(MEXICO)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
August 26, 2024
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
- Cases from Argentina, Australia, Ecuador, France, Mexico, and the United States prove how the Roman Catholic leaders foster the clergy sexual abuse crisis.English Edition
- These seven cases prove how the Roman Catholic Church upholds a system prone to clergy sexual abuse with little or no regard for its own members.
- These seven cases of clergy sexual abuse are not anecdotical. They are representative of how predators attack their victims and the strategies they follow to prey.
On Thursday, despite the deep economic crisis shaking Argentina, most of the media there published stories about Julio César Grassi, a Roman Catholic priest and the former leader of a foundation allegedly devoted to helping homeless and destitute children there.
Grassi had that day a hearing to seek either the full dismissal of his case or an advance release. A tribunal sentenced him in late 2009 to 15 years in jail. Given his high profile in Argentina, his ties to powerful figures in national and local politics, and the support he had from members of the Argentine Conference of Catholic Bishops, he was able to delay the execution of the sentence until 2013.
Thursday’s hearing with the equivalent to what would be the parole board in most U.S. states dismissed both requests. His sentence stands and he will not have the benefit of an advance release from jail, as the story published by La Nación newspaper tells.
Set up in 1992, five years after Grassi’s ordination, his charity became a major success in Argentina. Unlike other non-for-profit facing difficulties to raise funds, Grassi’s expanded its reach. Even the first accusations against him, in 1998, did little or nothing to what was a very efficient and complex operation.
He did so with the help of the then powerful minister of Finance, Domingo Cavallo, and a constellation of friends in all the right places who gave him money, land, airtime in Argentine radio and TV. Even the foreign media helped him.
As it used to be the “standard operating procedure” of the Roman Catholic Church at the time, he was able to discredit the victim. However, by 2001 allegations of misappropriation of funds gave the bishop of Moron, a township in the province of Buenos Aires, an excuse to dismiss him from the foundation, although he retained his role as spiritual leader of the non-for-profit.
Even in 2002, French newspaper Le Figaro published a piece praising Grassi’s dedication. Le Figaro plays along using one of his favorite nicknames: “padre gaucho,” as the newsclip appearing after this paragraph shows.
Despite that, the so-called Felices los niños Foundation (Happy kids would be a rather lose translation) was an example for other Roman Catholic Latin American non-for-profits. They were pioneers in setting up a website that, as early as 2001, was running versions in Spanish, English, and German, spreading the heartwarming story about a charitable priest devoted to help destitute children.
A monument to himself
The charity’s website is still available through the Internet Archive. Its 2003 version in English can be seen, almost in full, here. The screenshot after this paragraph comes from that stored version of what, otherwise, could be Grassi’s monument to himself.
As with many other sexual predators using media, the Internet or, more recently, social media, Grassi’s old website screams his need to portraying himself as “one of the good guys.” Over the years there were dozens of pictures of him playing the part, showing up how close he was to the underprivileged kids of Argentina even if he was abusing of some of them.
Some of those pictures are in the image after this paragraph, coming from what is still available at the Internet Archive’s stored pages from Grassi’s website.
Although there were repeated accusations against Grassi, nothing was enough to force the authorities to go after him. Bishops from all over Argentina, including then Cardinal and archbishop of Buenos Aires Jorge Mario Bergoglio, seemed to be at ease with the split screen of an endless stream of accusations and them providing some excuse to keep Grassi as priest.
Up until 2009, Grassi bragged about having among his supporters the then archbishop of Buenos Aires and future Pope Francis, as this story in Spanish from that time proves.
A spokesperson from the Argentine Conference of Bishops dismissed it as Grassi’s own interpretation, as the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires did later when addressing the existence of a report supporting Grassi.
For Juan Pablo Gallego, the lawyer representing Grassi’s victims, the report’s goal was to help Grassi while trying to influence the judiciary.
However, a few months later, a tribunal issued the first sentence declaring him guilty, as would do later another three appeals. Appealing allowed Grassi to remain out of jail, and able to lobby, to fundraise, and to argue his case in the media.
It was only his own inability to keep the terms of his home arrest deal what forced the authorities to actually incarcerate him in 2013. But even that screams privilege. As it happens all over Latin America with high profile inmates, Grassi serves his sentence in a context of privilege.
Clergy privilege
Even if he is in jail, he has access to cell phones, a personal computer, the internet, a TV set, and other amenities that attest to his ability to influence the wardens, the prison authorities.
There is no rational explanation as to how he pays his legal fees, his own studies as lawyer, who he completed as an inmate at the Campana prison in the Province of Buenos Aires, and his lavish lifestyle in the prison itself in ways. Jorge Lanata, a major personality in Argentine media offered, ten years ago, a detailed account of what was jail for Grassi, as the 2014 video linked after this paragraph shows.https://www.youtube.com/embed/f6OxsOS-5gc
A story from Jorge Lanata’s newscast about Grassi in jail. Audio available only in Spanish.
So, it is not as if there was a conspiracy of silence protecting Grassi, as it used to be with Maciel in Mexico or with the Archdiocese of Boston in the United States back in the eighties.
And yet, he remains a priest, so it is clear that the 2013 sentence had no effect on the Church’s understanding of Grassi’s behavior.
Back in 2017, the diocese of Moron issued a suspension from public ministry that remains the sole measure taken by the Church, as this story from AICA, the news agency of the Catholic Church in Argentina, available only in Spanish, states.
Only in the intro to that story, AICA addresses Grassi as “padre”, “presbyter”, and “priest”, so—even if he is not allowed to perform as such in public—he remains a priest, and the official news agency of the Roman Catholic bishops in Argentina will not miss a chance to remind their readers that he remains a priest.
And previous experiences with noted predator priests as Fernando Karadima in Chile prove that there is almost no limit to what priests in similar position are willing to do.
In that regard, if there any disposition from the Argentine or the global hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church to accept the judicial ruling and sentence regarding the sexual abuse of at least two of the seventeen victims that were willing to call Grassi out there is no evidence of it.
This is more relevant give the fact that both men at the top of the Roman Catholic hierarchy Pope Francis and Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are well aware of the case.
The video after this paragraph, shows how Grassi attended the most recent hearing in his case wearing the clerical or Roman collar, broadcasting his condition as Roman Catholic priest despite his conviction.https://www.youtube.com/embed/EE3HYe8uwYY
Grassi during his hearing procedure. Please notice the use of the Roman Collar.
The leaders of his Church are not alone in supporting Grassi. He no longer controls the finances of the foundation, but he keeps receiving money and other forms of support from loyal followers who, almost 30 years after the initial accusations against him, keep enabling him.
Gerald Ridsdale, Australia
From the Southern hemisphere there is also Australian predator Gerald Ridsdale. He is no longer a priest. At 90-years-old, he is serving a 36-year sentence with little or no chance to ever leaving the jail.
Ordained in 1961, his “career” as a predator goes all the way back to 1955, while a seminarian. The first formal report about his behavior on file dates to 1961, while the first public accusations regarding his behavior go back to the early 1970s.
Over a 29-year period as a priest, he held a total of sixteen different appointments, so he barely was able to spend less than two years in each appointment. Despite all the early warnings about his behavior, the Australian hierarchy ordained him and sent him in his very first appointment to a boy’s boarding school in Ballarat.
That diocese would later admit, already in September 2019, that they were aware of Ridsdale predatory behavior. What was happening at that diocese prompted the Australian government to set up the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
The Commission extensive work found that senior figures in Roman Catholic Church were aware of Ridsdale’s predatory behavior. Among said senior figures was then auxiliary bishop of Melbourne and future Cardinal George Pell. It was his role in Ridsdale’s case what earned him the trial that found him guilty, although an appeals court later dismissed that ruling.
Now we know that despite the reports of diverse forms of predatory behavior going back to his days as a seminarian, Pope John Paul II only defrocked, laicized, or expelled Ridsdale him from the clergy state in 1993.
Abuse and suicide
A month ago, on July 29th, Los Angeles Press published a story on Franklin Germán Cadena Puratambi, a former member of the Salesian order, an order to which Julio César Grassi was also affiliated as a seminarian and in the first years of his tenure as priest.
Unlike Grassi, who was ordained in 1987 as a priest in that order, Cadena Puratambi had to leave that order to be ordained in the most remote diocese in the Roman Catholic Church in Ecuador, the one operating out of the Archipelago of Galápagos, six hundred miles or little less than a thousand kilometers, West of mainland Ecuador.
Cadena Puratambi’s story is available after this paragraph. It provides details as to the case and raises many unanswered questions that one needs to raise in order to understand his role in the suicide of a 51 years-old male and former congressional aide who took his life in the rooftop of the Ecuadoran congress.
English Edition
Suicide at the Congress
What must be stressed is the opacity of the Ecuadoran leaders of the Catholic Church who let Cadena Puratambi be a non-ordained religious brother, with access and authority over the homeless kids at the Saint Patrick’s Center in Quito and how and why the then bishop of Galápagos Manuel Antonio Valarezo Luzuriaga decided to ordain a rather old former Salesian brother who had been rejected as candidate for the priesthood by the Salesian bishop of the diocese of Méndez.
That opacity is yet another feature that keeps coming over and over in cases of sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise.
As Grassi, Cadena Puratambi remains for the time being a priest. The reason is that he was not yet a priest when he abused of “Ricardo”, the former homeless kid and later in life congressional aide who killed himself in the Ecuadoran national congress.
From France to Japan and back
Last year, French-speaking media revealed the extent of the crisis in a French religious order devoted to spreading the Catholic faith in Asia and Africa. One of the cases emerging from this chapter of the crisis is that of French priest Aymeric de Salvert.
De Salvert was a member of the so-called Society of Foreign Missions, a religious “order” originally created in 1658, when France and other European nations were setting up empires. They have played a key role in the growth of the Roman Catholic Church in Asia and Africa.
As of 2023, they had a roster of 208 priests and twenty-five seminarians, a pale shadow of what it was in the mid-20th century, when the Society “exported” French priests to the various French-speaking territories in Africa, Asia, and other territories where France was influential.
The crisis in this “order” began in 2011, when the Japanese bishops forced out De Salvert from his then diocese of Sapporo, Japan. The very decision of sending him back to France is hard to trace since Sapporo had no bishop for two years.
Former bishop Peter Toshio Jinushi resigned his position on 2009. Pope Francis appointed current prelate Bernard Taiji Katsuya in June 2013.
It could be that back in 2011 the then emeritus bishop retained some power in the diocese or that he had made the request to expel De Salvert while in office.
In any case, the reason was that De Salvert was having a gay relationship with a Japanese male. Upon his return to France, the Society quickly brought back De Salvert.
Surprisingly enough, however, the Society appointed De Salvert as head of the vocations of that order. Georges Colomb, current bishop of La Rochelle, France, and at that time superior of the order appointed De Salvert to that position.
In doing so, Colomb allowed De Salvert to be in direct contact with young people who were trying to figure out if they actually were up for becoming a Catholic priest. Colomb also appointed De Salvert as head of a volunteer program offering accommodation in exchange for work done by young people.
Putting aside the questions raised by Colomb’s decisions regarding De Salvert, around 2013, Colomb himself assaulted a young man whom the French newspaper La Croix identifies only as Nicholas.
At that time, Nicholas reported this fact to then priest of the same order and now an extremely young bishop emeritus Gilles Reithinger, was at the time second in the hierarchical structure of the congregation, but did not proceed formally against Colomb.
Reithinger early resignation back in February, when he barely was 51 years-old, is an indication that he did something wrong. It is not clear what, but otherwise there would be no explanation for him offering his resignation as auxiliary bishop of Strasbourg.
Two years later, in 2015, Philippe Barbarin, archbishop and Cardinal of Lyon, France, himself involved in the mishandling of abuse cases in his archdiocese, informs Colomb of De Salvert’s dealings with a young seminarian who, given his own position in the Society, was under his supervision.
The reasons are not clear, but after that report, Colomb sends De Salvert as chaplain of a female order in Anjou, France, but neither Colomb nor Barbarin proceeded officially against De Salvert.
Once again, the Roman Catholic Church goes for the “geographic solution” to a report of sexual abuse, in the hopes that, either a “change of scenery” or a “change of duties and routines,” will make predator clergy change for good.
English Edition
The Oblates and the “geographic solution” to clergy sexual abuse
As Reithinger did, Barbarin would tender an early resignation to his position at the archdiocese of Lyon. In March 2020, news emerged that priests under his charge sexually abused persons under their care. Barbarin was unwilling to comply with what French law and his church’s rules require from a top official of the institution.
Even if in this case De Salvert’s case lacks Grassi’s, Ridsdale’s, or Cadena’s scandal factor, the fact remains: at different points, the Roman Catholic bishops avoid as much as they can complying with both civil laws and their own Church regulations, since there are plenty of loopholes in both.
For the time being, French bishops suspended De Salvert from public ministry, but he remains a priest, so there is a chance for him going back to perform as such.
Maciel and his many uncles
The most emblematic case of how dismissive the Catholic bishops are when figuring out whether to ordain a seminarian or to keep a priest in active ministry is Mexican Marcial Maciel.
There were several reports on Maciel scandalous behavior as a seminarian. None of them were enough to prevent him from becoming a priest and following a well-documented path of sexual abuse, financial mismanagement,
His case is well known in both the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds, so I will not go back into the details. I will only emphasize how even if Maciel is the odd case of a seminarian who has, when he was a young student, four uncles who happen to be Roman Catholic his case is not about how thick blood is.
His case only proves how far the Roman Catholic bishops are willing to go when dealing with a sexual predator. If Maciel was the lone case, the only one making headlines from the sleepy towns in Michoacán, Mexico where he grew up, to the corridors of power in Rome or to the wealthy suburbs in the diocese of Rockville Centre in New York, there would be some merit to the idea of clergy predators as lone rangers of sexual abuse.
Quite the opposite. His grand uncles Rafael Guízar Valencia, a saint in the Roman Catholic Church; Antonio Guízar Valencia, Francisco González Arias, and José María González Valencia, were always willing to offer a second chance at the expense of a potential victim of Marcial Maciel.
Later, his uncle Luis Guízar Barragán was a key supporter of the Legion of Christ. From the diocese of Saltillo, in the state of Coahuila, Maciel would have access to the local wealthy elites who would later help him get a foothold in Monterrey, the third largest metropolitan area in Mexico. His cousin, Ricardo Guízar Díaz, would also be a booster of the Legion of Christ.
In this regard, even if atypical because of the number of blood relatives involved in fostering Maciel’s career as a sexual predator, the same pattern exists with priests who develop a father-like relation with their bishops.
What is more relevant, however, is how in Mexico students leaving a seminary are able to find refuge in other seminaries with little or no oversight from the bishops and other senior figures in the Roman Catholic Church.
From Acapulco to Mexico City
That is what Los Ángeles Press found in the case of Morseo Miramón Santiago. We provided a detailed account of his case over two pieces published only in Spanish in January of this year.
México violento
Sacerdote de Izcalli, acusado de abuso de un niño de 11 años
He was originally a student at the seminary in the Mexican port and tourist destination of Acapulco, in the Pacific coast. For reasons and at a date unknown, he left the Seminary of Acapulco. It was possible to find pictures of him attending a ceremony where archbishop Carlos Garfias Merlos consecrated Morseo with the so-called “minor orders” in 2014.
The Seminary of the diocese of Cuautitlán Izcalli, a suburb of Northern Mexico City, accepted Morseo at some point in 2015 or 2016. The bishop there, Francisco González Ramos ordained him as priest in June 2017, although there is no record or evidence of Morseo’s ordination as deacon.
Bishop González Ramos appointed then priest Morseo to a parish in the old town of Tepotzotlán. By November 2023, the Facebook account of the Saint Barbara parish asked for prayers for “father Morseo”, providing no details as to why they were doing so.
Morseo would disappear a few weeks later, when—in the early days of January—the mother of his victim, a 11-year-old boy at the time of the attack, publicly accused Morseo of sexual abuse.
Even if him was not as well connected as Marcial Maciel or Julio César Grassi were, both Morseo Miramón Santiago in Izcalli, Mexico and Franklin Cadena Puratambi, in Galápagos, Ecuador, found bishops willing to put aside the “oddities” of their academic records, to get an easy ordination with little or no consideration for the potential effects of their decisions.
New England Gothic
Similar patterns emerge in the last case under consideration, that of John Geoghan. As Maciel, early in his career other clerics saw the troubling signs and were diligent enough to leave a paper trail of their concerns.
As in Ridsdale’s case, Geoghan’s superiors dismissed the many warnings they had over more than 30 years of the predatory nature of Geoghan’s ministry.
His case is also relevant because is one of many examples available worldwide of predatory priests who end up prompting violence against themselves. Geoghan’s life ended when a fellow inmate in a U.S. penitentiary attacked him back in 2003.
The Boston Globe published, already in 2002, a detailed account of the many warnings the leaders of the Boston Archdiocese received from parents, victims, and even other clerics concerned with the potential effects of Geoghan’s behavior.
Up until 1984, when he left Saint Brendan, in Dorchester for Saint Julia, in Weston, The Boston Globe found eight reports about predatory behavior. Despite that number of cases, in November 1984, he is “put in charge of the youth groups, including altar boys”.
The most striking aspect of Geoghan’s record is how one auxiliary bishop in Boston, Robert J. Banks, goes from asking Geoghan to “leave ministry” on April 28th, 1989, to the same bishop Banks recommending Geoghan going back to ministry on November 28th, 1990.
The “magical cure” was a three month stay at the Institute of Living, at Hartford, Connecticut. Geoghan entered that institute on August 10th, 1989, and left on November 4th of that year.
One year later, on October 23rd, 1991, there is a new complaint regarding Geoghan, and three years later, by November 1994, there are already four new accusations of sexual abuse of underaged males against him.
It was only then, when Geoghan’s victims were over 130 that the Archdiocese of Boston moved to suspend him from ministry. Rome will defrock him in 1998.
In February 2002, the authorities declared him guilty and put him in jail. A year later, on August 23rd, 2003, another inmate killed him.
Eight is a charm
As I was writing this piece, early on Sunday, a friend from Paraguay sent me a couple of pictures of a priest who tried to come to Mexico to continue his ministry despite the standing accusations of sexual assault on a female parishioner.
Rafael Fleitas López, the Paraguayan priest I wrote about in the story linked after this paragraph, is already back in public ministry.
The pictures I received from Paraguay have Fleitas joining clerics from his order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, at the parish of San Carlos Borromeo in the diocese of Villarrica del Espíritu Santo.
He was there, as the pictures before and after this paragraph show to participate in the ordination of a young Oblate priest.
San Carlos Borromeo stands two hundred kilometers or 125 miles East of Asunción. The pictures I was able to find of the ordination presided by Heinz Wilhelm Steckling, OMI, emeritus bishop of Ciudad del Este and epicenter of one of the most severe crises involving but not limited to clergy sexual abuse in Paraguay and Latin America at large.
The crisis was so deep that Pope Francis brought back now bishop emeritus Steckling from his native Germany to take over Ciudad del Este after the many mistakes made by Ricardo Livieres Plano who, to summarize a complex case appointed Carlos Urrutigoity as his vicar in charge of the seminary of that diocese.
Urrutigoity, an Argentine citizen, spent some time in the United States where he has standing credible accusations of sexual abuse.
As I see the pictures sent over WhatsApp, I wonder how many more victims the Oblates of Mary Immaculate need to act diligently on the reports regarding Fleitas’s behavior.
If the previous paragraphs prove something is that there is a pattern of dismissive behavior in the Roman Catholic hierarchy cutting deep the trust in that Church. The violence that predator priests exert against their victims breeds more violence.
But even if there is no physical violence, there is the issue of the effects on trust, in the Roman Catholic Church, in religious institutions, and even in interpersonal trust.
In that regard, this piece was not an attempt to offer a systematic analysis of the seven or eight cases. It aims at stressing the similarities between these and many other cases reported and probed by civil authorities, the Roman Catholic Church itself, a small army of journalists and other of academics from various disciplines trying to figure out the true reach of the clergy crisis of sexual abuse.
The very idea of the global clergy sexual abuse crisis as a bad case of “isolated cases” is getting old as nobody willing to follow the many leads, can believe that there are no similarities between Maciel, Ridsdale, Geoghan, and many other predator priests.
Awareness
These cases also prove how the national and global leaders of the Roman Catholic Church have been aware of these predator priests’ wrongdoing, without actually preventing them from harming their victims.
It is clear that neither the Roman Catholic bishops nor any other person can predict who is going to be a sexual predator in the future. Even if there are some tests that would provide some warning, they do not predict future behavior.
However, in all the cases considered here, the superiors of all the predator were aware of sexual behavior at least contradicting the rules of the Catholic Church.
In five of the cases: Altamirano (Mexico), Cadena (Ecuador), Geoghan (United States), Maciel (Mexico), and Ridsdale (Australia) there is evidence of attacks on others since their days in the seminary. If there is any collective memory of the effects of clergy sexual abuse, the hierarchy of the Catholic seems to be unaware of it.
It is hard even if back in July, for the first time in four decades, a formal document issued by that Church acknowledged that the crisis is having an undermining effect on the Church’s credibility.
Los Ángeles Press dedicated a story in this series to that acknowledgement, linked after this paragraph, and before that, a story available only in Spanish, about the perceived effects of the sexual abuse crisis on religious affiliation polls in Chile.