The sexual abuse of minors by clergy of the Catholic Church in Chile and the failure of Church officials to respond and take responsibility attracted worldwide attention as a critical failure of Pope Francis and the Church as a whole to address the sexual abuse of minors by priests. Among a number of cases, that of Father Fernando Karadima, which became public in 2010, raised questions about the responsibility and complicity of several Chilean bishops, including some of the country's highest-ranking Catholic prelates.
Karadima was accused as early as 1984 of sexually abusing minors. Reports of abuse were not addressed and an early investigation that found accusations against Karadima credible was ignored. When the Vatican found Karadima guilty of sexually abusing minors and psychological abuse in February 2011, it denied him the right to function as a priest for the rest of his life. Several priests he had mentored had by then become bishops. In 2015, Pope Francis appointed one of them, Juan Barros Madrid, to head the diocese of Osorno, provoking protests, especially from the local Catholic community. The appointment proved controversial in Chile, and Pope Francis' defense of Barros in January 2018 drew such an outcry from victims of sexual abuse and their advocates, including Cardinal Seán O'Malley, head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, that Francis ordered a reexamination of the cases of sexual abuse in Chile by the Vatican's chief expert on priestly sexual abuse of minors, Archbishop Charles J. Scicluna. Convinced by the report from that investigation of a widespread failure of the Church hierarchy to recognize and respond to the sexual abuse crisis, Francis called all of Chile's bishops to Rome for consultation, and there all of the country's active bishops offered their resignations.
