(ITALY)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
December 30, 2024
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
As a consequence of the attempts of Catholic leaders to downplay its scope, the sexual abuse crisis continues with little or no expectation of change.
Today’s piece summarizes what Los Angeles Press has published over 2024 about the clergy sexual abuse crisis at the Roman Catholic Church.
The sexual abuse crisis runs the risk of getting worse in a context less willing to pressure that and other churches in the United States, Latin America and elsewhere.
2025 will be year 42 of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church. Back in 2023, Los Angeles Press published a piece offering a summary of the crisis going back to the early 1980s, when Jason Berry first uncovered the sorrowful stories of abused kids and gaslighting clergymen in Roman Catholic dioceses in Louisiana, United States.
The last installment of that series, linked after this paragraph, offers an estimate of the number of current victims for more than sixty countries with populations of Roman Catholics larger than a million persons.
English Edition: An estimate of the number of victims of sexual abuse in the Church
That estimate goes from a lower limit of 420 thousand to an upper limit of more than a million victims. That range is the product of the algorithm provided by the Sauvé Report, a probe commissioned by the national conference of Roman Catholic Bishops in France.
That report sets a minimum of three percent of the total male clergy, both ordained and non-ordained male religious as a base for international comparisons on sexual abuse (p. 162 of the English version of the report available here at its webpage or here at Scribd).
A rate of around three percent of priests and members of religious orders who committed sexual violence against children, constitutes a minimum rate and a relevant point of comparison with other countries.
The crisis is far from over. Despite John Paul II’s and Benedict XVI’s many attempts at cancelling any meaningful debate of the crisis’ main drivers, depicting it as a malady associated to modernity, development, and secularization or as the consequence of an assault of gay people attacking the Catholic Church.
And one could say the same of Pope Francis’s acknowledgement of the reach and consequences of the crisis, affected every now and then by similar approaches of those of his predecessors: the crisis merely morphed into an ever more grotesque and contradictory narrative.
The Andean beast
As grotesque as the case of the so-called Sodalitium of Christian Life has been since the first victims of that organization came forward in the early years of this century.
The Sodalitium, a religious organization similar to an order, based in Peru, became this year the perfect example of all the things that can go wrong in the Catholic Church when Pope Francis decided to expel some of the members of that “order”, and—more significantly—issued threats of excommunications to figures of Peruvian public life who frequently claim to be faithful and loyal members of Francis’s Church.
That is the story coming out of the seven stories Los Angeles Press published this year dealing with the Sodalitium, the expelling of some of its members, and the unusual threats of excommunication issued by Jorge Mario Bergoglio from Rome.
Stories related to the Sodalitium of Christian Life, 2024
The Sodalitum case is far from over. There is no guarantee that the weak judiciary in Peru will offer a meaningful measure of justice to the victims. As most countries in Latin America, Peru lacks sunshine laws and mechanisms to protect the victims willing to come forward to talk about their experiences.
As in any other Latin American country, it also lacks protections for whistleblowers willing to tell what actually happens behind closed doors in Latin American firms, governments, and organizations such as churches. What is worse, as the personal stories of Paola Ugaz, Pedro Salinas, and José Enrique Escardó Steck prove, journalists and/or victims telling the stories of what has happened at the Sodalitium confront the effects of punitive laws that, allegedly protect victims, even if—in actuality—only protect the predators.
Victims as pawns
In that respect, sexual abuse remains the province of power struggles within the Church and outside the Church. That was the case of the former bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, and current head of the Dicastery for the Bishops and the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, Cardinal Robert Prevost.
English Edition: From Chicago to Chiclayo, sexual abuse victims are pawns
As the story linked above proves, the wrath of the U.S. Catholic far right, displayed in a series of pieces portraying Prevost as dismissive or irresponsible, was not actually about the abuse reported at Chiclayo, but about getting even with Pope Francis for having launched the probe on abuse in the Sodalitium.
It was about discrediting Francis and Prevost, with little or no regard or consideration for the effects of abuse on the victims. It was evidence of how victims become pawns of the U.S. far-right Catholic media.
What said media, the global leadership of the Catholic Church, and the Peruvian authorities dismiss are the actual, long-lasting effects of abuse. More so when one takes into consideration how key figures in Rome have been aware of the effects of abuse and how dismissive they have been of such effects. That was the point behind Cardinal Franc Rodé’s story of active defense of known predators, linked below.
English Edition: Cardinal Rodé, the sexual abuse missing link
More so because, there are plenty of accomplices of the Sodalitium far removed from the Peruvian jurisdiction, as in the case of Cardinal Rodé, and many other leaders of the Catholic Church who fostered the growth of that and other predatory organizations.
Some of them are dead, as in the case of Germán Doig, one of the Sodalitium founders. Others are out of reach of the Peruvian system of justice which shows no interest in pursuing a case against them. For one reason or the other, all of them will hardly ever be the subject of a thorough probe regarding their role in the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
At this point it is necessary to highlight the role of the Peruvian authorities, not because they are somehow special or different from the rest of their Latin American counterparts but because they offer a good example of how entrenched is abuse in Peruvian and Latin American institutions at large.
Similar patterns
More so because the political year in Peru closed with the assassination of Andrea Vidal Gómez on Monday December 23rd, 2024, a lawyer probing abuse and prostitution happening in the Peruvian single-house Congress. Her assassination proves how hard is to go deep into these issues in Latin America.
Her story, although not directly related to the clergy sexual abuse crisis, is similar to another violent death at the see of the legislative branch in another Latin American capital.
That was the subject of the report linked after this paragraph of the suicide at the National Assembly of Quito, Ecuador. There a victim of priest Franklin Germán Cadena Puratambi, decided to kill himself after repeated unsuccessful attempts at getting a measure of justice from the Ecuadoran authorities and the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in that country.
English Edition” Suicide at the Congress
Cadena Puratambi’s case follows the pattern so common in the first 30 or so years of the clergy sexual abuse crisis: a male cleric abusing a male minor under his care.
Even if that was the dominant understanding of the crisis, more so after the simultaneous debacles at the Archdiocese of Boston, the Mexican Legion of Christ, and the organization of the clergy led by Fernando Karadima at the Archdiocese of Santiago de Chile, it should be clear now that gay clergy have never been the sole and perhaps not even the main culprits of the crisis.
One must keep in mind that, by 2002, when we were aware of Bernard Law’s wide scale cover up operation at Boston, of Marcial Maciel’s systematic abuse of upper- class Mexican lads, and of Karadima’s desperate search for sex and power at Santiago’s Sacred Heart parish, there were already plenty of anonymous female victims.
The “new” pattern
However, as the stories published over this year prove, there are plenty of victims who are females. One of such female victims is Myriam, the Mexican nun whose story was the subject of a three-part series published back in November.
English Edition: A Mexican nun’s plea to end clergy sexual abuse in her Church
It is worth mentioning that Myriam’s case is still open in Mexican civil courts, but that she made more than many other victims would be willing to do before taking their cases out of the Church’s sphere and into the court’s jurisdiction.
Not that the Mexican Judiciary has a record of siding with victims of sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise, but things are about to change in that branch of the Mexican government.
English Edition: Blame the victim: the sexual abuse of a Mexican nun
Mexican bishops betting on their ability to manipulate the courts are betting on a dead horse. Even if the ongoing reform in the Mexican judiciary fails, that failure will put additional pressure to address issues of impunity when dealing with this kind of cases.
English Edition: The forgotten pain of clergy sexual abuse victims
Her account of what has happened to her and other nuns, and lay females in Mexico should be a warning to the Roman Catholic bishops who are still playing Benedict XVI’s game of blaming gay clergy of the sexual abuse crisis and who, simultaneously dismiss Pope Francis’s repeated calls for a “spirituality of reparation” that, as many of the ideas of his pontificate, is up until now a good intention, and only that.
Francis himself asked the so-called Tutela Minorum, the commission headed by Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Maley, emeritus archbishop of Boston, to issue a yearly report.
And this year, for the first time in 41 years of the crisis, there was a report. Los Angeles Press published a story on it, linked below. Despite the celebratory tone of the presentation of the document in Rome, it is hard to share the tone, because there the Mexican Conference of Catholic Bishops claims to be in full compliance with the Vatican’s request to have at least one commission to prevent clergy sexual abuse in each diocese, there is no evidence of that.
English Edition: The Catholic Church’s report on clergy sexual abuse
Back in April, Los Angeles Press went over the data available at the Mexican Bishops Conference, the so-called after its Spanish-speaking acronym CEM, and as the story linked after this paragraph tells, less than half the Mexican dioceses have a commission to prevent clergy sexual abuse.
English Edition: Less than half the Mexican Catholic dioceses prevent sexual abuse
After Tutela Minorum published its own global report, Los Angeles Press reviewed again the information at CEM’s website and there was no evidence of being in full compliance with the Pope’s request. What is worse, not even all the archdioceses in Mexico have set up a commission to prevent clergy sexual abuse.
Unsubstantiated reports
Weeks after publishing the report on the Mexican dioceses Los Angeles Press went over the available information for the other 18 Latin American countries and even if some countries claim to have complied with Pope Francis’s request, some have done it by creating a national, single body to deal with all cases, and in other cases, Brazil most notably, the country with the largest Roman Catholic population worldwide, has no record of having one commission per diocese or at least one single, national body to deal with the issue, as the story linked after this paragraph proves.
English Edition: Commissions to prevent clergy sexual abuse in Latin America, a report
In that respect although the year saw two major reports issued by the Roman Catholic Church, one at a global scale and other by one of the most influential religious orders of that organization, the reality is the reports suffer from faulty methods, extreme reliance on self-reporting, and an overall dismissive attitude towards victims and public opinion.
That is the morale of Camille Rio’s assessment of the Foreign Missions report on sexual abuse at that French religious order, published one week ago. Not that one should dismiss the entire report of what happened at that order.
English Edition: Secrecy and omerta behind sexual violence at the Foreign Missions
There is value in knowing now that at Foreign Missions, despite the many mistakes made in producing their report, there are more female than male victims. Even with all the many mistakes done while developing the probe, as proven by Rio, someone with deep knowledge of the specific field, there was no way to conceal that fact.
English Edition: Women make up the majority of abuse victims at Foreign Missions
But if one takes into consideration Rio’s critique of the Foreign Missions report, it is impossible to wonder what would have come out of it had that religious order done a rigorous probe.
In that respect, even if it is clear that by know it is harder to find people claiming to have some special knowledge of the abuse crisis still clinging to the idea that the crisis is the gay clergymen’s fault or, more broadly, the gay people’s fault, there are still voices within the Church calling to eliminate gay clergy from their ranks as a solution to the crisis.
La red en lucha: Herejía y escándalo, el laberinto de la homofobia católica
That was the case of the African bishops who criticized Pope Francis for his decision to allow informal blessings of gay and/or irregular couples, in the story from 2023 linked above, available only in Spanish.
English Edition: Sex-related blunders, the never ending story at the Catholic Church
However, that was also Pope Francis’s take when addressing first the Italian bishops, as the story linked above shows, and then when talking to a meeting of priests of his diocese, Rome, at the Salesian College in the Italian capital, as the story after this paragraph tells.
English Edition: What lies behind Pope Francis’s second use of a homophobic slur?
Collective understanding
It is unclear, in this regard, how much the Catholic Church’s collective understanding of the crisis has changed. In any case, regardless of how the bishops in Mexico, the United States, or elsewhere confront the accusations, it should be clear by now that the crisis has never been only about young males being the victims of gay predator clergy.
An even if Myriam’s story and the report of the French Foreign Missions order provide perfect examples of how misguided Benedict XVI’s 2005 reform of Roman Catholic seminaries was, it is hardly the only evidence available.
France and the Roman Catholic world were shocked to their cores when news emerged of how Abbé Pierre, a priest and hero of the French national resistance against Nazi occupation during the second World War, turned out to be also a sexual predator.
English Edition: Hero, priest, and sexual predator: the story of Abbé Pierre
On top of Abbe Pierre’s and Myriam’s cases, the results of the Foreign Missions’ report, there is also the evidence coming from the stories of systematic, large-scale sexual abuse of Bolivian girls at the hands of Spaniard Jesuits, as summarized in the story linked below.
English Edition: Clergy sexual abuse probe in Bolivia. Earthquake or business as usual?
If those examples were not enough, Los Angeles Press also published a two-installment series on the attempt from the so-called Oblates of Mary Immaculate to move a Paraguayan priest with credible accusations of sexual assault in his country to Mexico.
English Edition: From Paraguay to Mexico, a new route for the risk of sexual abuse
Missing the mark
All these cases should be enough to prove how Joseph Ratzinger’s 2005 reform of the education at the Roman Catholic seminaries missed the mark. Following the then new findings of the report commissioned by the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, first published in 2004 (available here at Scribd), Benedict XVI pegged the crisis on gay clergy.
In the early years of this century, the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church saw that report as the final world on the issue. In doing so, the crisis became the province of old clergymen, many of them dead or already retired, educated under the rules and academic programs that existed before the Second Vatican Council.
Desperate to support that idea, Rome used the questionable expertise of French cleric Tony Anatrella who became the French bishops wingman when dealing with gay seminarians and priests.
Anatrella’s expertise was doubletalk. He kept himself a French célébrité, a celebrity, publicly attacking gay persons for destroying Western civilization by requesting the right to get married, while privately providing questionable therapies, endorsed by the French hierarchy.
Said therapies aimed at “curing” priests and seminarians “with homosexual tendencies,” sent to Anatrella by their bishops or superiors by forcing them to have sexual intercourse with him.
But even if all the cases already mentioned were not enough: the French Foreign Mission’s report, Myriam’s case, Abbé Pierre’s record as a predator, the Spaniard Jesuits in Bolivia, and the Oblates order sending a Paraguayan priest to Mexico, back on September, Los Angeles Press published “The crime of father Araújo”.
Araújo’s story could be a remake of an old Portuguese drama, with a young priest, a rising star in his diocese, going as far as to force one of his many sexual partners, an underage girl, to have an abortion, and then maneuvering to bury the corpse of the fetus at a friend’s orchard.
English Edition: The crime of Father Araújo
Not that same-sex predatory behavior no longer happens. Even if Franklin Germán Cadena Puratambi’s case could be dismissed as “old”, given the fact that the abuse happened in the 1990s, only in 2024 Mexico contributed with at least three new cases of same-sex predatory behavior from young priests, educated, all of them under Benedict XVI’s new rules.
Young priests, old vices
Back in January, Los Angeles Press published a three-part series dealing with Sergio González Guerrero, a young priest, ordained in the middle of the pandemic in August 2020, accused of attacking an underage boy. The last installment of that series, available only in Spanish, appears after this paragraph.
Investigaciones: La ruta al sacerdocio del cura acusado de abuso en Tlalpan
A few days after, in February, Los Angeles Press published a two-part series on yet another young priest, Morseo Miramón Santiago, formed under Benedict XVI’s new rules, ordained in 2017, accused also of attacking an underage boy. The last installment of that series appears after this paragraph.
Investigaciones: De Tlalpan a Izcalli, la ruta del abuso sexual en la Iglesia Católica de México
It is worth noticing, as that installment stresses, that both priests were ordained in convoluted processes. González Guerrero was a scholastic or seminarian in a small religious order in Mexico. His superiors dismissed him from the order for reasons that remain unclear up until today. After a few months, the Seminary of the Archdiocese of Mexico accepted him.
Miramón Santiago was originally a student at the seminary of the Archdiocese of Acapulco. For unknown reasons, his superiors there forced him out and, after a year or so in some sort of exile, the diocese of Izcalli, an exurb of Mexico City, admitted, ordained, and eventually appointed him to one of its parishes.
Later, in September, yet another young priest, Jacinto Jiménez Tepetlixpa, became the main character in accusations of sexual abuse. The only difference in his case is that the victim was not an underage, but an adult male.
Although there is no record of Jiménez Tepetlixpa attending other seminary than the religious order he was ordained for in 2021, he was also formed under Benedict XVI’s rules excluding gay seminarians from the very possibility of being a member of a religious order, more so from the chance of being ordained as either a deacon or a presbyter as it happened with him in 2020 and 2021, as the story linked below tells.
English Edition: Mexico, Argentina, and Germany: geographies of clergy sexual abuse
It must be clear in this sense, that there is no reason to expect a sudden change in these patterns and that whatever expectation of a solution coming as a consequence of Benedict XVI’s alleged “stern” reform of the seminaries, there is no evidence of any meaningful effect.
Should gay people be blamed?
Sadly, the issue no longer depends on the will of the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church to acknowledge the negative effects of their own theology, leading them to claim that purging their seminaries from gay people will solve the crisis.
The main problem is that outside of the United States, Canada, and Australia, it is still almost impossible for victims, males, or females, to find a measure of justice without going through police and judiciary processes offering little or no chance to succeed.
Even European countries with long-standing traditions of effective police work and independent judiciaries deal with practices and attitudes blocking the few chances victims have to make their case.
In such a context, only ideologues would cling to the idea of a crisis brought to the Catholic Church by dark forces from outside. The new contours of the crisis find an increased number of females as the victims. So, the crisis turns on the product of opportunistic clergy and less so the consequence of an invasion or occupation of sorts of the Church by hordes of gay clergy, as Benedict XVI was so willing to insist even as to overshadow, from his retirement of sorts, what Pope Francis was trying to achieve with his timid reform.
This change in the understanding of the crisis has not come easy. It is the consequence of an increased number of female victims coming forward, telling their stories in a fashion similar to Giséle Pelicot’s call to make “shame change sides.”
In any case, it must be clear by now that one of the drivers of the crisis is the victims’ fear to come forward, because the law enforcement systems of most countries do not facilitate reporting, much less prosecution, and even far less a chance at achieving a measure of justice in the courts.
There are no reasons to believe that we are near a radical change as far as clergy sexual abuse is concerned in Latin America. Quite the opposite, the different crises in the law enforcement systems in the region, make almost impossible to expect anything but the usual dosage of scandals, from Mexico all the way down to Argentina and Chile.
Unlike what happened in 2023 in Illinois or in 2024 in Maryland, where the states’ attorneys in both places issued detailed reports about what has happened in the Roman Catholic dioceses there, in Latin America it is hard to expect that any Mexican state or any Argentine province would come forward with a systematic report on what has happened over the last 50 or 70 years.
The Catholic bishops’ bet in almost any country in the region on the victims’ or predators’ sudden death, so they can dismiss potential accusations. That has been, so far, the strategy up until 2024, and it is hard to imagine something different for 2025.
No expectation
Not that the whole Church is doing that. There are the precedents of what the United States bishops did in 2002-4 or what their French colleagues did in 2018-21. In both cases there were deep, thoroughly crafted reports, digging deep in what happened in both countries, deep enough as to shed light on what has happened at the global scale.
However, there is no expectation that any national conference of bishops affiliated to the so-called CELAM, the regional body for all the national conferences of Catholic bishops in Latin America, would ever commission a probe as systematic and detailed as those in the U.S. and France.
There is a chance, weak, that the Vatican probe in Peru regarding the so-called Sodalitium of Christian Life, a religious order of sorts in that and other Latin American countries, could see the light. As with the U.S. and French bishops’ probes, there is precedent of the Church opening its own probes as it happened with the document about the decades of abuse perpetrated by former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
However, unlike McCarrick’s case and the U.S. judiciary context, there is little or no actual, real pressure from the national authorities in Peru or any other country in Latin America to do something similar.
English Edition: A new wave of bankruptcies shakes the Catholic Church in California
Back in June, Los Ángeles Press compared the responses given by the Roman Catholic dioceses of California in the United States (see above) to those given by the dioceses of the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur in Mexico to the clergy sexual abuse crisis, linked below.
English Edition: Baja California and the clergy sexual abuse crisis
The key issue is not the doctrine of the Church, as that remains the same both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. They key issue is what the authorities in the U.S. are willing to do that the authorities in Mexico, as the rest of Latin America, are unwilling to even attempt.
One only needs to see how, when dealing with the accusations against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the Vatican went as far as to publish a detailed report, as to distance Pope Francis and the Holy See before his Pontificate from McCarrick’s predatory behavior.
Also, one needs to keep in mind that McCarrick’s report was a response not only to the accusations raised by his victims, against the former archbishop of Washington, DC, but also a response to Carlo Maria Viganò, the former nuncio to the U.S., who was officially excommunicated in July after more than five years of systematic attacks on Pope Francis.
There is similarity there with what happened with the Sodalitium: the attacks on Church authority, but unlike the fear of facing judiciary backlash in the United States, when dealing with the Sodalitium in Peru, the Legion of Christ in Mexico, and many other orders or dioceses in other Latin American countries, there is no such pressure.
If we know bits and pieces about the results of the probe regarding the Sodalitium, as in the case of how we know now that the Church admits abuse happened there at a larger scale than the original internal probe made by the Sodalitium itself, it is only because of the “punishment” issued from Rome in the form of expulsion or forced resignation as in the case of the now former archbishop of Piura, José Antonio Eguren Anselmi.
In that regard, what we know now is more about extent of the internal conflict in the Catholic Church, the rift between the most radical conservatives attacking Pope Francis while denying the very occurrence of abuse at the Sodalitium, than because there is some will to actually provide a measure of justice for the victims.
Moreover, the crisis risks worsening in a context less willing to put pressure on that and other churches in the United States, Latin America, and elsewhere, as a consequence of the victories of the far-right in several countries and the unwillingness of new governments in different countries to acknowledge the relevance of the respect for human rights.