Why it’s so hard to hold priests accountable for sexual abuse

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

Carolyn M. Warner, University of Nevada, Reno

(THE CONVERSATION) This article from 2018 was updated on May 9, 2024, to reflect the author’s latest research on how canon law has changed over the years and to include additional recent investigations.

Louisiana State Police are investigating senior officials of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans suspected to have shielded predatory priests for decades.

A search warrant, served in April 2024, seeks to enable the state police to look into the archdiocese’s history of covering up for abusive priests. It will allow the police to access communications between local church leaders and the Vatican and investigate priests for alleged sex trafficking of children.

Over the past few years, several investigations by state attorneys general, including reports from Illinois and Maryland in 2023 and one from New York in 2020, found patterns of child sexual abuse by clergy in Catholic dioceses.

In 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury report was one of many investigations to find shocking levels of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. It uncovered, in six dioceses, the sexual abuse of over 1,000 children and named 301...