ROME — The Vatican’s child protection board said Thursday the Catholic Church has a moral obligation to help victims of clergy sexual abuse heal, and identified financial reparations and sanctions for abusers and their enablers as essential remedies.

The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors focused on the issue of reparations in its second annual report. It’s an often sensitive topic for the church, given the financial, reputational and legal implications it imposes on the hierarchy.

The report, compiled with input from dozens of survivors, said monetary settlements were necessary to provide victims with needed therapy and other assistance to help them recover from the trauma of their abuse.

But it said the church owed a debt far greater to victims, the broader church community and God. The hierarchy must listen to victims and provide them with spiritual and pastoral help. Church leaders must apologize for the harm done, tell victims what they are doing to punish those who harmed them and what measures they are taking to prevent future abuse, the report said.

“The church bears a moral and spiritual obligation to heal the deep wounds inflicted from sexual violence perpetrated, enabled, mishandled, or covered up by anyone holding a position of authority in the church,” it said. “The principles of justice and fraternal charity, to which every Christian is called, require not only an acknowledgement of responsibility but also the implementation of concrete measures of reparation.”

Pope Leo signals commitment to commission

The report covers 2024, a period before Pope Leo XIV was elected. History’s first American pope has acknowledged that the abuse scandal remains a “crisis” for the church, and that victims need more than financial reparations to heal.

He has signaled a commitment to the commission, which was created by Pope Francis in 2014 to advise the church on best practices to prevent abuse. In its first decade, the commission struggled to find its footing in a Vatican often resistant to confronting the abuse crisis and hostile to endorsing victim-focused policies.

But more recently, the commission has carved out its space in the Vatican bureaucracy and in July Leo named a new president, French Bishop Thibault Verny, to take over from the retired American Cardinal Sean O’Malley.

A legal process that is itself retraumatizing

Significantly, the 2024 report said the church’s way of handling abuse cases internally, according to a secretive process that provides no tangible accountability, was itself retraumatizing for victims.

“We must re-emphasise that the church’s decades-long pattern of mishandling reports, including abandoning, ignoring, shaming, blaming, and stigmatising victims/survivors, perpetuates the trauma as an ongoing harm,” it said.

It was a reference to the church’s dysfunctional way of dealing with abuse cases according to its in-house canonical code, where the most severe punishment meted out to a serial rapist priest amounts to being fired.

The process is cloaked in secrecy, such that victims have no rights to information about their case other than learning its outcome, which often comes after a yearslong wait. Victims have no real recourse other than going public with their story, which can be retraumatizing.

The report called for sanctions that were “tangible and commensurate with the severity of the crime.” While laicization is a possible outcome for priests who rape children, the church is often loathe to remove priests entirely. It frequently gives out lesser sanctions, such as a period of retreat away from active ministry for even gross cases of abuse.

Even when a bishop is removed for bungling cases, the public is only told that he has retired. The report called for the church to “clearly communicate reasons for resignation or removal.”

An audit of countries and Vatican office

The report provided an audit of child protection policies and practices in over a dozen countries, as well as within two religious orders, a lay movement and one Vatican office.

The findings praised countries where dioceses had actively cooperated with the audit and called out those that didn’t. The report made recommendations for follow-up and provided data from other sources, including the United Nations and independent reports, to provide local context of how abuse is handled in the secular sphere.

The report found that the Vatican’s missionary evangelization office, which is responsible for the church in Africa, Asia and parts of the developing world, has the resources to handle abuse cases.

But it noted that only a “small number of cases” actually arrive in Rome, suggesting the church in Africa and Asia remains decades behind the West in reporting and handling abuse cases, which under Vatican law must be sent to Rome for processing.

The report said the missionary office had only handled two cases of bishops who mishandled abuse cases, a staggeringly low number given the size of the territory involved.

Such data suggests the Vatican still has a long way to go in parts of the world where abuse, especially same-sex abuse, remains a taboo topic in the wider society and where the church is confronting broader issues of war, conflict and poverty.