Sex abuse victims demand reparations from Pope Leo during Peru visit

“Survivors are demanding that the Catholic Church provide monetary compensation so that they can get the medication, health, and mental health care they so desperately need as the church is responsible for the survivors’ trauma that needs treatment,” said Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) Executive Director Angela Walker, according to a press release published Thursday.

Walker said survivors in Peru told her that they often suffer backlash from people in their community when they tell their story of abuse. 

“We are here because we want the pope to hear the needs of the many surviving victims of clerical abuse, who cannot be heard, whose complaints are ignored,” said Sara Carrion Mendez, who joined a protest outside the Papal Nuncio embassy in Lima Thursday.

While Mendez is not a victim herself, she sympathizes with those who have survived abuse and so advocates on their behalf. “In many cases, they suffer persecution. They need to make their grievances heard regarding the abuse they have suffered,” she said. “We want to help them find justice and reparation.”

Meanwhile, Leo met with six clerical sex abuse survivors at the Papal Nuncio embassy in Lima during his visit the same day.

“Allow me to refer to a reality that has caused us so much pain: the abuses committed by members of the clergy or within the ecclesial context. We must respond as Jesus would, with truth, justice, forgiveness, making amends and ever more resolute commitment to fostering a culture of prevention and protection for the weakest in light of such crimes,” Leo said Thursday before Peruvian clergy in the Nunciature chapel.

He then met with abuse survivors individually, “listening to their stories of suffering and their pain, and reflecting with them on how to foster a change in mentality through listening to victims, seeking the truth, pathways to healing, and a commitment to creating safe environments,” according to the Vatican press office.

Jose Escardo, part of the Network of Abuse Survivors in Peru, acknowledged Leo’s efforts, but insisted it isn’t enough.

“In reality, there are hundreds or thousands of victims whose voices are not being heard on this trip,” he told Al Jazeera. “We do not expect the pope to listen to each and every one of them — that would be humanly impossible — but we do expect him at least to listen to representative victims who can speak on behalf of hundreds or thousands of others. Unfortunately, despite all the requests we have made for this to happen, it has not happened.”

A woman who says she and her sisters were abused by a longtime priest-friend of Pope Leo last year requested a meeting with the pope after the alleged abuser, Father Eleuterio Vásquez González, was granted a dispensation from priestly duties by the Vatican.

Ana María Quispe Díaz lamented at the time that “it is incomprehensible that instead of seeking the truth and repairing the victims, the decision was made to close the case through a papal grace that frees the abuser from facing the responsibility that corresponds to him, leaving us in a vulnerable situation with no reparation, where the only thing offered to us is payment for therapy.”

She maintained that she met with Robert Prevost when he was bishop of Chiclayo in 2022, saying she informed him she was abused by Vásquez in 2007 as a young girl. Quispe Díaz’s two sisters also say they told Prevost that Vásquez abused them. Quispe Díaz also says that Prevost encouraged her to report the abuse to civil authorities but stated the Church could not do much to help.

“Prevost, after he gets this report, he tells the victims, ‘I believe you,’ and then he does nothing that he’s supposed to do under Peruvian policy that he himself set up,” SNAP co-founder Peter Isley said in May.

The 1983 Code of Canon law acts as a hindrance to the proper punishment of abuser priests, although this fact receives little attention. For example, Can. 1341 states, “The Ordinary is to start a judicial or an administrative procedure for the imposition or the declaration of penalties only when he perceives that neither by fraternal correction nor reproof, nor by any method of pastoral care, can the scandal be sufficiently repaired, justice restored and the offender reformed.”

It is the pope who has the final say over any changes to canon law, and who has the authority to change it himself.