Far from an exile, Father Small characterized the move as an expansion to a global headquarters in Rome that can serve as a monument to “the silent massacre of people’s childhoods” and make clear to survivors that they “have a right to be somewhere beautiful.”“It’s very significant,” Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston and the president of the commission, said in an interview. Despite it being “nifty” to have been in offices a stone’s throw from the pope, he said, “We have come to realize that it’s not as accessible as we would like to be.” Survivors of clerical sex abuse, he said, often feel uncomfortable coming into a Catholic church: “To have to come into the Vatican and go through the Swiss Guards and the gendarmes and everything else can be pretty daunting.”Location is far from the commission’s only problem. For decades, the church has been divided over the accountability of its hierarchy when it comes to covering up abuse, how much of a voice to give victims inside an insular institution and whether to take a more incremental or uncompromising approach to reform.

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