Catholic Church Sexual Abuse Scandals

    Place: United States; international

    Summary

    The Catholic Church has been at the center of sexual abuse accusations in the United States and around the world for decades, with the first significant US media coverage emerging in the 1980s. Sporadic subsequent allegations followed, and reached a new level with a major exposé of widespread abuse in the Boston area published in 2002. The resulting scandal spread to other dioceses, sparking various investigations, and drawing attention from the highest levels of the Catholic Church. However, the official church response to the crisis was widely criticized as ineffective, and the scope of the scandal continued to grow through the 2010s, especially as several cover-up attempts were revealed.

    While it became clear that abusive priests had long been protected by the church, eventually consequences began to be felt. A notable development came in 2018, when several high-ranking cardinals faced allegations and repercussions. The scandal has been considered a contributing factor in the ongoing decline in church attendance among Catholics.

    Key Events

    • 1985—National Catholic Reporter published an early account of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, based on the case of Fr. Gilbert Gauthe of Louisiana, who was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
    • 2002—The Boston Globe published a series of articles exposing widespread sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. The case centered around Fr. John Geoghan, accused of abusing over 130 young boys across thirty years yet subject to little action by church officials aware of his behavior. Geoghan was ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison, but was killed by another inmate in 2003.
    • 2004—A study commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and compiled by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice found nearly eleven thousand allegations of sexual abuse against over four thousand priests from 1950 to 2002.
    • 2007—Archdiocese of Los Angeles settled over five hundred abuse claims with a $660 million payment, one of several similar settlements across the United States.
    • 2010—Major accusations and investigations of sexual abuse by priests surfaced internationally, including in Ireland, Germany, and Brazil. Pope Benedict is accused of mishandling cases of abuse before becoming pope.
    • 2014—Pope Francis created the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors as part of an ongoing effort to address the scandal, and meets with sexual abuse victims.
    • June 2018—Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former Archbishop of Washington, DC, was accused of sexually assaulting minors and adults. Removed from public ministry, he resigned from the College of Cardinals the next month.
    • August 2018—A Pennsylvania grand jury found that the Catholic Church in that state failed to protect over one thousand children from sexual assaults by over three hundred priests. Other states announced similar investigations into clerical sexual abuse.
    • December 2018—The third-most powerful official in the Vatican and Pope Francis's anti-corruption chief, Cardinal George Pell, was convicted of sexual abuse of two choir boys in his home country of Australia. A court reversed his conviction and had him released from prison in 2020.
    • 2019—Vermont removed statutory time limits on child sexual abuse lawsuits.
    • 2021—Maine removed statutory time limits on previously expired child sexual abuse lawsuits.
    • October 2021—The Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church published a 2,500-page report detailing sexual abuse of more than 200,000 children by Roman Catholic clergy in France between 1950 and 2020.
    • December 2021—After a three-year investigation, Spain's El Pai
    • May 2023—Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul reported that since 1950, there had been more than 450 accused child sex abusers in the Catholic Church and about 2,000 victims under 18.
    • October 2023—A public human rights investigation in Spain found that an estimated 200,000 children had been sexually abused by Catholic clergy. The Church apologized to the victims but disputed the scale of the abuse and commissioned a separate investigation.
    • November 2023—Ohio priest Michael Zacharias was sentenced to life in prison after a federal jury found him guilty of five counts of sex trafficking.

    Status

    By the 2020s, the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal had been ongoing in the United States and around the world for at least seven decades. Allegations continued to emerge, including accusations of senior officials covering up abuse or committing it themselves. Pope Francis, whose leadership on the issue received criticism as well as praise, directly acknowledged how much damage the scandal has caused the church in a January 3, 2019, letter to the bishops of the United States. He continued to seek appropriate responses to the crisis and scheduled an international summit of bishops to discuss the issue.

    In-Depth Overview

    As public accusations of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, particularly against young boys, became widespread, it became clear that such abuse has long been occurring. Investigations have shown patterns in offenses since at least the middle of the twentieth century. Prior to this time, documentation becomes increasingly difficult. While exact numbers are unknown and often contested between different sources, even conservative estimates suggest tens of thousands of victims and thousands of perpetrators in the United States alone from the 1950s to the twenty-first century. Reports from other countries with significant Catholic populations show similar trends.

    Despite the pervasiveness of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, the issue was not publicly acknowledged until the late twentieth century. In 1985, the case of Gilbert Gauthe, who had been repeatedly accused of sexual assault, became the first widely publicized US example of a pedophile priest. Gauthe was sentenced to twenty years in prison, ultimately serving ten. Slowly, allegations of sexual abuse by priests gained more attention, aided by shifting cultural norms across the 1990s and the formation of survivors’ support organizations. Occasional cases made their way to court, but many more were quietly suppressed by the church. It would later emerge that offending priests were sometimes transferred rather than punished, giving them further opportunities to abuse.

    In 2002, dogged investigative reporting by the Boston Globe and the court-ordered release of over ten thousand pages of church records led to a months-long exposé on priest sexual abuse in the Boston archdiocese. The breaking scandal centered on the case of John Geoghan, accused of abusing more than 130 children and convicted of abuse that year. Public outrage was stirred by the revelation that priests with known accusations against them were moved from parish to parish, suggesting the church had greater concern for its reputation than for the protection of children. The crisis drew emergency attention from Pope John Paul II, and in December 2002 Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as archbishop of Boston.

    The Boston scandal not only rocked the Catholic Church, it opened a floodgate of further allegations. It was a turning point that would shape public perception of the church for years to come. A study commissioned by the US Council of Bishops and publicly released in 2004 found over ten thousand complaints of abuse against over four thousand priests between 1950 and 2002. Over the following decade, sexual abuse cases against priests and accusations of coercion and cover-ups continued to make news. Across the United States, several dioceses went bankrupt over such cases and others reached costly settlements. In 2012, Bishop Robert Finn of Missouri was the first US bishop convicted in a criminal court for failing to report the abuse of children.

    When Pope Francis ascended to the highest position in the church in 2013 with a message of reconciliation, many in the church were hopeful that his leadership would spell the end of the cover-ups and obstruction that had characterized the previous decades. Like popes Benedict XVI and John Paul II before him, Francis apologized for the church’s failings on the issue. He went on to establish structures to deal with the ongoing scandal, including an office to hold bishops accountable for mishandling or obscuring abuse cases. However, he also faced criticism for what some advocates felt was a lack of decisive action.

    Meanwhile, abuse allegations reached further and further up the church hierarchy. In June 2018, the former archbishop of Washington, DC, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was accused of sexually abusing a teenager and multiple seminary students, and the next month he became the first cardinal forced to step down as a result of the scandal. McCarrick faced criminal sex abuse charges in Massachusetts in 2021 and Wisconsin in 2023, but was found not competent to stand trial in both cases by January 2024.

    In August 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury released a report detailing abuse in that state, including allegations against more than three hundred priests involving over one thousand children that were subject to widespread and systemic cover-up attempts. Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, resigned after being named in the report as complicit in the cover-up. Then, in December, Pope Francis removed two figures from his close circle of advisers: Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz, accused of covering up abuse in Chile, and Cardinal George Pell, convicted of sexual abuse in Australia.

    A 2019 report compiled by the Pew Research Center gave indications of the extent to which the decades-long scandal had damaged the Catholic Church’s standing in the United States. It showed that the overwhelming majority of Catholics were at least partially aware of the scandals (95%). Another large majority (80%) believed issues of this kind continued to persist in the Church. About half of the study’s recipients expressed that this issue was not confined to the Catholic Church but applied to other institutions as well. About 25% of Catholics indicated a reduction in attendance because of the scandals as well as in their charitable contributions.

    In 2018, the attorney general of Maryland began a statewide investigation that, by 2023, had revealed that more than 600 children had been abused by more than 150 clergy within the Archdiocese of Baltimore. The archdiocese declared bankruptcy in September 2023, just days before the state's law removing statutory time limits on child sexual abuse lawsuits was due to take effect, in order to avoid multiple lawsuits.

    The attorneys general of twenty other states followed Maryland's lead, shedding light on new details about the scandal in several states. Although the state investigations resulted in few criminal prosecutions, they did help encourage legislators in some states to extend the time limits required for victims to sue their abusers.

    While accusations continued into the 2020s, the number of abuse allegations against priests had dropped significantly since the 1990s and the 2000s after a “zero tolerance” policy, training, and control procedures were implemented in US dioceses.

    Key Figures

    Cardinal Bernard Law: Archbishop of Boston

    Pope Francis: Roman Catholic pope

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