TWICE in the past few days, Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of senior prelates who were embroiled in abuse scandals. The latest was Australia’s Archbishop Philip Wilson, who had received a criminal conviction for covering up serial abuse by a priest. There had been widespread calls for him to step down, including from Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister. He submitted his resignation on July 20th, but only on July 30th did the pontiff publicly accept it. Mr Turnbull was among many Australians who called the pope’s actions welcome but overdue.

Two days earlier, on July 28th, the Vatican announced that the pope had accepted Theodore McCarrick’s resignation from the status of cardinal. Mr McCarrick, an archbishop emeritus of Washington, DC, was for decades one of the most prominent figures in Catholic America. The news came a month after the archdiocese of New York said it considered “credible and substantiated” an allegation of sexual misdeeds involving a teenager, said to have been perpetrated by the cleric in 1971 and 1972. Now aged 88, he said he has no recollection of the alleged incidents.

According to a Vatican announcement, the pontiff had “ordered his suspension from the exercise of any public ministry, together with the obligation to remain in a house yet to be indicated to him, for a life of prayer and penance until the accusations made against him are examined in a regular canonical trial”. By the Vatican’s slow-moving standards, this was a response of unusual firmness, and it held out the possibility that the fallen hierarch might be reduced to lay status.

For a cardinal to lose his rank is very rare in the annals of the Catholic Church. In 2013, Scotland’s Cardinal Keith O’Brien stepped down from his pastoral duties (and renounced the right to participate in a papal election) after it emerged that he had made sexual advances to young priests in the 1980s. He was later stripped of all other rights and duties pertaining to his office but he remained a member of the College of Cardinals.

The Vatican has maintained a defensive stance in the case of Australia’s Cardinal George Pell, who faces trial on charges of sexual offences which he strongly denies. He has been given leave from his post as the Vatican’s “secretary for the economy” in order to argue his case in court. In another high-profile saga, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston resigned from his post in 2002 after it emerged that that he covered up the sexual misdeeds of numerous priests. But he moved to Rome and held a prestigious clerical post there before his death last year.

To find another instance of a cardinal being obliged to doff his red hat, church historians had to go back more than 90 years, to the case of a certain Cardinal Billot in France who got into trouble not through sexual misdemeanours but for association with an extreme right-wing movement.

The pope’s acceptance of the high-level resignations in America and Australia has been widely welcomed in Catholic circles. But many other observers will have questions about why these cases were allowed to fester for so long.

Pope Francis has earned the reputation of being slow to react to sexual-abuse scandals, but capable of acting more decisively when the facts become impossible to ignore. On arrival in Chile in January, he caused a furore by defending a bishop who was notorious for having protected an egregiously abusive cleric. But he later ordered a report into sexual abuse in the country and prompted all the country’s hierarchs to formally submit their resignations.

In his five years as pope, Francis has gained credit by campaigning on behalf of the victims of human trafficking, many of whom also suffer sexual abuse. He has lent his moral authority to the efforts of the UN, which has designated July 30th as a date to reflect on trafficking and celebrate those who fight it. But the pontiff’s image as a friend of the vulnerable will be tarnished unless he can show that his church takes action against its own officials who exploit those within its power.