Pope Leo XIV privately apologizes to Blackrock College abuse survivor David Ryan

David Ryan walked into a private room at the Vatican on a February afternoon carrying two things: a St Brigid's Cross and a photograph of his brother Mark, who died suddenly in 2023. Forty-five minutes later, he emerged from an audience with Pope Leo XIV visibly moved, the first abuse survivor ever to meet privately with this pontiff alone.

Ryan had been abused as a child in the 1970s at Blackrock College in Dublin, a school run by the Spiritan order. His brother Mark had suffered the same abuse at the same institution, though neither boy knew it at the time. They carried that silence separately for decades until 2022, when the RTÉ documentary Blackrock Boys brought their story and the stories of many others into the light. The film prompted the Spiritan leadership to apologize and opened a floodgate: hundreds of allegations emerged against 77 Irish Spiritans working in ministries across Ireland and beyond.

The scale of what the documentary uncovered became clearer in 2024, when a scoping inquiry report identified 308 schools in Ireland where alleged abuse had taken place. That finding triggered a formal commission of investigation into historical child sexual abuse. Pope Leo, who had watched the Blackrock Boys film, understood the weight of what Ryan was bringing to him.

During their meeting, Ryan wore cufflinks that had belonged to Mark and a shirt his brother had given him, unworn until that day. He brought questions and the Pope listened. They spoke about Mark's death, about the abuse itself, about its ripple effects through the Ryan family and beyond. Ryan described the Pope taking a deep breath before answering each question, his responses marked by what Ryan experienced as genuine sorrow. "He felt my pain, but he hasn't experienced my pain," Ryan said afterward, "but he knows what pain I have gone through, and my family."

Toward the end of the meeting, Deirdre Kenny, chief executive of One in Four—a charity supporting abuse survivors—was invited into the room. She watched as Pope Leo thanked her organization for its work and described the encounter as relaxed and deeply human. The Pope blessed the photograph of Mark.

When Ryan emerged, he spoke of his brother with certainty: "I think Mark would be happy." He said he hoped the meeting would give other survivors permission to come forward, to understand that what happened to them was not their fault. Liam O'Brien, who produced the Blackrock Boys documentary, reflected that Ryan had achieved something neither he nor Ryan had imagined possible when they were making the film: he had sat across from the most powerful figure in the Catholic Church and made him listen to the specific, irreplaceable truth of his own life.

Since his election last year, Pope Leo has met with abuse survivors on two other occasions—with members of the End Clergy Abuse coalition in October and with 15 Belgian victims of clerical abuse in November. But Ryan's meeting stands apart: a single voice, a single story, delivered directly to Rome.