Pope meets with clergy abuse survivors in Argentina

During private meetings with survivors, Pope Leo XIV pledged to reinforce safeguards and listen to victims.

Pope Leo XIV has met with five survivors of clerical sexual abuse on the second day of his historic visit to Argentina.

The private meetings in Buenos Aires on Monday were the first of several talks the pope is planning to hold with abuse survivors during his 12-day tour of Latin America, according to the Vatican.

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“The Pope spoke individually with each of them, listened to their words and to the painful stories of their experiences, as well as to their proposals for strengthening paths towards healing within the Church,” the Vatican said in a statement.

The closed-door meetings followed a historic open-air mass that drew an estimated 2.5 million people to Avenida del Libertador, a major boulevard in the capital, at the Monumento de los Espanoles. It was the country’s first papal liturgy in nearly 40 years.

The meetings with survivors respond to the pope’s desire to “express his closeness to those who have suffered”, build paths to healing and ensure the church is a safe and “spiritually healthy” place, the Holy See Press Office said in October.

Leo, the first pope born in the United States, has consistently met with survivors during foreign visits as part of a wider outreach aiming to repair global relations and restore the Catholic Church’s credibility. Lawsuits, widespread sexual abuse and cover-ups have sullied its reputation over the last three decades.

While clergy abuse cases are difficult to track globally, a 2021 independent inquiry found there were an estimated 216,000 victims of the French Catholic Church’s clergy alone between 1950 and 2020. Earlier research found more than 10,600 people were abused by Catholic priests in the US between 1950 and 2002, while Australia counted 6,875 victims of Catholic clergy, religious and lay church workers between 1980 and 2015, according to a 2019 German study.

During the meeting, which lasted more than an hour, Leo, 71, listened to victims’ testimonies and reiterated his pledge to strengthen safeguarding in the Catholic Church. Before being named pope, Leo served as president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.

Argentina is the second stop on Leo’s three-country tour, which began in Uruguay and will wrap up in Peru.

His visit was the first by a pontiff since Pope John Paul II’s trip in 1987.