UNITED STATES
Washington Blade
by Michael K. Lavers
Emails leaked to a Chilean newspaper show two cardinals conspired to prevent a gay man from being named to a sex abuse commission that Pope Francis created.
El Mostrador on Sept. 9 published an email that Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, the archbishop of Santiago, wrote to his predecessor, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz, on June 28, 2014, that concludes Juan Carlos Cruz’s nomination to the commission “would be extremely serious for the Chilean (Roman Catholic) church.
Errázuriz — one of the eight cardinals who advises Francis on reforming the Curia that oversees the church — told Ezzati in a July 1, 2014, email that it “is clear” to the pope “that he (Cruz) should not be nominated.”
“It is already clear that this name will not be a member of the commission,” wrote Errázuriz in a July 3, 2014, email to Ezzati.
Cruz, who now lives in Philadelphia and is the head of global communications for DuPont Crop Protection in Delaware, is among the hundreds of people who Rev. Fernando Karadima sexually abused in his parish in El Bosque, a wealthy neighborhood in the Chilean capital, over more than three decades. …
Marie Collins, an Irish sexual abuse victim who is a founding member of the commission, last year nominated Cruz. Errázuriz in an April 21, 2013, email to Ezzati referred to Cruz as “the serpent” after they learned of his nomination.
“He is going to falsify the truth,” wrote Errázuriz. Cruz told the Washington Blade on Friday during a telephone interview from Philadelphia before boarding a flight to Chile that he did not know that Collins had nominated him to the commission until El Mostrador published the emails between Errázuriz and Ezzati.
“That’s how shrewd and sneaky that they are,” Cruz told the Blade.
El Mostrador also published emails between Ezzati and Errázuriz that show they identified cardinals who could help them prevent Cruz from speaking to a group of English-speaking bishops in Rome about sex abuse.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.