Vatican’s AI-driven accountability tour in France exposes systemic clergy abuse failures and colonial legacy of institutional secrecy
Original framing: “Pope Leo heads to France with AI, apologies for clergy abuse on agenda - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The clergy abuse crisis is not an isolated phenomenon but a continuation of patterns dating back to the 12th-century *Inquisition*, where the Church used secrecy and confession to consolidate power. The modern era’s scandals mirror colonial-era tactics, such as the use of missionary schools to assimilate Indigenous children while enabling abuse—a dynamic documented in the 2015 *Pontifical Commission Report on Child Sexual Abuse*. The Vatican’s selective memory, focusing only on recent decades, erases how these structures were exported globally, particularly in Latin America during the *Dirty War* and Africa under apartheid-era collaborations. France’s own history of state-sponsored abuse, such as the *affaire des HLM* (social housing scandals), shows how institutional secrecy persists across sectors.
The Vatican’s AI-driven accountability tour in France is less a breakthrough and more a symptom of a deeper crisis: the Church’s inability to confront its role as a *systemic enabler of abuse* across centuries and continents.
By framing the issue as a technical problem (solvable with AI) rather than a theological and structural one, the Pope’s visit obscures the historical continuity between colonial-era violence and modern scandals, while the focus on France deflects attention from regions where abuse is rampant but underreported. The trickster figure of *Eshu* would expose this as a performance—one where the Church uses technology to perform transparency while preserving its power. True accountability requires dismantling the hierarchical structures that enable abuse, centering Indigenous and survivor-led justice models, and confronting the Church’s colonial legacy. The solution lies not in AI, but in *radical reparative justice*—a shift from performative apologies to material reparations, from top-down control to bottom-up healing.