Austria ;Archdiocese of Vienna In 1995,
Hans Hermann Cardinal Groer stepped down as head of the
Catholic Church in Austria following accusations of
sexual misconduct. In 1998 he left the country and lost the duties of a Cardinal. Nevertheless, he still retained the title of a Cardinal. ;Kremsmuenster Abbey In March 2010, several monks were suspended at Kremsmunster Abbey, located in the Upper Austria city of Kremsmunster, for severe allegations of sexual abuse and physical violence. The reported incidents ranged over a period from the 1970s until the late 1990s and had been subject to police investigation. In July 2013 an Austrian court found Kremsmuenster Abbey director Alfons Mandorfer guilty in 24 documented cases of child abuse and sexual violence. The now
laicised priest, who was accused of committing "sexual acts of differing intensity" on the pupils between 1973 and 1993, was sentenced to twelve years in prison.
Belgium There have been several abuse cases in Belgium. ;Diocese of Antwerp Former parish priest
Bruno Vos of
Nieuwmoer parish in
Kalmthout was officially charged with rape of a minor by the Belgian judiciary. He was also alleged to possess child pornography.
Croatia •
Ivan Čuček was convicted in 2000 of sexual abuse of 37 young girls and sentenced to three years in prison. This term was later reduced by the
Supreme Court to one-and-a-half years. •
Drago Ljubičić, a Catholic priest on the isle of
Rab, was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison for molesting five teenage boys. He will be the first Catholic priest in Croatia to serve prison time for
sexual abuse. When asked by Catholic press agency Glas Koncila (prior to scandal) why children avoid going to church, he blamed the 'strong influence of communism on island Rab'. •
Nediljko Ivanov, former vicar of
Bibinje, is the first priest in Croatia convicted of pedophilia by a church court. Ivanov was first suspected in 2012 when four of his victims reported him to the State's Attorney Office for pedophile activities that occurred from 1983 to 1991. Ivanov was not prosecuted in a civilian court due to statute of limitations of legally prescribed 15 years, because cases were reported in 2012, six years after the statute of limitations went into power.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was also informed about the case, but did not use its authority to remove the priest from the church. The church court ruled that Ivanov can still serve Mass, but was sentenced to fasting, prayer and was ordered to apologise to the victims that he sexually abused. One of the victims stated in 2014 that he finds the judgment satisfactory because everyone know about Ivanov being a pedophile, but he does not consider sentence to be fair. Ivanov lives in a home for retired priests in
Zadar.
France Henri Lebras was sentenced to ten years for the rape of a twelve-year-old boy between 1995 and 1998. In February 2019, Pope Francis alluded to the closure of a religious order due to the 'sexual slavery' of the nuns within it. Some sources identify the congregation he intended as a part of the
Community of St. Jean. On 3 June 2019, the French Catholic Church activated a sex abuse commission—made up of 22 legal professionals, doctors, historians, sociologists and theologians—which will obtain witness statements and deliver its conclusions by the end of 2020. In June 2020, the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church (CIASE), which was established in June 2019, concluded that 3,000 children in France were sexually abused by Catholic clergy and officials since 1950 and that there was an average of 40 victims per year. On 11 November 2020, Jean-Marc Sauve, the head of the independent commission set up by the Catholic Church in France to investigate claims of sex abuse, acknowledged his commission's sex abuse hotline, which closed on 31 October 2020, received 6,500 calls reporting sex abuse in a period 17 months. A 2,500-page report was to be published in October 2021; the head of the independent commission investigating child sexual abuse in the French Catholic Church said that about 3,000 paedophiles, as a minimum estimate, had operated in the church since 1950, with at least 330,000 children sexually abused. Pope Francis said that he was shamed by the church's failure to deal with paedophile priests in France. Young girls abused by nuns were not an infrequent occurrence, either.
Abbé Pierre, founder of the
Emmaüs movement and a revered French priest, has been posthumously accused of sexual misconduct spanning from the 1950s to the 2000s. In July 2024, an internal report by Emmaüs International detailed allegations from seven women, including one minor, who reported sexual assault and harassment between the late 1970s and 2005. Subsequent investigations uncovered additional testimonies, bringing the total to 24 women. These accounts describe a pattern of abuse, with incidents occurring across various countries. Despite these revelations, the Paris prosecutor's office declined to initiate a formal inquiry, citing Abbé Pierre's death in 2007 and the expiration of the statute of limitations for potential charges.
Pope Francis acknowledged the Vatican's longstanding awareness of Abbé Pierre's actions, emphasising the need for transparency and accountability. The
French Catholic Church has called for judicial investigations to fully uncover the extent of the abuses and address potential systemic failures.
Germany In February 2010,
Der Spiegel reported that more than 94 clerics and laymen have been suspected of sexual abuse since 1995. Thirty of them had been prosecuted because legal time constraints related to the occurrence of alleged crimes prevented prosecution of older cases. In 2017, it was further reported that at least 547 members of the prestigious Domspatzen choir in Regensburg were physically or sexually abused between 1945 and 1992. On 25 September 2018, the German Catholic Bishops' Conference released a report (some data of which was leaked via
Der Spiegel several days before its official publication) that reported that 3,677 children in Germany, mostly boys under age 13, were sexually abused by Catholic clergy members over the past seven decades". About 1,670 church workers, or 4.4% of the clergy, had been involved in the abuse which is "shocking and probably just the tip of the iceberg" according to Germany's Federal Justice Minister Katarina Barley. The report, commissioned by the Bishops' Conference in 2014, was not fully independent of the church and likely understated the activity, as journalists have been forbidden from looking at church files which could contain more reports of abuse. The incidents were reported to have happened between the years 1946 and 2014. The report's author criticised the church for denying him access to other Catholic institutions, including children's homes and schools, which could consequently not be included. In December 2020, Catholic nuns who ran a former children's home in the German city of
Speyer were implicated in transporting children to priests who would then sex abuse them.
GottesSuche, a German nonprofit organization with the goal of researching and documenting abuse in both the Catholic and Protestant Churches, has a frequently updated sourced timeline of cases, international but focused on Germany. According to a February 2021 report in
The Daily Beast, nuns from a convent in Speyer rented orphaned boys to German businessmen who forced them to participate in gang bangs and sex orgies. The nuns later punished the young boys if they were covered in semen or had wrinkled clothing.
Ireland In August 2018, a list was published which revealed that over 1,300 Catholic clergy in Ireland had been accused of sexual abuse, with 82 of them getting convicted. ;Archdiocese of Dublin Several priests convicted of abusing children in the United States were Irish nationals, notably
Patrick Colleary,
Anthony O'Connell and
Oliver O'Grady. One of the most widely known cases of sexual abuse in Ireland involved
Brendan Smyth, who, between 1945 and 1989, sexually abused and
assaulted 20 children in parishes in
Belfast, Dublin and the United States. ;Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland In May 2020, it was revealed that prior to the 2004 merger with the SAI which formed Scouting Ireland,
Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland covered up sex abuse committed by people who served in the organisation. In a period spanning decades, both the CBSI and SAI shielded 275 known or suspected predators who abused children after becoming aware of the reported acts of abuse. In October 2018, however, Italian victim rights group Rete l'Abuso asserting that the Italian justice system has treated about 300 cases of predator priests and nuns and netted 150–170 convictions since the year 2000. Three former students claimed in 2010 that they had been abused, and 65 former students signed statements saying that they or other students had been abused by Catholic priests when attending the
Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf, a Catholic school for
deaf children in
Verona, Italy. The abuse, reportedly by 24 priests including the late bishop of Verona, is alleged to have occurred from the 1950s to 1980s. Former
Roman Rota judge Pietro Amenta was taken into police custody in March 2017. In Italy the issue of Catholic sexual abuse had been largely buried. Following an investigation which found thousands of perpetrators and hundreds of thousands of victims in France, there were calls for the church to "find the courage to investigate" clerical child abuse in other countries, including specifically Italy.
Hans Zollner, a German priest and adviser to Pope Francis, said "The Catholic church in other countries must now find the same courage as in France. I hope in Italy too. The church is not immaculate, unfortunately it is also made up of sin and crimes." A Maltese court found that Charles Pulis and Godwin Scerri sexually abused children, and sentenced the two men to six years and five years in prison, respectively. The church officially regretted the delays before investigations; it promised to
remove Pulis from the priesthood.
Anthony Mercieca, who was accused by former
Florida Congressman Mark Foley of molesting him as a teenager and has admitted "inappropriate encounters", now lives in Malta. In year 2020 Donald Bellizzi was sentenced to three years in prison for sexually abusing a teenage boy.
Monaco On 3 December 2020, William McCandless, a member of the Wilmington, Delaware-based religious order Oblates de St. Francis De Sales who was formerly assigned to DeSales University in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, was charged in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for possession of child pornography. He also served as an adviser to
Monaco’s
royal family, Much of McCandless' child pornography was imported from overseas as well. McCandless has been ordered to remain under house arrest until the outcome of his trial.
Netherlands Since 1995, the church established new procedures to receive reports of sexual abuse. Alleged victims can notify a central church institution, called Secretariaat Rooms-Katholiek Kerkgenootschap (SRRK). The church made this change in response to charges of alleged cases of sexual abuse by religious members of the Roman Catholic Church. On 14 May 1998, damages of €56,800 were paid by the diocese of Rotterdam to the victim of sexual abuse by a diocesan priest; this was part of a settlement to avoid civil prosecution. J. Ceelen,
pastor of the
parishes of
Lieshout and of
Mariahout (municipality of
Laarbeek), quit his post after allegations of sexual abuse on 1 September 2005. In February 2010,
Salesians were accused of sexual abuse in their juvenate Don Rua in
's-Heerenberg. Salesian bishop of Rotterdam
van Luyn pleaded for a thorough investigation. In 2011, the
Deetman Commission, acting on the 2010 request of the
Conference of Bishops and the
Dutch Religious Conference, reported on its inquiry into abuse cases from 1945 to 2010 affecting children entrusted to the care of the church in the Netherlands.
Norway Georg Müller, a former Catholic bishop in
Trondheim, Norway, has admitted to sexually abusing an altar boy in the 1980s when he served as a priest there. Müller, who retired as bishop in 2009, said there were no other victims.
Poland In 2013, a succession of child sex abuse scandals within the church, and the poor response by the church, became a matter of widespread public concern. The church resisted demands to pay compensation to victims. On 27 September 2018, however, Bishop
Romuald Kamiński of the Diocese of Warsaw-Praga stated that Polish church leaders were working on a document, to be published later, on priestly sexual abuse of minors in Poland, and ways to prevent it. Cases were being evaluated by Warsaw courts, and the priests involved were banned from working with minors; three were suspended from all pastoral work. According to Archbishop
Wojciech Polak, the head of Poland's Catholic Church, the document will include data on the scale of priestly sex abuse in Poland. On 11 May 2019, Polak issued an apology on behalf of the entire Catholic Church in Poland. The same day,
Tell No One, a documentary detailing accounts of sex abuse by Catholic church workers in Poland, went viral, obtaining 8.1 million viewers on
YouTube by 13 May. The film accused former Polish leader Lech Walesa's personal priest Franciszek Cybula, who is now deceased, of sexual abuse and noted that he transferred between parishes. On 14 May 2019, Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, which has long had an alliance with the nation's Catholic Bishops, Prosecutor and PiS lawmaker Stanislaw Piotrowicz, who heads the Polish Parliament's Justice Commission, has also been criticised for playing down the actions of a priest who was convicted for inappropriately touching and kissing young girls. On 16 May 2020, Polak asked the Vatican to investigate sex abuse claims involving brothers Marek and Tomasz Sekielski. The two brothers released a popular YouTube documentary titled
Hide and Seek, which detailed their allegations that they were molested by a
Polish Catholic priest. ;Archdiocese of Poznań In March 2002, the Archbishop of
Poznań,
Juliusz Paetz, stepped down following accusations, which he denied, of sexually molesting young priests. ;Diocese of Kalisz On 25 June 2020, Pope Francis ordered Bishop
Edward Janiak, age 67, to resign from his duties as bishop of the
Roman Catholic Diocese of Kalisz for protecting priests who committed acts of sex abuse. He appointed Archbishop Grzegorz Ryś of Łódź as apostolic administrator
sede plena, which means he has full administrative authority. On 17 October 2020, Pope Francis accepted Janiak's resignation from the diocese. ;Diocese of Płock In early 2007, allegations surfaced that former bishop
Stanislaw Wielgus (later very briefly Archbishop of Warsaw) was aware that several priests in his former diocese of
Płock were sexually abusing minors. ;Diocese of Warsaw-Praga On 27 September 2018,
Warsaw-Praga Bishop
Romuald Kamiński apologised to those who had been victims of sexual abuse in his Diocese. Jankowski was the subject of a criminal investigation in 2004 related to alleged sexual abuse of a boy; the case was dropped. He was defrocked in 2004. Glodz had presided over Cybula's funeral. Although Glodz had turned 75, the required age for Catholic bishops to offer their resignation, his removal by Pope Francis was described as "cleaning house". It is highly unusual for the pope to accept such a resignation on a prelate's birthday. was now "barred from any kind of celebration or public meeting and from using his episcopal insignia, and is deprived of the right to a cathedral funeral and burial." Gulbinowicz was also ordered to pay an "appropriate sum" to his alleged victims.
Portugal In Portugal an independent commission commissioned by the Catholic Church reported in February 2023 that at least 4,815 children had been abused by Catholic clergy since 1950.
Slovenia ;Archdiocese of Ljubljana •
Franc Frantar – detained in 2006 for sexual abuse of up to 16 minors. He was later sentenced to five years in prison. He initially escaped prosecution by escaping to
Malawi to work there as a missionary, but returned to Slovenia after an
Interpol notice was issued. •
Marko Rupnik – In November 2022, Italian media reports began to appear alleging that Jesuit priest Rupnik had sexually and psychologically abused a number of nuns three decades earlier in the 1990s in a convent in Slovenia when he was their spiritual director. In December 2022, a 58-year-old ex-nun gave an interview to an Italian newspaper, describing several allegations of sexual and psychological abuse committed by Rupnik against her and fellow nuns. On 6 January 2023, the Slovenian Jesuit order said in a statement they 'believe in the sincerity of the nuns and other victims who have spoken out about their suffering and other circumstances regarding emotional, sexual and spiritual abuse by our confrere. We sincerely ask for forgiveness from all.'
Sweden ;Diocese of Stockholm One child was sexually abused by a priest several years in the late 1950s. When the child raised the issue at the time, the priest was protected and the abuse was kept quiet by the church. The victim reported the abuse to the Stockholm diocese again in December 2005, demanding a public apology from the church. In June 2007 Sweden's Catholic church made a public apology in two newspapers.
United Kingdom Vatican Holy See On 23 June 2018, a Holy See tribunal convicted former diplomat Carlo Capella for possessing child pornography while in the Holy See's U.S. nunciature and handed him a five-year prison sentence. On 9 December 2019, lawyers brought a sexual abuse lawsuit against the Holy See, regarding an alleged cover up of abuse committed by former Cardinal
Theodore McCarrick. On 19 November 2020, four people who accused McCarrick of sexually abusing them filed a lawsuit against the
Holy See in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, saying it had failed in its oversight of McCarrick over whom it exercised complete control as his employer. The Holy See says priests are not its employees and that its status as a foreign sovereign is a defence from such a suit.
Vatican City On 14 October 2020, the first ever criminal trial held within the Vatican City for sex abuse began, and involves a priest accused of sexually abusing a former St. Pius X youth seminary student between 2007 and 2012 and another for aiding and abetting the abuse. == North America ==