What to expect from the 1st global child protection report

The pope’s safeguarding commission has announced the “imminent” release of its first annual report, but what will it say and what is at stake?

The pope’s safeguarding commission has announced the “imminent” release of its first annual report on the Church’s worldwide efforts to protect minors and vulnerable adults.

Cardinal Seán O’Malley, president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. © Mazur/catholicchurch.org.uk.

The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (PCPM) said Oct. 18 that the eagerly awaited document would “provide an assessment of the nature and effectiveness of safeguarding policies and procedures in the Church, and offer recommendations for continuous improvement.”

Why is the report significant? What do we know about its contents? And what should we look out for when it’s released? 

The Pillar takes a look.

Why is the report significant?

The report is notable because it marks the first time a Vatican body has published an assessment of the state of safeguarding in the worldwide Catholic Church.

If you haven’t been following the Church’s child protection efforts closely, that might not sound like much of an achievement. Perhaps it even sounds like something the Church should have commissioned decades ago. 

But the Catholic Church — with its 114 national Latin Rite bishops’ conferences, 23 Eastern Catholic Churches, and 1.39 billion members — is an extremely complex institution. And its approach to record-keeping is, to put it gently, inconsistent. 

Yet for the PCPM’s members, the report’s significance extends beyond the facts and figures in its pages. 

As Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, the chair of the pontifical commission’s annual report committee, put it in February, “the annual report is a tool for promoting a change of mindset, in the Church.”

How will it do this? The PCPM sees the report as the first of many. Over the years, the documents should help the commission and other interested parties to develop a better understanding of how safeguarding mechanisms are operating (or failing to operate) worldwide. 

The PCPM hopes the inaugural report, which Pope Francis asked for in April 2022, will increase pressure on Church entities to take a more consistent and transparent approach to child protection. 

The commission’s president Cardinal Seán O’Malley told L’Osservatore Romano in March that the annual report would enable the PCPM to “kind of take the temperature of what’s happening in the Church over the past year.”

That simply hasn’t been possible before. 

What do we know about the report?

Quite a bit, from the PCPM’s website and its members’ public statements. We know, for example, that it’s called the “Pilot Annual Report on Safeguarding Policies and Procedures in the Catholic Church.”

We also know it will focus on four topics: 

1) The local Church in focus: In this section, the report will examine how the battle against abuse is being fought in specific territories. It will likely focus on the roughly dozen countries whose bishops made ad limina visits to Rome in 2023. For each territory, it will present “key findings,” “lessons learned,” and “recommendations and objectives” for the next 12 months.

2) The Church in the regions: The report will then discuss safeguarding at the continental level. The PCPM’s four regional groups — Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe — will present their assessments, following the same “key findings,” “lessons learned,” and “recommendations and objectives” structure.

3) Safeguarding procedures and the Roman Curia: In this section, the report will explain how the PCPM functions within the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), the Vatican body responsible for handling clerical abuse cases involving minors. It will also examine how Vatican dicasteries manage abuse reports referred from local Churches, again presenting “key findings,” “lessons learned,” and “recommendations and objectives.” 

4) The Churches’ Safeguarding Ministry in Society: In the fourth section, the report will give an overview of the Church’s wider child protection efforts through global organizations such as Caritas Internationalis, also ending with “key findings,” “lessons learned,” and “recommendations and objectives.” 

PCPM members discussed a 70-page draft report at their plenary assembly in March. 

De Boer-Buquicchio told The Pillar she hoped the finished text would be made public by the summer of 2024. It’s appearing a little later: in the final days of October, following the publication of Pope Francis’ fourth encyclical and the synod on synodality’s closing Mass.

PCPM members are already looking beyond the first report’s launch. They discussed a blueprint for the second annual report, covering 2024 to 2025, at their plenary meeting this month.

What should we look out for?

There are several topics that journalists, and other readers, are likely to skim the report for:

• Assessments of local Churches: Media in countries that had ad limina visits in 2023 are likely to be interested in the PCPM’s verdicts. These nations include Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, Colombia, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe. Which will fare well and which poorly?

• Holding bishops accountable: How will the report tackle the sensitive question of episcopal accountability? It’s been five years since the publication of Vos estis lux mundi, the papal document establishing a mechanism for holding bishops responsible for the mishandling of abuse cases. Commentators have argued that the norms are being applied inconsistently and opaquely worldwide. When a bishop steps down following a Vos estis investigation, Church authorities seldom explain why. Will the report have anything to say about this practice?

• The Rupnik affair:  Almost a year ago, the Vatican announced it was reopening an investigation into abuse allegations against the Slovenian mosaic artist Fr. Marko Rupnik. The Holy See press office statement said the review was triggered by information about the handling of the affair highlighted by the PCPM. Will the report refer to the now notorious case, or is it beyond its scope, given the PCPM doesn’t typically address individual cases?

What’s at stake?

In September 2022, Cardinal O’Malley highlighted the gulf between words and actions when it comes to clerical abuse.  

“Policies are of little use unless they are put into practice, guidelines are ineffective unless there is robust training for and by those responsible for their implementation,” he said. “And none of this will add up to a credible prevention mechanism unless there is transparency in reporting with consequences for failings.” 

The PCPM’s annual report is an attempt to help Church authorities take responsibility not only for the just resolution of individual cases, but also for global trends, underpinned by solid data.

As the pilot report only covers a dozen of the world’s 114 bishops’ conferences, some will dismiss it as inadequate. But that’s roughly 10%. Over a decade, the reports would cover all the bishops’ conferences, though the full picture might still be unclear, given the institutional complexity of the Church, with its far-flung religious orders and charitable works.

Would annual reports alone ensure “consequences for failings”? No, but they could establish a new level of transparency, helping Church leaders now running from one crisis to the next to reflect on which policies would prove most effective in the worldwide fight against abuse.

In his April 2022 address to PCPM members, Pope Francis said he hoped the annual report would be “a factor of transparency and accountability,” providing “a clear audit” of the Church’s progress.

What if it fails to do that? The pope outlined a bleak scenario.

“Without that progress,” he said, “the faithful will continue to lose trust in their pastors, and preaching and witnessing to the Gospel will become increasingly difficult.”

That’s how high the pope himself believes the stakes are.