Pope Francis and zero tolerance of child sexual abuse

The term “zero tolerance” was first used in the United States in 1972 by politicians pushing for tougher criminal laws. Merriam Webster defines it as “a policy of giving the most severe punishment possible to every person who commits a crime.” It has its critics because it does not take into account that offences may vary in their seriousness, and the circumstances of the offender might justify a lesser sentence. Despite civil law jurisdictions adopting this principle of proportionality, there is often zero tolerance in practice for certain kinds of crimes. Drink-driving causing death will attract a jail term. The Australian Government is introducing mandatory sentences for hate crimes.

In an address in 2002, Pope John Paul II said: “there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young”.

The Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in its 2017 Final Report, quoted these words when it said that the appropriate punishment for child sexual abuse was dismissal from the priesthood and expulsion from a religious community. That is zero tolerance because they are the maximum penalties under canon law.

Under canon law, only the Pope or his delegate can dismiss a priest from the clerical state. On 17 January 2014, Pope Francis’ representative, Archbishop Tomasi, told the United Nations Committee for the Rights of the Child that since 2005, the Holy See had dismissed only 25% of the 3400 priests against whom credible allegations of child sexual abuse had been made. That’s 75% tolerance, not zero. Despite Pope Francis’s calls for transparency, we do not have statistics for dismissals since 2014 because he has not published them.

In 2014, Archbishop Coleridge of Brisbane told the Australian Royal Commission that he had sent applications for dismissal to the Vatican in respect of six priests who had been convicted by the state’s courts of sexual abuse offences. The Vatican rejected five out of the six applications for dismissal. That is 83% tolerance, not zero.

Bishop Accountability, and Broken Rites have many examples of where priests have not been dismissed after being found by the church procedures to have sexually abused children. A recent example in 1922 is Fr Hilary Ngome from Cameroon.

Pope Francis is not the only one in the Vatican to use the term zero tolerance. The 2024 Universal Guidelines for national protocols issued by the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors states three times that zero tolerance should be the policy for child sexual abuse. It watered down the accepted meaning by defining it as “permanent removal from ministry”. But the Guidelines say that where someone is convicted of the canonical offence of child sexual abuse, the punishment imposed by the Vatican is to be followed.

The Vatican had an opportunity to impose zero tolerance either as dismissal or permanent removal from ministry in its reform of Book VI of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. It failed to do so.

The claims about zero tolerance are yet another example of “bella figura” that the late Bishop Geoffrey Robinson says pervades the Vatican. In Italian culture, “bella figura” (literally “beautiful figure”), means presenting a good external appearance to the world, while “brutta figura” (literally “ugly figure”) means doing the opposite. Bella figura  has no concern for the truth and never admits a mistake. To get around Pope Francis’ claims of zero tolerance, the Universal Guidelines reduces the term to gobbledegook. The Guidelines provide for permanent removal from ministry for child sexual abusers, but if the Vatican decides differently — and it so often does — then they won’t be permanently removed.

The Church practices zero tolerance when it suits. Priests who want to marry in the Church have to apply for a dispensation from their promise of celibacy, and in return, they are required to be “laicised”. Priests who have been removed from ministry, but not dismissed, can say mass privately, and in some cases, have been allowed to concelebrate mass at the funerals of their parents. If laicisation — the Church’s highest punishment — is mandatory for priests who have never sexually abused a child and want to marry, surely it should be mandatory for those who sexually abuse children.

The Holy See’s response to the Australian Royal Commission’s recommendation of mandatory dismissal for child sexual abuse was odd to say the least. It justified its practice of not dismissing all child sexual abusers by stating that the Church “cannot be indifferent to the sinner’s conversion”. Surely, spending time in a jail cell should give him sufficient opportunity to repent and be saved.

The continuous claim of Pope Francis that the Church practices zero tolerance for child sexual abuse is just another example of bella figura. If Pope Francis wants to exercise leniency, then he should stop using the term “zero tolerance” and admit that it was never appropriate to use that term. Bella figura requires that a mistake is never admitted. However, Pope Francis is capable of admitting mistakes, as he did in 2018 when he admitted that he was wrong in accusing some Chilean sexual abuse victims of slander. But if he does not recognise that zero tolerance is an inappropriate term to describe the way the Church deals with child sexual abusers, then he will be adding more justification to the accusation made by Jason Berry, a committed Catholic and one of the first to write about the sex abuse scandal, that the Church hierarchy is plagued by institutional lying.

This is an edited address given by the author to the ECA Zero Tolerance Conference held in Manila on 1 February 2025.