The Letters Pope Leo Couldn’t Answer

Dr. Christopher Longhurst KSO

Pope Leo XIV (Robert Prevost) has repeatedly spoken about the Catholic Church’s responsibility to listen to survivors of abuse. In March 2026, addressing the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, he said survivors’ experiences are “essential reference points” for the Church. Their suffering, he said, brings truth to light and teaches the Church humility. Listening to victims and survivors, he insisted, “must find concrete expression” in every ecclesial community and institution.

In April, a message issued in his name went further. Those who have suffered abuse, it said, deserve “humble listening” and perseverance in seeking what is right and possible to make amends. The Church must not minimise evil or shut itself off from the pain of those who have suffered; it must walk the demanding paths of “truth, justice and healing.”

These are admirable words. But there is another story.

On 10 May 2025, shortly after his election, Pope Leo XIV was sent a letter from survivors of sexual abuse by his priests and congregational members in New Zealand. Its delivery was confirmed by the Apostolic Nunciature in Wellington.

It was a respectful letter. The survivors asked the Pope a simple and specific question: Would he make the public apology and acknowledgement recommended by New Zealand’s Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care?

The Commission had spent years investigating decades of abuse and neglect in state and faith‑based care. Its findings concerning the Catholic Church were devastating. Among other things, it found that Catholic Church leaders had not been accountable or transparent with their own people, or with the wider public, about the nature and extent of abuse.

Recommendation No. 3 was unambiguous: The Pope should make “a public apology and acknowledgement for the abuse and neglect in the care of the Catholic Church in Aotearoa New Zealand.”

The Commission went further, explaining that an apology from the Pope was “a necessary step towards true reconciliation and acknowledgment of the harm suffered by survivors of abuse and neglect in the care of the Catholic Church in Aotearoa New Zealand.”

The survivors were not asking Pope Leo to investigate every historical allegation against his clergy in New Zealand. They were not asking him to determine individual cases or endorse every criticism directed at his Church’s leadership here. They asked him simply to respond to the findings of a national inquiry and fulfil a recommendation directed specifically at the office he occupies.

They politely requested a response by 2 June 2025.

Nothing came. No acknowledgement. No apology. No explanation.

A year later, on 22 June 2026, the survivors wrote again, repeating their request.

Again, nothing.

That silence becomes difficult to ignore when set against the Pope’s repeated insistence that survivors must be heard.

Granted, Pope Leo is not obliged to agree with the survivors. Perhaps he believes that the apology delivered in March 2021 by the New Zealand Catholic bishops already fulfilled the Church’s responsibility. Perhaps he holds another position entirely. But if that is the case, why not say so? Why is silence the response?

This question matters because for survivors, silence has a dark history.

Many were silenced as children by their abusers. Many encountered institutional silence when they finally reported what had happened. Many watched perpetrators moved from place to place while bishops protected reputations rather than children. Some have more recently encountered lawyers hired by his bishops to silence them. And all have felt the painful irony of being told that the Church has changed, only to encounter the very same institutional reflexes: deny, deflect, delay, and remain silent.

This history is why silence is never neutral for survivors. They have lived through it before. They know what it looks like.

So, when survivors write to the highest authority in the worldwide Catholic Church and receive no answer, that silence carries its history with it. It becomes much more than an administrative oversight.

Pope Leo had an opportunity to do something remarkably simple: acknowledge the survivors of clerical and religious child sexual abuse in Aotearoa New Zealand and respond to what this country’s Abuse in Care Inquiry expressly recommended.

Instead, an uncomfortable question now hangs over Robert Prevost’s promises of survivor‑centred accountability: what does “listening to survivors” mean when survivors have written twice and he has said nothing?

Perhaps a Pope will eventually apologise. Perhaps it will happen during a future papal visit to New Zealand — a carefully prepared ceremony, a public statement, cameras, and an audience. But an apology delayed until a papal itinerary makes it convenient is not quite the same thing as an apology freely and promptly offered when survivors first reached out.

And if a future papal visit does become the occasion for an apology, another question will remain: Why did it take a papal itinerary for the suffering of survivors to become worthy of the Pope’s attention?

But survivors do not need another public speech. They do not need to hear more about the importance of listening. They need a response. That distinction matters, because institutions do not demonstrate change through public statements. They demonstrate it through conduct.

A Pope who has genuinely learned to listen should not need a papal visit to prove it. Sometimes the test is extraordinarily simple: someone writes, you answer.

So, Robert Prevost — where is your answer.