A Human Problem

The Pope says sexual abuse is “first and foremost a human problem”. Bishop Bätzing considers this “inadequate and, in its potential consequences, highly problematic”. The dispute looks like a dispute about a word. In truth it is about who controls the Church.

I. Two sentences

On 28 September 2026 Pope Leo XIV flew back to Rome from his journey to France. In Lourdes he had met seven survivors of sexual abuse. Several of them declared afterwards that abuse in the Church was systemic. On the plane a journalist asked the Pope whether he saw it that way too.

Leo answered that he preferred to express it differently. Some organisations in the Church had “at times, if you will, as a system, been abusive”. But: “Sexual abuse is first and foremost a human problem.” When it happens in the Church, another dimension is added, because it wounds and sometimes destroys the faith of those affected. From this arises a particular responsibility of the Church to accompany them.

On 3 November 2026 Georg Bätzing, Bishop of Limburg and former chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, publicly contradicted him. The recognition of systemic causes, he wrote, was “not a peculiarity of the Church debate in Germany” but “a consequence of scientific findings”. Should the Church downplay or deny the systemic causes, that would be a serious setback. He wished the Pope would make “an equally clear recognition of the systemic causes of sexualised violence”.

That a bishop publicly contradicts the Pope is rare. That he does so on this question has a reason.

II. What science found

The findings Bätzing relies on come from the so-called MHG study, named after the universities of Mannheim, Heidelberg and Giessen. The German Bishops’ Conference had commissioned it itself and published it in 2018. It examined the years 1946 to 2014 in all 27 German dioceses.

The researchers found indications of 1,670 accused clerics and 3,677 affected children and young people. They expressly called this a lower estimate, because they were not allowed to inspect the files themselves. Church staff or law firms searched the archives and filled in questionnaires. More than half of those affected were 13 years old or younger.

Three findings are decisive for the dispute. First, canonical proceedings were opened in only 34 per cent of the documented cases. Second, accused priests were transferred more often than others. Third, six of seven sub-projects found indications that personnel files had been destroyed or altered. The authors concluded that sexual abuse is above all an abuse of power. As risk factors they named the power relations in the Church and its sexual morality. In his statement Bätzing adds clericalism and the “sacral elevation of priestly authority”.

III. What is true in the Pope’s sentence

Fairness requires first examining what the Pope says correctly. Sexual abuse is indeed not confined to the Church. It happens in families, in sports clubs, in schools. The Odenwaldschule in Hesse, a showcase boarding school of progressive education, had no priests, no celibacy and no Catholic sexual morality. Nevertheless children were abused there for decades, and those around it kept silent.

To that extent abuse is a human problem. There are perpetrators wherever adults have power over children.

IV. What the sentence conceals

But the question was not whether there are perpetrators everywhere. The question is what an institution does when it has a perpetrator in its ranks. This is where the systemic lies, and here the Pope’s sentence does not help.

A control engineer would put it this way: a system in which the one being measured holds the sensor cannot correct itself. In the Church the bishop was at the same time superior, pastor and judge of the accused priest. He decided whether there would be an investigation, whether the police would learn of it and what went into the file. When files were altered or destroyed in six of seven sub-projects, that is not the human failure of individuals. It is the way of working of an institution that owes account to nobody but itself.

An everyday picture makes this tangible. A sports club in which a coach abuses children has a human problem. A sports club that moves the coach to another department, makes the records disappear and suggests silence to the parents has a systemic problem. The difference lies not in the act but in the response to it.

V. Two biographies

How hard it is to step out of this system is shown by the paths of both parties, and this is no reproach to either of them.

As bishop of Chiclayo in Peru, Robert Prevost helped the victims of the Sodalicio, a Catholic community whose founder had abused children and young men. He organised meetings with Church officials when other Peruvian bishops refused. The Vatican investigator Jordi Bertomeu called his role “essential”. At the same time the New York Times reported in 2025 on cases in his own diocese in which accused priests continued to appear in public. The Church investigation was closed in 2023 and reopened after public pressure. The Vatican states that he acted according to the rules.

In 2022 Georg Bätzing appointed as district dean a priest against whom there were allegations of sexual harassment of women and whom he himself had admonished in writing. At the Katholikentag he defended the decision and said that today he would submit the case to an advisory board.

Both cases show the same thing: even those who mean it seriously decide within a structure in which they themselves are the final authority. That is precisely why the good will of the individual is not enough.

VI. What it is really about

The two are less far apart on substance than the headlines suggest. The Pope, too, concedes that organisations of the Church have acted abusively “as a system”. The dispute is about a word, but the consequences hang on this word.

If abuse is a human problem, prevention, training and the accompaniment of survivors suffice. The structures remain as they are. If it is systemic, the distribution of power must change: independent oversight, accountability of bishops, participation of the laity. That is exactly what the Synodal Way in Germany, which Bätzing led, demanded, and exactly what Rome has resisted. The dispute about the cause is a dispute about the consequence.

Incidentally, the German debate began with the Jesuits. In January 2010 Father Klaus Mertes, then rector of the Canisius-Kolleg in Berlin, wrote to former pupils and made abuse by members of the order public. An order demonstrated at the time that an institution can take the step outwards. It took it because one individual no longer kept to the rule of silence.

VII. What follows

Max Stirner described the holy as that which one may not touch and at which one does not laugh. The MHG study speaks more soberly of the sacral elevation of priestly authority. The same is meant: what is holy is not controlled. And what is not controlled does not correct itself.

An institution that examines itself will always come to the conclusion that the problem lies with individuals. Negative feedback must come from outside: files that independent experts may inspect, suspected cases that go to the public prosecutor and not to the vicar general, bishops who owe account to an authority outside their own hierarchy. As long as this is missing, the Pope’s sentence remains true and without consequence at the same time. People fail. Systems decide whether it is noticed.

Further reading: The Saint and the Heretic · Priests Without a Congregation · The Controller Without Sensors