MADRID – Pope Leo XIV met Monday with six survivors of clergy sexual abuse in Madrid and vowed to consider their suggestions for how the Catholic Church can improve its response to the crisis, the Vatican said.
The meeting, which followed in the tradition of popes meeting with abuse survivors during their foreign trips, lasted about an hour and took place at the Vatican embassy in Madrid, the Vatican said in a statement.
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Spain’s Catholic hierarchy has only recently begun reckoning with its legacy of abuse and cover-up after long dismissing the severity of the scandal that came to light thanks to reporting by the newpaper El País.
During the meeting, the survivors told the pope their stories and recommendations for how the church should respond, the Vatican said.
“The pope listened with affection and attention, assured them of his closeness — and that of the entire church community — and pledged his commitment to ensuring that the suggestions received serve as a foundation for further efforts, so that the church may truly be a safe and spiritually healthy place where wounds find comfort and healing,” said a statement from Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni.
Ahead of the expected meeting with Leo, several groups representing survivors that were not included said they were left in the dark about the encounter, and held a small protest outside the Vatican’s embassy in Madrid.
“Our associations are pleased that a group of victims from the reparation plan can be heard by the pope, but they do not represent all the victims, and deep down they are being used by the church, by the bishops conference, to clean up the image of a Spanish church that has never been able to live up to its victims,” said Juan Cuatrecasas, a spokesperson for the Robbed Childhood association.
Across the world, clergy sexual abuse and cover-up scandals have rocked Catholic dioceses, damaging the church’s reputation more than three decades after the crisis first erupted publicly in the West.
Leo addresses abuse to bishops and parliament
Before the meeting, Leo told Spanish bishops that they must offer reparations to survivors and that the entire church community should have an "ever more determined commitment to prevention and a culture of care.”
“Faced with this scourge, the ecclesial community is called to respond with listening, truth, justice reparation," Leo said. “Every wounded person must be able to find sincere listening, welcome, protection and real paths to healing.”
Amid public outrage over the abuse crisis, Spain launched a reparations system earlier this year for clerical abuse cases too old to be prosecuted that requires the participation of the Catholic Church and the Spanish government.
Other countries and churches have set up reparations mechanisms to compensate survivors and provide therapy, but the Spanish one is unusual in that it gives the government a strong role in the process and the final say in payouts.
The system, which is not legally binding, has drawn praise and some skepticism from advocacy groups and survivors. It gives people a year to apply.
Leo reaffirms church’s right to confessional secrecy
Leo also reaffirmed the right of the Catholic Church to maintain secrecy involving the sacrament of confession, amid efforts in Europe and elsewhere to force Catholic priests to report abuse that they learn about during the one-to-one conversations.
Independent investigations into clergy abuse around the world have identified the seal of confession as a major impediment to exposing and preventing abuse, and called for it to be abolished. The investigations have documented how abusers used the confessional to solicit sex from minors and then relied on the seal of confession to keep it secret.
In his speech to the Spanish parliament Monday, Leo framed the right of the church to keep priest-penitent conversations confidential as a matter of freedom of religion.
“To protect it legally, as is done in a similar way in some professions, means preserving a sacred space of inner freedom, where the believer can open his or her soul to God without fear of external pressures,” he said.
Former Opus Dei members say they couldn't meet with Leo
Some former members of the powerful Catholic movement Opus Dei, which was founded in Spain and remains influential here, were unable to get a meeting with Leo. They had sought to speak to him while he was in Madrid about psychological and other abuses they say they suffered in the movement.
“We do not speak out of bitterness, nor do we seek any kind of revenge; rather, we speak out of a sense of responsibility and moral duty as those who have firsthand knowledge of a reality that has caused grave harm to the church and suffering to many people,” eight former members wrote to Leo on May 24 in asking for an audience.
Leo’s office received their letter but was unable to arrange the meeting at such a late date, said Gareth Gore, an author who met with the pope at the Vatican in March about a book he wrote in 2024 on alleged abuses in Opus Dei that the movement strongly rejected as unfounded.
In declining the meeting, Leo might want to avoid suggestions he was interfering in church and Argentine investigations into the movement. In 2024, Argentine prosecutors concluded there were grounds for launching a criminal investigation into its top South American officials on charges of human trafficking and labor exploitation against 44 women.
Opus Dei in Argentina has denied the accusations.