Before he was elected, Pope Francis wrote about how there is a very clear distinction between sin and corruption. Pope Francis says, no, sinners need forgiveness, but you can't just forgive corruption and move on. If you're a priest, your job is to forgive and to reconcile. We're professional reconcilers. So our tendency, by nature, is to try to find a way to apply mercy to a situation through forgiveness. But what's often needed instead is to shine the light in the darkness, and to expose the corruption for what it is, so that we can then move forward, as sinners. We can move forward together as sinners — but we can't move forward together as a diocese if we’re corrupt, and it’s not acknowledged.

The pope put aside his prepared remarks to address “a problem that is very serious on this matter of abuse, the filming of child pornography. These children who are recorded, are victims, sophisticated victims of this consumer society." Sexual abuse of minors is “one of the greatest scourges” of society today. Pope Francis recalled the “sad reality” of abuse cases in the church and in the world, objecting to people who may say, “ah, there aren’t so many. If it were only one, it would already be scandalous, just one, and there are more than one,” he said.

The 2022 Annual Report considers allegations made between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022. It found that there were 16 allegations made by minors during that time, seven of which were substantiated. That means that of the 52,387 members of the clergy (34,344 priests and 18,043 deacons), .013 percent of them had a substantiated allegation made against him.

Diocesan archives are required to preserve, and then purge, the notes, evidence, and conclusions of investigations into allegations against clerics which do not go forward or are found to be unproven. As part of wrongfully accused clerics’ right to a good name, the Church is not supposed to preserve in perpetuity all the details of a false accusation made against them. “A brief summary of what occurred along with the text of the definitive sentence is to be retained,” Canon 489. However, diocesan bishops actually have the power to dispense from the legal requirement to destroy their old case files — and they always have.

When the church filed for Chapter 11 in May 2020, some 30 lawsuits alleging abuse had been filed against individual clergy members and the archdiocese as a whole. In the years that followed, the number of claims -- many dating back decades and alleging abuse against Catholic priests, nuns, brothers and deacons -- swelled to 450. After a new state law passed in 2021 and enacted in 2022 extended the window for claims to be filed, the number grew to nearly 500.