“Once is a fluke and twice is a coincidence,” begins a pretty standard version of a popular saying, “but three times is a pattern.”
If there is any truth to the expression, then the past week or so may well have provided the three data points needed to begin wondering whether the honeymoon period of Leo XIV’s pontificate is over.
To ask the question is not to answer it – not quite – but everyone knew the honeymoon wouldn’t last forever.
In the bottom half of September and into early October, the pontiff faced real challenges testing his leadership in three key areas: Clerical sexual abuse and coverup, curial reform, and synodality.
A powerful cardinal’s a new assignment
This past week, Leo moved the controversial archpriest of St. Peter’s, Cardinal Mauro Gambetti, to the central Italian archdiocese of Chieti-Vasto.
A 2021 Francis appointment to the St. Peter’s position – a powerful post controlling significant real estate and resources – the 60-year-old Gambetti, had a tumultuous tenure at the Vatican basilica.
In Chieti-Vasto, Gambetti succeeds 77-year-old Archbishop Bruno Forte, a Tubingen-trained theologian and a known quantity to Vatican watchers who rose to prominence during the 2014 synod on the family but never became a player in the Vatican.
Gambetti’s appointment to Forte’s former see, which is not seen as a promotion, is a significant move in curial personnel management. Vatican watchers will be paying close attention to Leo’s choice of successor.
Synodality
Also last week, Leo received a set of proposals from the synod of bishops’ commission on reforming Church law. The commission was tasked with applying the results of the synodal process in its 2021 to 2024 phase, and sought sought to identify how the insights gleaned could be translated into canonical norms.
Pope Francis created the commission in 2023 and named several prominent canonists to it, including Jesuit Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda, widely seen as the architect of the legal theory undergirding appointments of women and lay persons to senior leadership posts.
It’s a complex business, the quick and dirty version of which is that, according to Ghirlanda, the “power of governance in the Church does not come from the sacrament of Orders,” but from “canonical mission,” granted by the Roman pontiff.
Francis appointed women to lead curial departments, but he also tightly reined in the departments’ governing powers, and he appointed cardinal “pro-prefects” to countersign the women-prefects’ orders, effectively hedging his bets.
Since a pro-prefect has the same authority as a prefect, acts that bear a lay prefect’s signature and that of the pro-prefect (a cardinal archbishop) will be valid even if it turns out Ghirlanda was wrong and the lay person can’t actually govern, even in the pope’s name.
Leo followed Francis’s practice of naming a pro-prefect when he appointed Sister Alessandra Smerilli prefect of the Dicastery for Laity, Family, and Life in June of this year.
RELATED: Pope appoints woman to head development dicastery
He did not appoint a pro-prefect when he named lay woman Montse Alvarado to lead the comms department (already headed by a layman), but that fact tends rather to confirm than to complicate the idea that both Francis and Leo were unsure about the theory, since the communications dicastery has no statutory governing power requiring Holy Orders.
RELATED: Vatican explains new reform of Roman Curia, with evangelization at its core
Among the proposals the pope received from the canonical reform commission last week is one that would allow lay persons to be sole judges in cases at canon law.
Currently, lay persons do serve as canonical judges but cannot preside over cases at canon law or serve as sole judges because lay persons do not possess the potestas gubernandi or “power of government” that comes exclusively through Holy Orders and is held in fullness by bishops.
The proposed change – to canon 1425 § 4 – would implicitly recognize that Ghirlanda is unambiguously correct.
Leo XIV is a trained canonist, so it is highly unlikely that the import of the proposed change will escape him. What – if anything – the pope will decide to do with the proposals is anyone’s guess, for now.
There is ample good reason to watch closely, because the game’s afoot, in any case.
The crucial issue: Clerical sexual abuse and coverup
In Lourdes, the pope met privately with seven victims of clerical sexual abuse, encountering them both individually and as a group, for an hour and a half on September 27.
The press office of the Holy See said Leo thanked all the victims “for their painful testimony and reaffirming his commitment to ensuring that the harm they experienced is not repeated for others.”
“There was something sincere about [Pope Leo], said 43-year-old Jérôme Guillement, who suffered abuse when he was a teenager. “Every word was carefully chosen,” Guillement said, “every word had meaning.”
RELATED: ‘This brought me reconciliation’: Abuse survivors praise Sunday’s meeting with Pope Leo
Guillement remains a practicing Christian and is a practicing psychotherapist who advocates for abuse survivors and for reform in the Church.
Another survivor-advocate who met with Leo, Olivier Mardi, told reporters he sensed that the pope is “a man of commitment and also a man of resolve,” who “is not fooled and knows that these events will continue and that we must remain vigilant.”
Meeting the French bishops earlier that same day, Leo praised the prelates for their determination in facing “the painful scourge of abuse committed against minors by members of the clergy or in an ecclesial context against minors.”
“You have taken courageous measures to respond through listening, the search for truth, justice, forgiveness and making amends,” Leo said, “and through a firm commitment to a culture of prevention and protection against these crimes.”
The place of the encounters with survivors and with the bishops – Lourdes – was also significant.
The small French town in the Pyrenees foothills is home to one of the Church’s most renowned healing shrines, and the Lourdes basilica is decorated with mosaics by one of the Church’s most notorious abusers: Father Marko Rupnik.
The Slovenian ex-Jesuit is currently on trial for serial sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse he allegedly committed against dozens of victims over several decades, during which he garnered accolades as an artist and renown as a spiritual master.
The priest is also accused – by several “highly credible” witnesses, to hear the Vatican’s own investigator tell it – of using his “creative process” in his abusive modus operandi.
That fact, victims and advocates as well as Church watchers say, complicates the case for continued use of Rupnik’s work to adorn sacred space.
It also bears mention that Rupnik’s victims were adults – most of them women religious – a fact the Holy See’s own communications prefect cited in 2024 when he defended his dicastery’s continued use of Rupnik images in Vatican media.
RELATED: Vatican comms chief defends use of accused sexual abuser’s artwork
“We’re not talking about abuse of minors,” then-prefect Paolo Ruffini told a room of roughly 150 journalists and other media professionals gathered to hear his keynote address at the annual Catholic Media Conference in Atlanta, Georgia in June of 2024.
Shortly after Leo’s election, the Vatican removed Rupnik’s work from its website, but victims and reform advocates have sharply and insistently criticized the slow pace of justice for Rupnik and the opacity of the canonical legal process he is currently facing.
RELATED: Vatican website removes pictures of artwork created by priest accused of abuse
Rupnik’s mosaics were covered for the papal visit to the shrine – reportedly at the pope’s request – but they remain in place despite survivor-advocates’ sustained efforts to see them removed and the local bishop’s stated belief that they should be taken down.
In 2024, Bishop Jean-Marc Micas of Tarbes and Lourdes told LA Croix International the Rupnik mosaics “prevent Lourdes from reaching all the people for whom the sanctuary’s message is intended.”
Micas also said his proposal to remove them had met “with real opposition from some,” leading advocates and observers including this one to wonder who were the sources of opposition and who could thwart the determined will of a diocesan bishop in his own see.
On the flight home from France, Cyriac Zeller of France’s I-Media asked Leo whether he considers sexual abuse in the Church to be systemic.
“Yesterday [Sunday],” Zeller said, “the victims you met told us that you had acknowledged to them the systemic nature of sexual abuse in the Church.”
“Is that indeed the case?” Zeller asked. “Could you explain your position on this? Do you consider sexual abuse in the Church to be systemic?”
In response, Leo said several victims spoke of systemic abuse.
“[W]ithout wanting to contradict anyone, as I think it is very important,” Leo said he prefers “to express it in a different way, although I did speak about some organizations within the Church who have, at times, if you will, as a system, been abusive.”
“Sexual abuse is first and foremost a human problem,” Leo said. “When it happens within the Church, it actually has another whole dimension added to it, because people’s lives of faith are deeply wounded and sometimes even destroyed.”
“I spoke with them about how the Church, in certain ways, has been seen as being responsible,” Leo said, “but in the same way that the Church, I think, is an important part of helping them to find healing.”
Crux Now reached out to several current and former high-ranking Vatican officials to gauge the response to the pope’s remarks within and around the Vatican, and it was mixed.
Those we contacted spoke on background because they were not authorized to speak.
One bluntly described the pope’s answer as “not surprising, but disappointing,” while another noted how the pope’s remarks in Lourdes and to the victims he met there “seem to confirm his awareness about systemic issues.”
A former high-ranking Vatican official said the pope’s remarks show he is “accepting the legal reality: There are many, many cases of abuse by various officials around the world.”
“Different countries have different laws, and some are even changing laws, including the lifting of statutes of limitations,” to create “look-back windows.”
“Pope Leo understands this,” the former official said, “and must be careful when being asked legal questions on a plane.”
Leo XIV is nothing if not careful – and he is not wrong about abuse (and cover-up) being a human problem first and foremost – but it is a problem in the Church, and that means it is his problem.
As others have repeatedly said – Crux Now’s Editor-in-Chief among them –the abuse and coverup crisis will not end until there is a reform of clerical and hierarchical leadership culture, and that reform requires meaningfully transparent and speedy procedures.
RELATED: The Vatican still hasn’t learned how to deal with abuse allegations
Without them, even relatively small sexual mistakes by clerics – things that are definitely sins but definitely not crimes – will appear very grave to the eyes of the faithful, who exhausted by years of scandal.
Opacity also enables some very bad actors to get away with very bad things, sometimes for a very long time, as the Rupnik case amply illustrates.
This is especially the case when procedural opacity is coupled with ingrained attitudes in society and in Church leadership culture insensible of the ways in which spiritual, psychological, and sexual power dynamics are interwoven.
The end of the beginning
Leo XIV is a cautious and deliberate decision-maker, an institutionalist by character and temperament, a gifted administrator and a genuinely sensitive pastor.
He is also a thought leader – as his global moral leadership during the ongoing and increasingly tumultuous AI revolution continues to demonstrate – and an incisive observer of human nature.
The past couple of weeks, however, have seen issues fall on his plate or come into focus, which are not going away and require address.
“May you live in interesting times,” is an expression apocryphally attributed to an ancient Chinese source no one has been able to nail down.
Times are certainly interesting.