As Pope Leo prepares for his return to South America, Peruvian abuse survivor Pedro Salinas reflects on the hope and lingering doubts surrounding the pontiff’s efforts to confront sexual abuse within the Catholic Church.

For a decade, Salinas followed the Church’s investigation into Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a Peru-founded Catholic movement he helped expose over allegations of sexual, physical and psychological abuse.

The effort culminated in the final days of Pope Francis’ papacy last year, when the Vatican dissolved the group and its affiliated branches.

"What was achieved, nobody, absolutely nobody, could even have imagined. It was inconceivable. But it happened,” said Salinas, 63, a journalist and former member whose reporting played a key role in bringing the allegations to light.

Robert Prevost, now Pope Leo, quietly supported survivors and advocates during his time as a bishop in Peru and later as a Vatican cardinal, Salinas said.

He attended meetings, helped gather information and maintained contact with those involved through WhatsApp and email.

"Without him, the needle didn't move,” Salinas said.

The first U.S.-born pope will travel through Uruguay, Argentina and Peru from Nov. 6 to 17, spending the final six days in Peru, where he arrived as a missionary in the 1980s and later became a citizen and served as bishop of Chiclayo. The Vatican said he will meet with clergy abuse survivors there, as he has done on other recent trips.

Survivors say they wonder whether Leo's approach in Peru, which they credit with helping bring about the rare step of dissolving a Catholic community, can translate into broader change across a Church where accountability remains uneven.

"What is lacking are bishops everywhere in the world committed to this issue,” Salinas said.

Peru is preparing for a tourism boom during Leo's visit. José Enrique Escardó, 56, president of a Peruvian survivors network, views the excitement from a different perspective.

While Escardó acknowledged that some survivors credit Leo with helping dissolve Sodalitium, he said the Church's actions have not delivered sufficient justice, accountability or reparations.

"Survivors have grown tired of being told things, of being promised things, but nothing being done,” Escardo said. "We feel more abandoned. We feel deceived.”

He wants survivors to have a role in shaping Church policy and believes reparations should include psychological care and education.

The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment.

'Tip of the iceberg'

Francis, the first Latin American pope, left a complicated legacy, survivors say.

Juan Carlos Cruz, a survivor whose case became central to Francis' 2018 reckoning with abuse in Chile, credits the former pope with introducing changes that included revisions to canon law, the removal of the pontifical secret, the Church's highest level of confidentiality, from abuse cases, and the introduction of Vos Estis Lux Mundi, a Vatican framework for addressing allegations of abuse or cover-ups involving bishops.

"We're still at the tip of the iceberg,” said Cruz, whom Francis appointed in 2021 to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. "The commission has been working for years on universal safeguarding guidelines, and those standards need to be applied around the world.”

Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the watchdog group BishopAccountability.org, which tracks Catholic Church abuse allegations worldwide, called Vos Estis the most significant action Francis took on abuse. But she said the Vatican rarely makes clear whether an accused bishop's resignation represents punishment.

"The public is left in the dark,” she said.

Barrett Doyle said the Vatican has not released global disciplinary data comparable to figures it provided to a United Nations committee in 2014. Her group relies on public records, media reports and investigations by prosecutors, governments and commissions to track cases.

She wants Leo to make permanent removal from ministry the universal rule for priests found under canon law to have sexually abused children, extending worldwide a policy adopted by U.S. bishops in 2002.

"To say that no child molesters should be out to practice as priests is just such a no-brainer,” she said. "It's a step that Leo could take now.”

Vatican officials have previously cited the difficulty of creating a single abuse reporting law across all countries and argued that removing priests can put them beyond Church supervision.

Angela Walker, executive director of the U.S.-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said survivors increasingly turn to civil authorities because of the Church's "incredible failure” to police itself.

"There needs to be more transparency, more openness and more accountability,” she said. "I will believe it when I see it.”

Survivors' long wait

In Mexico, survivors pressed the Vatican on clerical abuse decades before it became a defining crisis across Latin America. Among the most notorious cases was that of Marcial Maciel, the Mexican priest who founded the Legion of Christ order and whose accusers took their allegations to the Vatican in the 1990s. The Vatican ordered Maciel in 2006 to withdraw from public ministry. He died in 2008 without ever facing his accusers.

The scale of his abuse became clearer after his death. In 2019, the Legion reported that Maciel had abused at least 60 minors, among 175 instances of child abuse the order documented involving 33 priests over eight decades.

Jose de Jesus Barba Martin, 87, alleged that Maciel abused him while he was studying for the priesthood in the 1950s. He recalled survivors struggling to be heard by Church and state authorities in the late 1990s and said an appeal he sent to Pope John Paul II went unanswered.

Decades later, that experience has left him with little expectation that another appeal to Rome would bring change.

"The Church is made up of two types of men: good and bad, courageous and cowardly,” he said. "It will take a long time, and the issue will not be addressed under this pope nor the next.”

Alberto Athie, 72, a former Mexican priest who pursued clerical abuse cases from inside the Church before leaving the priesthood in 2003, sees Leo's visit as another opportunity to push for transparency.

"I do have hope,” he said. "But my hope fades just the same ... Things have to be fixed within the Church.”

Abuse survivor Sebastian Cuattromo said the Argentine Church should have been "at the international forefront” of confronting abuse under Argentine Pope Francis but fell short of what he had hoped to see.

"There is a major outstanding debt,” Cuattromo said.

Argentina's Episcopal Conference declined to comment.