What Pope Leo was reported to have said in Spain about the “scourge” of sex abuse by Catholic clergy was reminiscent of what Pope Francis said in Belgium in September 2024 when he was “met with anger” over his mishandling of clerical sex abuse. Even though both pontiffs decried abuse and met with some Belgian and Spanish victims, neither of them ever disciplined over 160 bishops credibly accused of sexually abusing children and vulnerable adults, as documented by BishopAccountability.org.
Gullible mainstream and Catholic media sources often fail to report how recent popes are “weak on crime,” like the criminal sexual abuse of children and vulnerable adults. It is indisputable that Francis was, and Leo is, “all talk and no action” when it comes to disciplining clerical predators and bishops who cover up abuse.
Neither Francis nor Leo responded to “The Prayer of the Prey,” which documents cases of truly egregious clerical sexual abuse. Any Catholic who clicks on and watches “The Prayer of the Prey” cannot help but be ashamed of being a member of the Roman Catholic Church, headed by popes and bishops who tolerate predator priests like former Father Jacob Bertrand who satanically abused Rachel Mastrogiacomo, and priests like Father Dennis Hanneman who was reported to the Antelope County Sheriff’s Department for having insert consecrated hosts, rosaries, and candles into the lower orifices of at least two girls, including Lisa Roers, featured in “The Prayer of the Prey.” This behavior is not only sick and evil, but the cover-up and spiritual betrayal by Church leaders often proves more devastating to victims than the actual abuse.
Despite the fact that Roers appealed her abuse to both Pope Francis (on September 30, 2024) and Pope Leo XIV (on March 15, 2025), she has yet to hear back from either Pope Leo or Omaha Archbishop Michael McGovern after writing to the Archdiocese on numerous occasions, most recently on November 11, 2025. Unfortunately, while the media reported faint promises uttered by Leo who staged a photo shoot with a few abuse victims at the Nunciature in Madrid, they avoid interviewing U.S. victims like Roers and Mastrogiacomo, whose cases demonstrate not only cover-ups by both popes, but also by prelates like Cardinal Robert McElroy, retired Archbishop George Lucas, and current Omaha Archbishop Michael McGovern.
A second reason abuse victims are devastated involves the U.S. Bishops’ approval of revisions to the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People which continue to exclude misconduct by bishops, and misconduct by priests with adults. Bishop Barry Knestout, who heads the USCCB’s Committee on the Protection of Children and Young People, opposed delaying the vote on the revisions of the Charter lest recommendations be added to extend protections to vulnerable adults like seminarians and women religious.
Knestout, along with his friend, the late disgraced retired Wheeling-Charleston Bishop Michael Bransfield, was reported to have been at ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s beach house the night of Friday, May 6, 1994, when McCarrick was reported to have sexually assaulted a seminarian. The seminarian later filed a lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Newark, identifying Knestout as having been an accessory after the fact.
What does it say about the character of the U.S. Bishops who elected Knestout to supposedly protect children and young people when most of them knew that he was a very close friend of notorious sexual predator Theodore McCarrick? Considering how McCarrick made Knestout his personal priest-secretary, and knowing how "close" some priest-secretaries become with their closeted homosexual bishops, many might consider Knestout's election a sick joke perpetrated by corrupt, closeted, complicit bishops, many of whom deserve to be put behind bars, especially for the profitable role they played in the human trafficking of some 11 million illegal immigrants that resulted in the misplacement of approximately 450,000 immigrant children. Currently, 146,000 misplaced children have been found, some of whom report having been raped 600 to 700 times.
What the mainstream and Catholic media failed to mention is how bishops, under the norms of the revised Charter, will continue to avoid scrutiny and accountability. Vos estis lux mundi, the process devised in 2019 by Pope Francis to investigate bishops, is an even bigger joke than the Charter. Abuse victims and advocates know that Vos Estis is nothing more than a “self-policing process disguised as accountability” that involves bishops investigating other bishops who are accused of abuse or cover-ups. Unless the abuse receives a lot of media attention and there are multiple victims, credible allegations against most bishops in Vos Estis complaints are ordinarily ruled “unsubstantiated.”
Pope Leo was one of six out of 133 cardinal electors who were accused by the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) in a Vos Estis complaint of covering up abuse in Chicago and Chiclayo. Because the complaint was never thoroughly investigated, and because Leo unjustly laicized Msgr. Ricardo Coronado, a canon lawyer who defended three abuse victims, one cannot expect Leo to discipline other similarly accused bishops. What you will never read elsewhere is how Leo has yet to be investigated for covering up the sexual predation of certain Augustinian seminarians and priests who reported being abused in Rome and Washington, D.C., when Prevost was Prior General of the Augustinian Order (2001-2013).
With Pope Leo covering up for bishops whom he alone can discipline, and with bishops like Knestout and others covering up for priests who were reported to have abused over 150,000 victims in the U.S. and over 200,000 victims in Spain during the past 75 years, there is no reason to believe that the abuse will cease. If abuse cases have decreased in the U.S. as the U.S. Bishops argue, it’s only because the number of priests actively engaged in ministry has decreased dramatically by 61% from 56,454 in 1965 to 21,750 in 2025. Even with that significant decrease, between July 2024 and June 2025, U.S. Catholic abuse allegations and costs surged. The Secretariat of Child and Youth Protection reported 1,070 new allegations (a 19% increase), while the cost of the scandal soared by 82% to $483.5 million in just one year. If just 3 out of the 198 U.S. dioceses and eparchies pay out $3.1 billion for abuse settlements (Los Angeles $1.5 billion; San Diego $800 million, and New York $800 million), the total cost for abuse cases in the U.S. would amount to over $25 billion (not the $5 billion reported by EWTN and other Catholic media sources).
Many sex abuse victims believe that popes like Francis and Leo, along with cardinals like McElroy, Gregory, and Dolan who have been accused of covering up abuse, will all burn in hell for all eternity. Certainly, when one clicks on and watches “From Predators to Pastors,” which documents several accused predators whom Dolan left in ministry, and if one were to read the affidavits in the Gorgia vs. Dolan and the North American College lawsuit, one might come to agree with these victims. Certainly, the excellent documentary by Christine Niles entitled “Clerical Orgies: The Devil in Rome,” should convince most viewers that what Dolan did to Gorgia and his family merits eternal damnation.
As long as the pope, and most cardinals, bishops, priests, and seminarians outside of Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, like India, are closeted homosexuals whose numbers, according to researchers, correlate directly to the number of sex abuse cases in the Catholic Church, one should expect more abuse cases, more cover-ups, and more straight seminarians and priests who report abuse to be canceled and thrown into the street while most Catholic media sources maintain silence and lay Catholics do nothing.
