“He’s a man of justice and a man who has cared for those who are marginalized, and certainly victims should be at the top of that list,” said Daniel Griffith, a Minneapolis priest and founding director of the Initiative on Restorative Justice and Healing at the University of St. Thomas. “There has been slow and steady movement forward. However, there is much more that needs to be done.”

Leo has not made any public statements about the sexual abuse crisis, though in past interviews he disavowed “cover-up and secrecy” and emphasized assistance for victims.

Experts and those who have worked with him during his lengthy tenure as priest, missionary, bishop and leader of an international order express confidence that he has the characteristics to accelerate progress — excellent listening skills, a canon law degree, experience suppressing an abusive Catholic movement in Peru.

Yet his record during those years, when he was known as Father Robert Prevost, has already faced scrutiny from some survivor groups. They say they are troubled by his ascent to the apex of the church, calling his oversight of two cases involving accused priests problematic.

In March, the U.S.-based Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, sent a complaint to the Vatican calling for investigations into both cases: an accusation that a quarter-century ago, Prevost approved the relocation of an abuser to a Chicago friary located near a parish elementary school; and a 2023 claim by three sisters in Peru who say that Prevost, at that point a bishop for the Diocese of Chiclayo, insufficiently investigated their allegations of sexual abuse by two priests years earlier.

In neither case did the alleged abuse occur under Prevost’s watch. Still, SNAP President Shaun Dougherty said he felt “flabbergasted” last week when Prevost emerged as Pope Leo XIV on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. The cardinals’ selection of Prevost was “tone deaf” as the church continues to grapple with the decades-long crisis, Dougherty said.

Others have a different assessment, saying abuse in the church has been so widespread that the conclave would have struggled to choose a pontiff whose career was untouched by the fallout.

“For me, the bigger story is what he does moving forward,” said Brian Clites, an expert at Case Western Reserve University on clergy sexual abuse. The allegations “are serious,” he said, “but they’re so common that I cannot imagine many people who would have been elected pope who would not have had similar profiles.”

And in a statement posted last week on X, the president of the Peru Survivors Network said he had met with Prevost in January and praised the new pope’s role in helping to dismantle Sodalitium Christianae Vitae. The Peru-based movement, a lay community founded to recruit “soldiers for God,” was dissolved early this year after a Vatican investigation uncovered sexual and spiritual abuses.

“He listened with attention to my ideas and showed his total agreement and support for my fight against physical, psychological, spiritual and sexual violence in the Catholic Church,” Jose Enrique Escardó Steck wrote of their conversation.

The church’s reckoning became far more visible under Francis, who met several times with survivors and in 2014 created a Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. Five years later, he convened an unprecedented summit on clerical sexual abuse, where he called for an “all-out battle” to end it. Francis followed that with a sweeping law to hold clerics accountable, requiring church officials to report accusations of abuse or cover-ups to their superiors. (The law does not require civil authorities to be contacted.)

Even so, Francis was criticized for slow-walking certain cases, and survivors and their advocates saw many of his moves as toothless. Some commission members quit in protest, saying the body lacked independence and transparency — a charge the group itself echoed in a report last year.

Though thousands of priests have been disciplined by the Holy See and abuse cases keep surfacing, critics say the investigative process remains cloaked, the result of an entrenched hierarchy averse to openness and change.

Hans Zollner, a German Jesuit priest who is considered one of the church’s foremost authorities on safeguarding children from sexual abuse, quit the commission out of frustration in 2023. But he said he has seen “a positive dynamic” worldwide over the past two to three years and is looking for the new pope to build on it.

Zollner hopes Leo will invite victims to Rome — not only so he can hear directly from them, but also so he can involve them in “rethinking procedures in the church and in promoting safeguarding.”

As a native of the United States, where the scandal exploded in 2002, Leo would have significant familiarity with the problem and what is now the U.S. church’s “zero tolerance” policy. Across the country, dioceses and other Catholic entities have since reported more than 16,200 credible allegations of abuse made by minors, as detailed in a report early this year by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

But Leo’s many years in Peru may give him a broader perspective — one that grasps the scope of abuse in countries from Ireland to Australia to the Philippines.

Some Catholics around the world continue to believe “this is a decadent American problem,” said Stephen White, who leads Catholic University’s response to the abuse crisis. “I think he will be very much disabused of that idea.”

Clites said Leo, like Francis, seems to embrace a liberation-theology-style approach that gives a “preferential option” for the poor. Whether he will extend the same to survivors of abuse, as SNAP and other groups have demanded, is unclear.

“The biggest thing a pope could do that we haven’t seen from the past few popes would be to direct dioceses around the world to be more transparent. We really have no idea about the rates and cases of abuse outside of the most developed countries,” Clites said. He added: “It’s not just about implementing policies and the speech acts that Francis did a good job at.”

Chicago was the base of the early survivor movement, and its diocese was viewed as the “most forward thinking” on the issue at the time, according to Clites. The future pontiff’s brief tenure there from the late 1990s to 2001, heading the Midwest province of the Order of St. Augustine, would have given him a close view of the situation.

But it was in Chicago that SNAP alleges Prevost first stumbled in his handling of a case. In the early 2000s, he agreed to a request from the Archdiocese of Chicago to house James Ray, a disgraced priest named by 13 victims of sexual abuse spanning decades, in an Augustinian friary in a residential area on the city’s South Side.

Neither Prevost nor other church officials notified the nearby school or other neighbors, SNAP alleged in its complaint. “When predators are moved around, the number one thing is they are not supposed to be near schools,” said Eduardo Lopez de Casas, the group’s vice president.

Michael A. Airdo, an attorney for the Augustinians of the Midwest, said in a statement that Ray was placed in the home before the church created new guidelines for protecting children and that he was not accused of any wrongdoing at the school during the years he lived nearby.

A priest who served with Prevost for several years in Chicago said he understood his decision. Ray was not an Augustinian, the Rev. Bernard Scianna explained, and he so was not under Prevost’s purview. “We were asked by the cardinal to put someone in our house,” he said. “I believe that Bob was doing what he was asked to do by the cardinal.”

Accusations that Prevost mishandled an abuse case as bishop in Chiclayo — involving the three sisters who said they’d been victimized as minors — surfaced a couple of years ago.

Prevost had overseen an investigation that the diocese says was sent to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the office that handles such reports. Months later, the women reported the abuse to civil authorities. According to the SNAP report, they did so because of a lack of action by the church; Oswaldo Clavo, a priest from another area who assisted in investigating the allegations, said Prevost urged them to go to the authorities.

Prosecutors ultimately closed the case because the statute of limitations had expired. The Vatican office then closed its case, citing insufficient evidence, after Prevost moved to Rome.

In November 2023, one of the women launched a public campaign, primarily on social media, denouncing the Vatican’s decision. Ana María Quispe Díaz and her sisters maintain Prevost never seriously examined their claims. They’ve said he never interviewed them and failed to put safeguards in place so the accused priests couldn’t abuse others. Quispe Díaz did not respond to requests for comment.

The diocese has since reopened its investigation, and officials in Chiclayo — and beyond — have fiercely defended Prevost.

Guillermo Cornejo, the auxiliary bishop who replaced him in Chiclayo, said Prevost took care with allegations of sexual abuse and made sure they were thoroughly documented. He denied in an interview Saturday that Prevost had mishandled the sisters’ case. On the contrary, Cornejo said, it was among the ongoing tasks he highlighted before leaving.

“He always told us: Even if it’s your best friend, the one who’s involved in these issues, you have to act. Even if it hurts your soul. Even if it’s your brother, even if it’s your blood. Even if it’s your seminary classmate, you have to act,” Cornejo said.

Rolando Serquen, a catechist in the San José Obrero Parish in Chiclayo, has similar memories. After the allegations about the two priests emerged, he said, Prevost organized trainings in child protection for the catechists, teaching them best practices for limiting access to and avoiding inappropriate contact with children.

The Vatican did not respond to requests for comment on SNAP’s charges or to specific questions about Prevost’s actions in addressing the concerns in Chiclayo.

From Rome last week, Zollner said he had been told by “somebody who was very close to the canonical procedures” that the future pope “did what he was obligated to do and he did it in due time.” The Jesuit priest also pointed to Prevost’s key role in Francis’s decision to dismantle Sodalitium Christianae Vitae.

Some of Leo’s supporters in Peru believe he is being falsely accused because of his efforts to suppress the group, noted journalist Paola Ugaz, who exposed its scandals. One of the priests who advocated on behalf of the Quispe Díaz sisters had ties to the group and was himself defrocked last year over sexual abuse allegations.

Sodalitium Christianae Vitae’s dissolution was a “stunning and extremely rare outcome,” according to BishopAccountability.org, a victims advocacy and research group. Yet co-director Anne Barrett Doyle said Leo must do more to demonstrate his dedication to ending abuse.

Two years ago, after Francis named then-Cardinal Prevost to the powerful Vatican office that helps vet and choose bishops, Doyle was disappointed he didn’t make the disciplinary process of the bishops he oversaw more transparent. He instead maintained the status quo, releasing no names or data about bishops accused of sexual abuse or covering it up.

Questions swirling around the Quispe Díaz case provide an opportunity, Doyle said: Opening the files with the report submitted to the Vatican would help Leo start his tenure on the right foot.

“He’s beginning his papacy with a shadow over it about abuse,” she said. “If kids are being abused, that’s information that belongs to the people.”

Bianca Padró Ocasio contributed to this report.