The Summit on Abuse, Five Years Later

Five years ago this month Pope Francis convened the Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church at the Vatican. The first-of-its kind meeting—announced in September 2018—was an acknowledgment of the global dimension of the clerical abuse crisis, which after a year of revelations and reports was becoming a dire threat to Francis’s pontificate. There had come Australia’s Royal Commission report in December 2017, the revelation of abuses in Chile (and the resignation of one-third of that country’s bishop) in January 2018, the McCarrick scandal that summer, the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report in August 2018, and the attempt to personally connect Francis to the various scandals—and perhaps force his resignation—by former papal nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Clearly, something new had to be tried.