Abuse survivors demand next pope enact zero-tolerance policy, identify cardinals with poor records

Next Pope Zero Tolerance

Title: Abuse survivors demand next pope enact zero-tolerance policy, identify cardinals with poor records

Author: Nicole Winfield

Publisher: AP (Associated Press)

Date: 30APR2025

VATICAN CITY (AP) — A coalition of survivors of clergy sexual abuse demanded Wednesday that cardinals entering the conclave to elect a successor to Pope Francis pick a pope who will adopt a universal zero-tolerance policy for abuse and himself has a clean record handling cases.

The group End Clergy Abuse issued an open letter to the cardinals who are meeting informally this week before the start of the May 7 conclave. SNAP, the main U.S.-based survivor group, also identified cardinals who themselves have problematic records in a new database, highlighting a new level of scrutiny of all possible contenders for the papacy.

The developments come amid real questions about how prominent the abuse scandal is featuring in the discussions about finding a new pope. After two decades of unrelenting revelations about abuse and cover-up that have discredited the Catholic hierarchy, many church leaders would like to think the issue is in the past, the survivors said.

“The sexual abuse crisis is not a matter of the past. It is present. And nowhere is its devastation more visible than in the Global South,” the survivors said in the open letter.

ECA and SNAP have called for the Catholic Church to adopt a zero-tolerance policy that a priest will be permanently removed from church ministry based on even a single act of sexual abuse that is either admitted to or established according to church law. That is the policy in the U.S. church, adopted at the height of the U.S. scandal in 2002, but it is by no means embraced elsewhere.