Pope Leo Taps French Archbishop to Lead Child Protection Commission
Archbishop Thibault Verny of Chambéry, France, who has served on the commission since 2022, also heads the Church's child protection conference of France.
By Gary Gately
Pope Leo XIV has appointed as head of the Vatican’s child protection advisory commission a French bishop who vowed to “uphold the highest standards of protection” to finally eradicate abuse in the 1.4 billion-member Catholic Church.
Archbishop Thibault Verny of Chambéry, France, succeeds Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley, the emeritus archbishop of Boston, who had served as president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors since Pope Francis established it in 2014 to advise the Church on strategies to fight abuse and protect children.
Verny, a member of the commission since 2022, also heads the child protection conference of France. He has played a key role in the Catholic Church’s response to a 2021 French government report that revealed that more than 330,000 children had been abused by priests and other Church staffers over the past seven decades.
The 59-year-old Verny’s appointment came two weeks after Leo, in his first public statement on abuse since becoming pope on May 8, underscored the “urgent need to establish a culture of prevention throughout the Church that does not tolerate any form of abuse — neither of power nor of authority, nor of conscience or spiritual, nor of sex.”
Verny said in a statement after his appointment that he is “fully aware of the grave and sacred task entrusted to the commission: to help the Church become ever more vigilant, accountable, and compassionate in her mission to protect the most vulnerable among us.”
“We will promote the ... equitable sharing of resources so that all parts of the Church, regardless of geography or circumstance, can uphold the highest standards of protection," he added
For his part, O’Malley, 81, praised Leo, the first U.S.-born pontiff, for taking steps to “assure the world that the Church will not grow complacent in her efforts to as best possible ensure the protection of children, vulnerable adults and all people in our communities.”
Under O’Malley’s leadership of the child protection committee, the Vatican released its first report on the Church’s safeguarding efforts worldwide in October 2024.
Verny said his role as chair of the Council for Preventing and Combating Child Abuse of the French Bishops’ Conference since 2022 will help prepare him to take on leadership of the advisory panel. He has negotiated, implemented and monitored an agreement between the Archdiocese of Paris and the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office to facilitate reporting of abuse violations to civil courts.
The “decisive experience” enabled him “to listen to the victims and accompany them on their journey,” Venry said, adding: “Our work must begin by listening — with humility, with respect, and with cultural intelligence.”
The 69-year-old Leo’s first public comments on abuse came in a written message read in Lima, Peru, at the premier of a play that dramatizes the work of an investigative journalist who exposed sexual, physical and spiritual abuses at the now-suppressed Peru-based lay Catholic group Sodalitium Christianae Vitae (Christian Life Society).
In the message, Leo, who spent two decades in Peru as missionary priest and Bishop Robert F. Prevost, wrote that “prevention and care are not a pastoral strategy; they are the heart of the Gospel.”
Quoting the late Pope Francis’ 2018 “Letter to the People of God,” Leo said in his message that to protect minors and vulnerable adults and to support abuse victims, the Church must undergo a “profound ecclesial conversion,” which “is not rhetoric, but a concrete path of humility, truth, and reparation.”
Survivors of Sodalitium’s abuse told The Associated Press in May that beginning in 2018, then-Bishop Prevost met with them, took their claims seriously when others did not, got the Vatican involved and arranged a meeting with Pope Francis that resulted in the Jesuit pontiff’s suppressing the group a week before his death in April.
On May 8, the day of Pope Leo’s election, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, a support group for victims of clergy abuse, wrote in a letter to him: “Why are tens of thousands of clerics, known by you and your fellow bishops around the world to have raped and sexually assaulted children and the vulnerable, still in ministry today? Why can any bishop in the world, including you, cover up instances of rape and transfer offenders to new assignments where they are likely to abuse again?”
The group called for a “universal zero-tolerance law enacted into canon law, removing all abusers and complicit officials”; a “reparations fund” supported by the Church to provide victims financial restitution, education and psychological care; and “acts of restitution” by the Church, including memorials and official public acknowledgements of abuse.
Melanie Sakoda, SNAP’s survivor support director, said in an email to The Catholic Observer that Verny’s “words sound promising.”
”But,” she added, “will anything actually change?”