Pope Must Address Clergy Sexual Abuse and Massive US Decline in Church Attendance

“Your Eminence, ‘Which has greater value...the combined and total financial value of all our Archdiocese’s assets, or the value of a girl’s life lost to evil’?”

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD

www.virtueonline.org

May 29, 2025

By all accounts the new Pope Leo XIV is getting rave reviews from Catholics and Protestants alike. He comes across as humble, self-effacing, and approachable with a non-celebrity, non-mega church humility-like approach to his job. He seems to be without a flaming ego that needs constant reinforcement by an adoring public.

That he is an American is clearly a plus at a time when everything seems topsy turvey in America with a government and president having imbibed a winner take all approach to life. Pope Leo is a breath of fresh air.

He is steering the Catholic ship between the Charybdis of MAGA and the Scylla of Woke with skill and alacrity.

He turned his back on a Gay PRIDE flag waved at him in a walkabout; and then spent only 17 seconds shaking hands with vice-president J.D. Vance preferring to hold long meetings with other leaders.

He has made the right noises on abortion and gay marriage. He outlined a clear Catholic teaching on marriage and abortion, noting that family is based on a "stable union between a man and a woman" and that the unborn enjoy dignity as God’s creatures.

Plus, plus on all counts. But the story does not end there. Not by a long shot.

The two major issues he must face are critical to his church’s very survival at least in the US -- clergy sexual abuse and the falling away of millions of Catholics from the fold.

How he handles these two issues will determine his future and legacy.

Let’s start with Catholics leaving the church. There is a mass exodus. The Roman Catholic Church in America is cratering. While there are a few intellectual evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics who are becoming Roman Catholic, the overall trend is in the other direction.  Actually, the Roman Church is hemorrhaging members…by the millions.

While a multiyear decline in Christianity in the U.S. may have leveled off, according to a new survey by Pew Research Center, the survey found Catholics are seeing the greatest net losses of believers compared to other religions in the U.S.

The data indicate that for every one person received into the Catholic Church, another 8.4 individuals have left the faith, either altogether or for another worship tradition. This increases the trend Pew found in 2014, when 6.5 Catholics left the faith for every person who entered.

Pew’s new survey also shows just 29% of the nation’s Catholics attend religious services weekly or more often. Altogether four in 10 Catholics attend religious services monthly or more.

In addition, support among U.S. Catholics for legalized abortion, homosexuality and other stances at odds with church teaching has increased over the past decade and a half.

None of these figures should make Pope Leo happy and if he wants to see the church in the country of his birth survive and thrive, he must reverse the current trend. That is a tall order for a nation fast becoming post-Christian. The strength of his church lies in the Global South, as it does for global Anglicanism. The migration of Catholics from Latin countries is the one best hope for America.

CLERGY SEXUAL ABUSE

The Roman Catholic Church in America is riddled with abusive homosexuals and pederasts at the very highest levels of the church, and unless they are rooted out, they will bring the whole house of cards down around themselves.

Consider this story: “There was a young girl who loved our Lord and was befriended by an associate priest who raped her. In great shame and deep sorrow, the girl told her parents who would not believe her because priests supposedly are ‘holy men.’ The parents of the girl spoke to the pastor who defended the associate and claimed their daughter was lying. When the parents told their daughter to remain quiet, she then killed herself. A young girl’s life was lost to the predatory behavior of a so-called holy priest. To my knowledge, the rapist suffered no consequences. Here is my question, Your Eminence, ‘Which has greater value...the combined and total financial value of all our Archdiocese’s assets, or the value of that girl’s life lost to evil’?”

Our Lord’s response would be overwhelming; It is best that a millstone be tied around the priest’s neck and he be dumped into the ocean, than he ever offends (abuses) a child of God. And there is not a shred of Biblical evidence that such a person be shielded by the seal of the confessional. This is the fallback bullshit Catholic position to shield the vilest offender who in this case happens to be a priest.

This is not an isolated story. It has been and continues to be repeated hundreds of times. Men with boys is an even bigger story. Consider the late Cardinal McCarrick who took young seminarians to his bed. He almost got away with it but the public outcry was so great he was defrocked by Pope Francis after being convicted of sexual misconduct in a canonical trial.

As of November 21, 2019, there were 6,488 names in the USCCB database, including 5,808 priests, 35 bishops, 108 deacons, and 47 seminarians, for a total of 5,998 accused clerics and future clerics. We don’t have the updated 2025 figures.

Many who have written on the needed characteristics of the next pope have said such things as “The next pope needs to call the bishops to proclaim the faith boldly; to restore respect for the sacraments; to unify the polarized elements of the Church.” Few pundits note that purging the Church of the Lavender Mafia, of the homosexual priests and bishops who run the Church, is arguably the most important and the most difficult of all tasks a new pope will face.  We believe it is.

Pope Benedict failed to do the cleanup because he was old, frail, and sick—but even more so because the resistance to his efforts was so strong. If Pope Leo has the cojones, he needs to clean house starting in his own backyard. He needs to root out every sodomist cleric regardless of how high they have climbed in the hierarchy.

Veteran Vatican watcher Dr. Jules Gomes has documented it all, noting that the U.S. Catholic Church has spent $5 billion on clergy sex abuse allegations in 20 years. A 106-page study records a total of 16,276 “credible allegations” of abuse of minors by priests, deacons, and religious brothers, which were reported by dioceses, eparchies, and men’s religious communities in the U.S. over the last two decades.

Bishops have had to sell churches to pay settlements as insurance companies meet less than one-fifth of the expenses. Dioceses and religious orders were forced to bear 84% of the costs, resulting in bishops selling churches, reorganizing parishes, and filing for bankruptcies, with several dioceses explicitly citing the settlements as a reason to declare bankruptcy.

Four in five victims were male and one-fifth of the victims were female, the survey recorded, confirming reports by The Stream and other experts of a “lavender mafia” dominating the Latin-rite Roman Catholic priesthood.

More than half the victims were between ages 10 and 14 (56%) at the time the abuse occurred or began, with 24% ages 15 to 17 and 20% ages nine and younger. (Again think Jesus and millstones).

The report estimated the number of perpetrators to be 4,490, with a combined 95% of all alleged perpetrators being priests, either diocesan (80%) or religious (15%). Four percent are religious brothers and 1% are deacons (diocesan or religious).

This is what Pope Leo must attend to without delay. His own credibility as the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics is on the line.

END