How Pope Francis tackled church's dark sex abuse secrets

Pope Francis inherited a “large white box” full of documents related to various scandals faced by the Catholic church when he took over from his predecessor. The pontiff made the revelation in his autobiography, Spera (Hope).

Francis became pope in 2013 after the shock resignation of Benedict XVI, a decision that meant the Argentinian was in the almost unprecedented position of being able to have an in-person handover when he started.

Shortly after his election as pope, he recalls in his book, he visited Benedict at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence south of Rome.

“He gave me a large white box,” Francis wrote. “‘Everything is in here’, he was told. “‘Documents relating to the most difficult and painful situations. Cases of abuse, corruption, dark dealings, wrongdoings.’”

Benedict then told him: “I have arrived this far, taken these actions, removed these people. Now it’s your turn.”

In Hope, Pope Francis says: “I have continued along his path.”

He does not, however, specify the contents of the box or any scandals that had been addressed either by Benedict, who died in December 2022, or by himself during his almost 12-year papacy.

In February 2013, Benedict became the first pontiff in almost 600 years to resign, saying his health was deteriorating. A deeply conservative pontiff, his tenure was overshadowed by sexual abuse scandals in the church. He retired leaving a chequered reputation after a papacy that was at times divisive.

The last year of Benedict’s papacy was also tarnished by the ‘Vatileaks’ scandal, which exposed allegations of corruption, internal conflict and financial mismanagement.

Although there were reports about the existence of the white box in 2013 and in later years, the passage in Hope is the first time Pope Francis has spoken on the record about it.

The Italian publisher Mondadori has said Hope is the first autobiography published by a pope, although Francis has published other memoir-style works.

Sexual abuse scandals

Francis’ papacy was marked by his struggle to restore credibility to a Church rattled to its core by clergy sexual abuse scandals, even though the overwhelming part of the crimes took place before his election.

The year 2018 was Francis’ “annus horribilis” - chiefly because of the simmering crisis around Church sex abuse.

It began with a trip to Chile in January, where at first he strongly defended a bishop who had been accused of covering up sexual abuse, testily telling reporters that there was “not a single piece of evidence against him”.

His comments were widely criticised by victims, their advocates and in newspaper editorials throughout Latin America. Even key papal adviser Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston distanced himself, saying the pope had caused “great pain”. Francis later apologised, saying his choice of words and tone of voice had “wounded many”.
Soon after he returned, he sent the Church’s top sexual abuse investigator to Chile.

The subsequent report by Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta accused Chile’s bishops of “grave negligence” for decades in investigating the allegations and said evidence of sex crimes had been destroyed.

That May, all of Chile’s 34 bishops offered their resignations en masse. The pope accepted seven resignations over the next few months. He later defrocked the two other bishops and the priest at the centre of the abuse scandal.

Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., stepped down as cardinal over sexual misconduct accusations in July and in August the U.S. Catholic Church was rocked by a grand jury report in Pennsylvania that detailed 70 years of abuse.

“With shame and repentance, we acknowledge as an ecclesial community that we were not where we should have been, that we did not act in a timely manner, realising the magnitude and the gravity of the damage done to so many lives. We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them,” Francis wrote in a letter to all Catholics on August 20, 2018.

Still, the topic of sexual abuse dominated his trip to Ireland in August 2018, during which a conservative Italian archbishop took advantage of the media’s presence to issue an unprecedented broadside demanding that the pope resign over the McCarrick affair.

Francis defrocked McCarrick in February 2019, making him the highest-profile Church figure to be dismissed from the priesthood in modern times.

Francis summoned almost 200 Church leaders to a summit in February 2019 on child sex abuse by the clergy, issued a landmark decree making bishops directly accountable for sexual abuse or covering it up, and abolished “pontifical secrecy” for abuse cases. Victims’ groups said this was too little, too late.

An institutional report on McCarrick in 2020 showed that Francis’ two predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, knew about rumours of his sexual misconduct, but promoted him or failed to discipline him anyway.

Changing the church face

Pope Francis changed the face of the modern papacy more than any predecessor by shunning much of its pomp and privilege, but his attempts to make the Catholic Church more inclusive and less judgmental made him an enemy to conservatives nostalgic for a traditional past.

Francis inherited a deeply divided Church after the resignation in 2013 of his predecessor, Benedict XVI. The conservative-progressive gap became a chasm after Francis, from Argentina, was elected the first non-European pope in 1,300 years. The polarisation was fiercest in the United States, where conservative Catholicism often blended with well-financed right-wing politics and media outlets. For nearly a decade until Benedict’s death in 2022, there were two men wearing white in the Vatican, causing much confusion among the faithful and leading to calls for written norms on the role of retired popes.

The intensity of conservative animosity to the pope was laid bare in January 2023 when it emerged that the late Australian Cardinal George Pell, a towering figure in the conservative movement and a Benedict ally, was the author of an anonymous memo in 2022 that condemned Francis’ papacy as a “catastrophe”.

The memo amounted to a conservative manifesto of the qualities conservatives will want in the next pope.

Francis appointed nearly 80 per cent of the cardinal electors who will choose the next pope, increasing, but not guaranteeing, the possibility that his successor will continue his progressive policies. Some Vatican experts have predicted a more moderate, less divisive successor.

Under his watch, an overhauled Vatican constitution allowed any baptised lay Catholic, including women, to head most departments in the Catholic Church’s central administration.

He put more women in senior Vatican roles than any previous pope, but not as many as progressives wanted.

Besieged by conservatives

Conservatives were unhappy with the pope from the start because of his informal style, his aversion to pomp and his decision to allow women and Muslims to take part in a Holy Thursday ritual that previously had been restricted to Catholic men.

They balked at his calls for the Church to be more welcoming to LGBTQ people, his approval of conditional blessings for same-sex couples in December 2023 and his repeated clampdowns on the use of the traditional Latin Mass. He said conservatives had made themselves self-referential and wanted to encase Catholicism in a “suit of armour”.

Their spiritual gurus were Pell and U.S. Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke, who once famously compared the Church under Francis to “a ship without a rudder”.

In 2016 and in 2023, Burke and a handful of other cardinals lodged public challenges known as “Dubia” (doubts), accusing Francis of sowing confusion on moral themes, once threatening to issue a public “correction” themselves.
They spoke at conferences where participants openly referred to Francis as the precursor of the Antichrist and the end of the world.

“I don’t feel like judging them,” the pope told Reuters in 2018. “I pray to the Lord that He settles their hearts and even mine.” But a year after Benedict’s death, Francis lost his patience with conservative ringleaders, stripping Burke, who was rarely in Rome, of his Vatican privileges, including a subsidised apartment and a salary.

Burke’s punishment came days after Francis dismissed Bishop Joseph E. Strickland of Tyler, Texas, another of his fiercest critics among U.S. Catholic conservatives, after Strickland refused to step down following a Vatican investigation.

Conservatives were also rattled by his decision to declare capital punishment inadmissible in all cases, his frequent attacks on the arms industry, and his calls for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

But liberals were deeply disappointed in 2020 when Francis dismissed a proposal to allow some married men to be ordained in remote areas, such as in the Amazon.

Clean-up 

The Covid-19 crisis forced him to cancel all trips in 2020 and to hold virtual general audiences, depriving him of the contact with people that he thrived on.
But he also said the pandemic offered a chance for a great reset, to narrow the gap between rich and poor nations. “We can either exit from this pandemic better than before, or worse,” he said often. He criticised “vaccine nationalism,” saying poor countries should be given priority.

On March 27, 2020, when the whole world was in various forms of lockdowns and death tolls spiralled, he held a dramatic, solitary prayer service in St. Peter’s Square, urging everyone to see the crisis as a test of solidarity and a reminder of basic values.

Francis moved to clean up the Curia, the staid central administration of the Roman Catholic Church that was held responsible for many of the missteps and scandals that marred Pope Benedict’s eight-year pontificate.

Despite massive improvements compared to the past papacies, financial scandals still plagued the Vatican during Francis’ pontificate.

In 2020, he took drastic action by firing Italian Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who was accused of embezzlement and nepotism and was also enmeshed in a scandal involving the Vatican’s purchase of a luxury building in London. Becciu has denied any wrongdoing.

On July 3, 2021, Becciu was among 10 people sent to trial in the Vatican charged with financial crimes including embezzlement, money laundering, fraud, extortion and abuse of office. In December 2023 Becciu was found guilty on several counts of embezzlement and fraud and sentenced to five-and-a-half years in jail. He and others convicted are free pending appeal.

Francis brought the Catholic Church’s dialogue with Islam to new heights in 2019 by becoming the first pope to visit the Arabian Peninsula, but conservatives attacked him as a “heretic” for signing a joint document on inter-religious fraternity with Muslim leaders.

A trip to Iraq in March 2021, the first ever by a pope, aimed to solidify better relations with Islam while also paying tribute to the Christians whose two millennia-old communities were devastated by wars and Islamic State.