.
Viktor Orbán‘s Hungary, a predominantly Roman Catholic nation, was rocked by a paedophile scandal in 2023, centering on a children’s home in Bicske, a town west of Budapest.
France, too, was forced into a reckoning in 2021 when the Sauvé Report revealed that some 216,000 minors had been abused by clergy since 1950. The commission accused the Church of “deep, systemic” failings and called for sweeping reform. President Emmanuel Macron described the findings as “a shame for the Church,” while victims’ groups demanded reparations and legal accountability.
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Even traditionally Catholic Poland has not escaped scrutiny. A 2019 documentary, Tell No One, produced by journalist Tomasz Sekielski, sparked outrage after revealing how abusive priests were protected by Church authorities and moved to new parishes, mirroring the practices seen elsewhere. The Polish episcopate later admitted to covering up cases and promised to cooperate with prosecutors — albeit under considerable public and political pressure.
This long and painful record casts a stark light on the controversy now confronting Pope Leo XIV. For many victims and observers, the continuity is unmistakable: a pattern of secrecy, clericalism, and moral cowardice stretching from the Vatican corridors to the remotest parish.
The question now is not whether the Church has a problem — it is whether its new leader has the courage and integrity to confront it head-on. Pope Francis made limited progress, establishing a Vatican commission and expelling some high-profile predators, but critics said he stopped short of real structural change. The hope among survivors is that, if Pope Leo XIV cannot escape his own record, he may finally be forced to break with it.
As Lopez de Casas put it: “This cannot be another pontificate of polite apologies. It must be one of action. The time for silence is long over.”
Main Image: Courtesy of Wikipedia.
