Pope Francis had a troubled course on dealing with clergy sexual abuse

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Few could have predicted that a comment Pope Francis made during a 2018 visit to Chile would blow up into the biggest crisis of his papacy, and one that eventually set the Catholic Church on a new path of accountability for clergy sexual abuse.

Francis was asked by a TV reporter about a Chilean bishop who had been accused by victims of having covered up the crimes of Chile's most notorious pedophile. Francis had been defending the bishop for years and shot back that there was "not one shred of proof against him. It's all slander. Is that clear?"

His irate response struck a nerve in Chile, which was just beginning to come to terms with a horrific legacy of clergy abuse, and it prompted Francis' top child protection adviser to sternly rebuke the pope for his harmful words.

But then something remarkable happened: Rather than dig in, Francis commissioned an investigation, realized he was wrong, apologized to the victims he discredited, and got the entire Chilean hierarchy to offer to resign. It was one of the greatest midcourse corrections of the modern papacy.

"He recognized his mistakes," said papal biographer Austen Ivereigh. "He learned from them. He said 'sorry.' And he put it right."

When Francis was elected history's first Latin American pontiff in 2013, abuse survivors and their advocates initially questioned whether he "got it" about abuse, because he freely admitted he had never handled cases of accused priests as archbishop of Buenos Aires.

Francis did create a sex abuse commission early on to advise the church on best practices and placed a trusted official, Boston's Cardinal Sean O'Malley, in charge. But the commission lost its influence after a few years and its crowning recommendation - the creation of a tribunal to judge bishops who covered up for predator priests - went nowhere.

And then came Chile.

During the now-infamous visit to Iquique, Chile, Francis was asked about Bishop Juan Barros, whom he had transferred to a southern diocese over the objections of the local faithful. Their complaint? Barros had been a priest under the sanctioned Rev. Fernando Karadima, and was accused by Karadima's victims of having witnessed and covered up the crimes.

Francis had defended Barros because one of his friends and advisers, Chilean Cardinal Javier Errazuriz, also had defended the bishop.

After being pressed on the plane home by journalists about his Barros defense, Francis commissioned an investigation into the Chilean church and realized he had been misled by Errazuriz and others.

Juan Carlos Cruz, one of Karadima's victims who received the pope's personal apology that year, later developed a personal friendship with the pontiff.

"He sincerely wanted to do something and he transmitted that," Cruz said.

Years later, Francis acknowledged 2018 was the turning point, or "conversion," in his understanding about abuse, and he credited journalists, including The Associated Press, with enlightening him.

"I couldn't believe it. You were the one on the plane who told me, 'No, that's not the way it is, Father,'" Francis told AP in a 2023 interview. Making a gesture that indicated his head had exploded, the pope continued: "That's when the bomb went off, when I saw the corruption of many bishops in this."

By mid-2018, Francis had largely atoned for the Chile scandal. But then the next crisis hit.

In July of that year, Francis removed once-influential American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick after church investigators said an allegation that he groped a teenage altar boy in the 1970s was credible. Subsequently, several former seminarians and priests reported that they had been abused or harassed by McCarrick as adults.

It was apparently common knowledge in the U.S. and Vatican leadership that "Uncle Ted," as McCarrick was known, slept with seminarians, but he still rose steadily in the church’s ranks.

Having removed McCarrick and approved a canonical trial against him, Francis should have emerged as the hero in the saga since he righted the wrong of St. John Paul II, who had promoted McCarrick despite his reputation.

But Francis' get-tough victory lap was cut short when a former Vatican ambassador to the U.S. accused the pope himself of participating in the McCarrick cover-up.

In an 11-page denunciation in August 2018, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano claimed he had told Francis in 2013, at the start of his pontificate, that McCarrick had "corrupted a generation" of seminarians and priests and that Pope Benedict XVI had eventually sanctioned McCarrick for his sexual misconduct. Vigano claimed Francis disregarded his 2013 warning and rehabilitated McCarrick. He called on Francis to resign.

Francis didn't initially respond. But he authorized a two-year investigation into McCarrick, finding that bishops, cardinals and popes over three decades played down or dismissed multiple reports of sexual misconduct against him. The report largely spared Francis and instead found that Vigano had failed in monitoring McCarrick while he was U.S. ambassador.

McCarrick died earlier this month; Francis excommunicated Vigano last year for schism.

The crisis prompted Francis to take even bolder action to hold the hierarchy accountable for covering up abuse. In 2019, he summoned the heads of bishops’ conferences from around the world to the Vatican to impress on them the need to act to prevent abuse and punish offending priests.

He changed church law to remove the "pontifical secret" covering abuse cases and passed a law requiring church personnel to report allegations in-house, although not to police. He approved procedures to investigate bishops who abused or covered up for their pedophile priests, seeking to end the tradition of impunity for the hierarchy.

Ivereigh, the papal biographer, said those reforms were the result of Francis' learning curve on abuse.

"I think he understood that at the root of the sex abuse crisis was a culture and a mindset which he constantly called clericalism, a sense of entitlement, and which led not only to ultimately to abuse of power and sexual abuse, but its cover up," Ivereigh said.

But questions continued to dog Francis even after the scandal passed.

One case that haunted him for years was that of Argentine Bishop Gustavo Zanchetta, who was accused, and eventually convicted, in an Argentine court of abusing his seminarians. Francis had created a job for Zanchetta at the Vatican after he had been accused of misconduct, spiriting him out of Argentina for purported "health" reasons.

Francis never responded to questions about the Rev. Julio Grassi, who was Argentina's most notorious clerical sexual abuser. While Francis was archbishop of Buenos Aires, he commissioned a study into Grassi's conviction that concluded he was innocent, that his victims were lying, and that the case never should have gone to trial. Argentina's supreme court upheld the conviction.

"Before Pope Francis can enact accountability for bishops and other church leaders, he has to own up to the harm he himself caused victims in Argentina," said Anne Barrett Doyle of the online resource Bishop Accountability, which pressed Francis to get even tougher about abuse and cover-ups throughout his pontificate.