“Unless the Church is committed to protecting children, our evangelizing efforts will be ineffective”. This was said by cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley, archbishop of Boston and president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, as he spoke at the Università Gregoriana during a workshop on “Safeguarding in Homes and Schools: Learning from Experience Worldwide”. “There is no excuse – the archbishop warned –; we cannot fail in developing effective standards for the protection of children and vulnerable adults”. “We must address the problem of sex abuse by clerics”, warned the president of the Commission, who thinks that “abusing the more vulnerable ones is not a Catholic or clerical problem, it is a human problem, but, when the abuser is a priest, then the damage is even deeper”, and “the Catholic world demands that we, its shepherds, take all the steps we need to protect the children who we have been asked to take care of”. After all, “the Pope entrusted us with the mission of promoting the responsibility of the particular Church by sharing best practices and developing effective answers with the involvement of all our local Churches”. Francis’s reform, he pointed out, “does not concern the structures only; the Pope calls us, firstly, to reform our hearts, to convert ourselves”, and “a key part of this is offering safe places for everyone in our churches”. However, O’Malley warned, “we will fail if we do not put the victims first. ‘Victims first’ is the key principle of our Commission. Only survivors will help us. We cannot be lenient in these efforts, and we must learn from experience and from our mistakes”.