Pope Leo’s new line on ‘vulnerability’

In a speech last week, Pope Leo XIV appeared to signal a change in how the Church should think about adult victims of abuse.

Pope Leo XIV. Credit: Vatican media

The issues surround the sexual abuse of adults in the Church have been among the most prominent and contentious areas of canonical reform in the years following the scandal of the late former cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

In 2019, Pope Francis significantly broadened the definition of “vulnerability” used to determine if sexual misconduct is canonically criminal with the motu proprio Vos estis lux mundi, creating a years-long back and forth among canon lawyers and Vatican departments, and left many dioceses confused about how and how broadly to apply them.

While some clarification came in the form of handbooks and clarifications of various dicasteries, there has remained a debate about who, exactly, is a “vulnerable adult,” canonically speaking.

But in a speech last week, Pope Leo XIV appeared to signal a change in how the law is to be applied, and how cases of vulnerability are considered. The change could bring needed clarity to the canonical process, shifting the focus of vulnerability from consideration of the person to the situation.

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In his speech to the plenary session of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors last week, Pope Leo told the body that its work to prevent abuse is both a matter of “protocols or procedures” and forming a wider “culture of care.”

Throughout his address, the pope referenced together— as has been the papal norm since the scandals of 2018 — the abuse of both minors and of adults, as a single unified area of concern for the commission.

Under Pope Francis, both in the texts of his public addresses and in the law of Vos estis, the accepted terminology was to speak of the abuse of “minors and vulnerable adults.”

The original text of Vos estis criminalized specifically “performing sexual acts with a minor or a vulnerable person,” though sexual conduct with minors was already a canonical criminal offense.

In a 2023 update to the document, the language was amended to say “vulnerable adult,” while keeping the definition of vulnerability as “any person in a state of infirmity, physical or mental deficiency, or deprivation of personal freedom which in fact, even occasionally, limits his or her ability to understand or want or in any case to resist the offense.”

That definition has caused considerable canonical headaches over the years. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has exclusive competence to handle cases of sexual abuse of minors and, according to its own law, those who “habitually have an imperfect use of reason” — adults with severe mental disabilities, who are considered legally equivalent to minors.

But it was not clear whether the expanded definition of “vulnerable adult” gave an expanded competence to the DDF to adjudicate cases of other kinds of “vulnerable adults.”

The DDF clarified in 2020 that it remains competent only to handle penal cases involving minors and those equivalent to them in law — those with habitually imperfect use of reason — and then did so again in 2024, with other cases of vulnerability to be handled by other Roman dicasteries as appropriate.

The reason for these rolling clarifications has been the continued debate, even among senior cardinals, over how broadly the Vos estis definition of vulnerability should be applied, and what equivalence in law it should be accorded compared to the abuse of minors.

The matter became somewhat clearer when Pope Francis promulgated a new version of Book VI of the Code of Canon Law, distinguishing further between two notions of “vulnerable adult” in the revised canon 1398, which recognized “a person who habitually has an imperfect use of reason [equivalent to a minor],” on the one hand, and on the other: “one to whom the law recognises equal protection” under the definition of Vos estis.

While legal opinion settled that a substantive distinction should be drawn between the sexual abuse of a minor and the sexual coercion of an adult, how to treat different classes of adult victims has remained a live issue — as has the legal utility of the broad category created by Vos estis.

Fr. Hans Zollner, SJ, a founding member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors and for years the Vatican’s de facto expert spokesman on issues of abuse reform, has repeatedly indicated that he believes the definition of vulnerable adult in Vos estis is unworkable, and even unhelpfully broad.

The priest has questioned the broad application of the term, and argued that it detracts from sound application of the law.

“Do you really want to be a ‘vulnerable person’ [just] because you are a woman and because you are a parishioner? I don’t think so,” Zollner told a public Q&A session on abuse reform in 2023, shortly before announcing his surprise resignation from the pontifical commission and disaffection with its work and progress.

But advocates for victims of clerical coercion or sexual manipulation have maintained that the Church should continue to recognize legally the way in which spiritual authority or imbalances of power can impact consent.

Into that debate, Pope Leo last week offered a subtle but important change in language during his speech to the PCPM, during which he departed from the usage of his predecessor and the law by not mentioning “vulnerable adults” even once. Instead, Leo used the formula of “minors and persons in vulnerable situations,” which he repeated three times.

While the difference might appear to be a distinction without difference, canonists have picked up on the new phraseology as potentially significant.

The shifting of the assessment of vulnerability from the individual to the context of the alleged sexual misconduct could have a dramatic impact on how cases are assessed, and on how victims of abuse are themselves categorized legally.

The current definition of “vulnerable adult” in the law is that of “any person in a state of infirmity, physical or mental deficiency, or deprivation of personal freedom which in fact, even occasionally, limits his or her ability to understand or want or in any case to resist the offense.”

In essence, the definition seems to require Church authorities to declare an adult mentally compromised, unable to consent to sexual acts. In doing so, it erects a nebulously low bar for establishing some cognitive-evaluative-volitional deficiency but, as Fr. Zollner has observed, this involves victims of abuse being essentially categorized as vulnerable people.

A person in a “vulnerable situation,” by contrast can be construed as a victim of both the alleged abuser and of the circumstances of abuse. This allows authorities to consider the specific situational context of an alleged criminal sexual advance — whether there is a hierarchical, pastoral, or spiritual relationship which can leave a person practically or morally vulnerable to abuse.

Such a shift in emphasis in the language of vulnerability would allow for a more accurate legal assessment of, for example, a seminarian who alleges abuse by a formator or senior cleric who is not, and would not wish to be otherwise determined by ecclesiastical authorities to be of a mental deficiency or have an impaired ability to understand sexual advances.

Similarly, canonists who have advocated for accused clerics have questioned if the language and definition of vulnerability in Vos estis even allows for a sinful but non-abusive consensual sexual encounter between a cleric and any lay person to occur, or if all lay people are de iure “vulnerable” in relation to clerics.

By shifting the assessment of vulnerability from the person and class of person to the situation, it will be likely easier for authorities to consider the relative circumstances of the two people, and whether a situation was indeed “vulnerable” or something closer to consensual.

Of course, Leo’s shift of language in his speech to the PCPM does not alter the text of the law in Vos estis. However, after years of “minors and vulnerable adults” serving as a term of art in canon law and papal rhetoric, it is impossible to ignore that a canonist pope replaced it entirely in his address to the PCPM with a new formulation.

That formulation, emphasizing vulnerability of situations, rather than labeling a person as especially vulnerable, seems almost certain to have been communicated deliberately by the pope and will no doubt begin to be reflected in the PCPM’s work, too.

From there, it is likely to feed into the work of different dicasteries, charged with handling these cases, and from there feed back down to local dioceses as well.

In doing so, Leo appears to be putting into practice his stated understanding of the PCPM’s work, and the wider effort to eradicate abuse within the Church: that there is a need for changing and creating the correct “culture” in facing the abuse crisis, not merely revising procedures and protocols.

Ironically, if Leo’s new words are heard and acted on, the culture around how abuse cases involving adults could precede an eventual change in the wording of the law itself.