Clerical Abuse Scandal and Secularization in Chile

Chile's Catholic Church suffered a severe and rapid loss of institutional credibility following revelations of clerical sexual abuse and its cover-up, most prominently the case of priest Fernando Karadima, whose decades of documented abuse the Vatican initially handled with visible leniency before Pope Francis, after his own 2018 visit to Chile drew widespread public criticism and initially defended a bishop accused of covering up Karadima's crimes, reversed course, apologized publicly and accepted the resignations of numerous Chilean bishops in an unprecedented mass response. This scandal accelerated an already underway secularization trend, and Chile's 1980 Pinochet-era constitution, still substantially in force after failed replacement attempts in 2022 and 2023 referenda, maintains separation of church and state without an established religion, guaranteeing religious freedom under a framework dating to the 1925 Chilean constitution's original disestablishment of Catholicism as official state religion.

Chile has since become one of Latin America's more socially liberal Catholic-heritage countries, legalizing same-sex civil unions in 2015 and marriage in 2022, and decriminalizing abortion in limited circumstances in 2017, changes reflecting the declining direct political influence of a church still recovering from its credibility crisis.