Pope Leo XIV will touch down in Argentina on Nov. 8 carrying a message of healing, with an itinerary full of cathedrals and a conscience full of unfinished business. The people waiting for him are carrying something else: a list of names the Vatican has refused to act on. He is visiting a country where a priest accused of abusing kindergartners was photographed saying Mass at the Córdoba cathedral in July, where 43 women say they were worked 12 to 16 hours a day as unpaid domestic servants inside Opus Dei houses, and where a former police chaplain convicted of complicity in seven murders during the dictatorship is still, canonically, a priest. The Holy See’s answer to all of it, so far, is silence. Not denial, not explanation — silence, the oldest instrument in the institutional toolbox.
Take Córdoba, where the pope is scheduled to visit. Priest Alejandro Nicola stands accused of sexually abusing children at a Catholic school’s kindergarten, mostly in 2025. More than a dozen families have filed complaints. Prosecutors are investigating. And Nicola was still celebrating Mass at Córdoba’s cathedral in July — the very cathedral the pope is expected to visit. Florencia Navarro, whose daughter is among the alleged victims, wants the pope “to provide explanations, since they talk so much about protecting the vulnerable.” Córdoba Archbishop Ángel Rossi reaches for presumption of innocence; Alejandro Nicola tells reporters only that “the lawyers will take care of that.” Presumption of innocence is a right a defendant has in a courtroom. It is not a robe a bishop may wear to avoid answering a question.
Zero tolerance was always the slogan. The follow-through is harder to find. The pattern is now so stable it functions like policy: Argentina sentences the criminals, the Vatican waits, and the whole machinery runs on the same three moves — protect the institution, question the victims, wait out the clock.
Consider Mendoza, where the Antonio Próvolo Institute became a synonym for clerical horror. Dozens of deaf children were abused there between 2005 and 2016 — children whose silence the institution was built to guarantee. Horacio Corbacho got 45 years and Nicola Corradi 42 back in 2019. A Vatican-appointed judicial vicar recommended that both men be thrown out of the clergy. The canonical proceeding against Corbacho, open since 2017, has produced no public outcome in more than eight years, and the Vatican has never announced the result. Corradi died under house arrest, taking his secret with him. A former nun, Kumiko Kosaka, drew 20 years this September for abusing five students. The criminal courts move. Rome does not. If the church’s most severe disciplinary punishment exists, it is being applied in a room where no one can see it.
And the ranks of the convicted are still full. Christian Von Wernich, the dictatorship’s police chaplain, was sentenced to life in 2007 for his role in seven murders and dozens of kidnappings and torture cases — and no canonical sanction has ever been made public. Gustavo Zanchetta, the former bishop so close to Pope Francis that Francis created a job at the Vatican to get him out of Argentina after the accusations surfaced, was sentenced in 2022 to four and a half years for abusing two seminarians and paroled in 2025, which is exactly when survivors renewed their demand that he be defrocked. Francis authorized a canonical criminal case in 2019. No ruling has been announced. Neither has one for Julio Grassi, serving 15 years for abusing a minor — the same Grassi whose case Bergoglio, then archbishop of Buenos Aires, saw fit to fund a four-volume, 2,000-plus-page forensic study branding his victims liars and concluding the trial should never have happened. A Church that commissions 2,000 pages to declare a conviction wrong and then declines to say so out loud is not exercising caution. It is protecting itself.
Then there is Opus Dei, where 43 women say they were recruited as teenagers, trafficked and forced into unpaid domestic servitude, isolated from their families and their mail, sometimes for decades. Their 2021 complaint implicates the organization’s global leader, Fernando Ocáriz, and its second-highest-ranking official, Mariano Fazio, and describes teenagers recruited under false promises between the 1970s and 2015. It has drawn no response from the Vatican at all. Opus Dei’s Argentine authorities deny everything categorically; denial is not accountability. Andrea Martínez, 52, entered an Opus Dei center in Buenos Aires as a teenager. “We were just little girls when we entered,” she said. “They will never give us back the dignity they stole from us.” Rosana Vaccon never got her mother’s letters about her dying father. Their case is stalled a stage earlier still — prosecutors have requested that the defendants be summoned, and the judge has not ordered it.
The Vatican’s stated rationale is that it waits for criminal appeals to exhaust so as not to prejudge. As doctrine, that is defensible. As practice, it is a stopwatch that never starts. Survivors hear it as stalling, and they have heard every version of it for decades. Asked directly about the canonical status of these men, the Vatican did not answer — and neither did the dioceses that oversee their cases. Silence, too, is a policy.
Leo has already promised several meetings with abuse survivors in Latin America, and he has made gestures before — he highlighted abuses of “vulnerable” adults and sat down with an Opus Dei critic back in March. Showing up, listening, meeting survivors: that matters, and it is more than his predecessor mostly did. But meetings are not the currency here. Defrocking is. Meeting a critic is not the same as disciplining an institution, and listening is not defrocking. Victims are asking for the Church’s most severe punishment, and what they keep getting is calendar space — calendar space that some survivors have already refused outright, saying the church broke its “zero tolerance” promises and its visit is not welcome. That refusal is the indictment: when the people you came to console decline to be consoled, the meeting was never the point. Fernanda Agüero asked for “concrete actions” rather than words. Both women are asking a sovereign to do the one thing a sovereign can do — punish — and being offered a photo.
For the men Argentina has already convicted, these are not cases in search of proof; they are convictions in search of a signature. The Church has spent a decade telling the world it has embraced zero tolerance. Argentina is where that claim goes to be tested, and it fails every time. A pope who wanted to distinguish himself from his predecessors would not need a new document or a new commission. He would need one afternoon: names on a page, canonical dismissals published in the bulletin, a plain statement that a murderer in holy orders is no longer in orders.
He is about to stand in a cathedral where an accused abuser recently celebrated Mass, in a country where convicted priests still carry the title “Father.” If he leaves Argentina without visibly stripping that title from anyone, then “zero tolerance” will remain exactly what it has always been — a phrase for press conferences, not a promise kept. Everything else — the meetings, the cathedral visit, the carefully worded homily on protecting the vulnerable — is set dressing until then.