WASHINGTON (DC)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
February 24, 2025
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
What will be the effect of the second Trump administration on the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church and beyond?
Trump’s record on abuse and his relationship with U.S. Cardinals force to wonder what the effects of his second term on the clergy sexual abuse crisis will be.
Dolan, Barron, Naumann, and other U.S. bishops endorse Trump at the expense of spreading lies about the role of other bishops supporting migrants, fostering distrust about their role in the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
One of the most imminent risks posed by what seems to be a coup d’ Etat in the United States at this point is the way many institutions are folding into whatever form the current regime desires.
This is relevant for the global clergy sexual abuse crisis not only because of the potential future of cases in the United States, up until now one of the few countries in the world where predators have served actual, meaningful, prison terms, where forms of reparation have been paid to survivors, where authorities have published actual official reports, and where at least two states, California and New York, have found creative ways to overcome one of the most painful obstacles: the, so-called, statute of limitation.
Even if one was able to put aside the fear brought by the way Donald Trump endorses Russian military aggression of Ukraine, probably as a way to do as he pleases with territorial grabs in Greenland, Canada, Panama, or to launch attacks on civilian populations in Mexico or any other place infested by drug cartels, the sole issue of the possible future of the struggle to offer a measure of justice to victims of clergy sexual abuse should be enough to raise all kinds of concerns about how far is Donald Trump willing to go with this coup.
For people who have been studying transitions to democracy in Latin America and Eastern Europe such as Larry Diamond, the last line of defense in the United States is the Judiciary and, more specifically, the Supreme Court of the United States.
It is not clear if that would be the case when one takes into consideration how SCOTUS has endorsed the new understanding of the powers of the U.S. Presidency, morphing it into the kind of presidencies that most citizens of Latin America, perhaps with the odd exception of Costa Rica and Uruguay have been used to deal with since the 19th century.
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What is clear is that it given Trump’s unchecked control of both Houses of the U.S. Congress and of SCOTUS, there is no actual limit to the kind of potential changes to U.S. law, and law enforcement.
Organized religion, organized crime?
Not that the U.S. Federal government has been the key player when dealing with clergy sexual abuse, as the FBI has resisted using the vast arsenal of laws and regulations at its reach, as there is evidence and opinions from lawyers, former state and district attorneys, and other professionals on the field, about the potential use of the RICO Act not only against the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, but also against the other Christian churches, and religious organizations of other traditions, involved in such practices.
The RICO Act is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, a U. S. federal law providing for wide criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed by criminal organizations.
That is the case of the most radical fringe groups derived but separated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints as the so-called Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints, the Priesthood Council, or the Blackmoore Group, among many others, already the target of RICO probes.
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It is also the case of fundamentalist organizations in the Jewish religious tradition, as Lev Tahor in a series of small communities stretching from Canada to the United States, Mexico, Guatemala, and Israel. Although in Lev Tahor’s case there is no record of being the target of a RICO probe, U.S. federal authorities have charged that organization with “child exploitation offenses” (see here too).
The issue of the future of clergy sexual abuse under the second Trump administration is more relevant in the current context in the United States because of Donald Trump’s own record.
Although normalized by now by his political success, one should keep in mind he openly admitted to assault females when he bragged about “grabbing” them by their private parts when he felt there was a chance at succeeding in said practices.
Even if there were people still willing to believe that what he said to a crew of “celebrity news” was nothing but “locker room talk”, out of the many trials Trump has been involved over decades, one the few where he was declared guilty, was one involving the sexual assault of journalist and writer E. Jean Carrol, and that tape was used as evidence of his predatory behavior during the trial, as the video from Forbes Magazine’s channel over YouTube after this paragraph shows.https://www.youtube.com/embed/EHuo2Kj6y_g
In that regard, it is almost impossible to dismiss the idea that there is a strong change of a major shift in the attitudes of the police departments, the district and state attorneys, and the U.S. courthouses, and that said shift transcends the United States as it has happened with other attitudes towards key issues.
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Migration and abuse, the explosive mix
Not immediately, but…
Not that the MAGA movement is going to immediately remove sexual abuse from the punishable offenses in the United States. Despite Trump’s history, portions of the MAGA movement have drawn attention to their cause by using a version of sexual abuse that paints that practice as related to the service the Catholic Church and other religious organizations in the United States provide when taking care of refugees, as the story linked above tells.
The Catholic Church itself, deeply divided by the loyalty of some of its bishops towards Trump, fuels some of these conspiracy theories. That was the case of Joseph Fred Naumann, head of the archdiocese of Kansas City, charged former President Joe Biden’s policies for creating what he called a “crisis at the US-Mexico border”, a line of attack used by the MAGA movement to discredit Biden.
The story linked after this paragraph goes over the absurdity of Naumann’s take on the issue, but the fact remains: trapped in the post-truth vortex created by Trump and the MAGA movement, senior Roman Catholic clerics are fueling the very accusations thrown at them: using migrants and refugees to have access to potential victims of clergy sexual abuse.
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Cardinal McElroy decries “war of fear and terror” on migrants
And it is not only in the United States. Less noticeable in the English-speaking world, as most of his “pastoral” activity is done in Spanish, there is the case of the spokesperson of the Mexican diocese of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Eduardo Hayen Cuarón who, as far-right Latinos in the U.S., supports conspiracy theories the MAGA universe is willing to put out as an excuse to attack migrants and refugees.
In Hayen Cuaron’s case the paradox is more striking as several cases of clergy sexual abuse exist in that diocese. Bishop José Guadalupe Torres Campos dismisses victims a spends small fortunes in the defense, all the way to appeal courts, of priests found guilty in lower courts.
If Hayen Cuarón and his superior were willing to actually care about clergy sexual abuse victims, they have plenty of room to teaching by example. Far from that, Catholic clergy in Juárez and other dioceses in Chihuahua, as Hayen Cuarón, attack Pope Francis himself over his social media accounts while dismissing accusations of sexual abuse from fellow priests.
Los Angeles Press published back in 2023 a series devoted to some of the cases in Juárez, providing a comparison of the response to clergy sexual abuse from the diocese of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.
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El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, contrasting responses to sexual abuse
Continental shift
In that respect, the risk of a major shift in the attitude of the U.S. federal government and the state attorneys towards clergy sexual abuse conflates with the many contradictions brought by the Catholic Church on its own, and the misgivings of the governments with pending cases on this matter.
Besides the Mexican government, paralyzed at this point by the ongoing assault on the Judiciary, two of the most notable cases are those of France and Peru.
The Peruvian Sodalitium has been the focus of several installments of this series over the last year. However, none of those installments deal with any action coming from the Peruvian government. No institution there seizes the will of the Holy See to acknowledge the extent of the abuse, sexual and otherwise, at that order. Quite the opposite.
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Figari, the Sodalitium and sexual abuse: much ado about nothing
The ongoing political crisis there provides an effortless way out of any questions about the Peruvian government silence: too many issues, too many cases.
Back in December 2024, Andrea Vidal, a lawyer probing a case dealing with sexual exploitation in the national congress died under a “storm” of at least 62 gunshots (opens a story in Spanish).
The violence displayed to kill Vidal is reminiscent of how drug lords in Mexico or Colombia attack rival gangs or how they send messages to law enforcement officials willing to probe their crimes.
More than two months after Vidal’s murder, there is little or no evidence of some interest from President Dina Boluarte to probe the crime, much less to actually advance the case the victim was already probing.
From France to Paraguay
On the other side of the Atlantic, in France, it is possible to see a similar pattern. Despite the will of the Catholic bishops there to launch the most comprehensive probe of sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise, anywhere in Europe or the so-called Western world, the so-called Sauvé Report, the national government is unable to acknowledge its own mistakes in dealing with the effects of clergy sexual abuse at the school of Our Lady of Bétharram, located at a town whose mayor happens to be, due to the peculiarities of French politics, the current Prime Minister.
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Argentina, Germany, or France: nobody knows about abuse
Last week, Los Angeles Press introduced this case in the story linked above. After a week in the spotlight, there is little to report as Trump’s demolition of the postwar military alliance that used to be the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, after he blamed Ukraine for the Russian military aggression, shocked France and the rest of Europe.
It is unclear whether François Bayrou will be able to whether the storm he is facing at this point. However, it is hard to imagine that his or Emmanuel Macron’s future hangs on their response to the abuses at Our Lady of Bétharram, or any other pending case of clergy sexual abuse in France, when Europe is worried about the results of yesterday’s election in Germany and the possible consequences of Trump’s decision to throw Ukraine under the bus.
Who is next in Vladimir Putin’s list? Poland, Finland, Sweden, The Baltic states? And if Trump is willing to do what he did with Ukraine, what is his expectation regarding Greenland? After all, Trump could use Putin’s excuse there or to retake the Panama Canal.
The risk for survivors of clergy sexual abuse is that governments in Europe and elsewhere would try to dismiss their legitimate demands for justice because of all the other risks at hand.
In Argentina, to name the most obvious case of a national government openly siding itself with Trump, Javier Milei’s government is pulling out of the World Health Organization, dismissing the very idea of feminicide as a specific type of crime, while blaming LGTBQ persons for sexual abuse, as told by the last paragraphs of the story linked below.
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Sodalitium, a suppression of sorts
Blaming LGTBQ populations of sexual abuse is a favorite strategy of the most radical wings of the Catholic Church, as proven by Benedict XVI’s strategy when dealing with Mexican and Chilean victims of super-predators Marcial Maciel and Fernando Karadima victims, despite the many cases of females who are victims of abuse, as the story after this paragraph proves.
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A Mexican nun‘s plea to end clergy sexual abuse in her Church
And if that was not enough cause of concern, it is necessary to add two more issues. On the one hand, the order running the school of Our Lady of Bétharram is, as many other Catholic religious orders, a global organization.
Global issues
It is not what it used to be in the early 1960s, when they used to be over 350 priest and over 530 religious males, spread over more than 50 houses, as the graph after this paragraph shows. But, as with other male Catholic religious orders now in crisis, there is a robust chance that abuses happened in other houses of that other besides the school of Our Lady of Bétharram in Southern France.
If one goes over the available information at websites like www.catholic-hierarchy.org or www.gcatholic.org, and even their own website, available in several languages at www.betharram.net it is possible to see that they have houses and parishes, and schools in several countries all over the world.
In that regard it would not be difficult to find that they are also practitioners of the so-called “geographic solution” to clergy sexual abuse: moving priests from one country to another with relative ease.
The order had their last bishops in Paraguay and Morocco. One of them, Spaniard bishop Ignacio Gogorza Izaguirre, was bishop in three different Paraguayan dioceses: Coronel Oviedo (1998-2001); Ciudad del Este (2001-4), and Encarnación (2004-14).
Pope Francis accepted his resignation when he was 78 on November 15th, 2014, the same day that the Pontiff accepted the resignation of the auxiliary bishop there, Claudio Silvero Acosta, a Paraguayan national and member of the same order.
Even if there were no reports of abuse at Encarnación, the last diocese ruled by these two members of the order of Bétharram, it is hard to dismiss the possibility. More so, because Ciudad del Este was one of the epicenters of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Paraguay and South America at large.
It was, on the one hand, because of the role of now deceased bishop Rogelio Ricardo Livieres Plano, during his life a full (numerary) member of the Spaniard Opus Dei, the order that is now mobilizing all their resources to discredit HBOMax Latin America for their decision to broadcast a series devoted to abuse at that order’s houses.
Also, because after Livieres Plano’s forced resignation there, Pope Francis appointed German-born Heinz Wilhelm Steckling as bishop there. Steckling was at the time of his appointment as bishop, the former general superior of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, an order with several accusations of clergy sexual abuse in the English-, Spanish-, and French-speaking worlds .
A member of that order from Paraguay was the subject of two installments of this series, after the relatives of a victim of clergy sexual abuse let us know about the plans of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate to send to a rural diocese in Oaxaca, in Southern Mexico, a Paraguayan priest with credible accusations of abuse in his country of origin.
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From Paraguay to Mexico, a new route for the risk of sexual abuse
The installments telling that story appear before and after the previous paragraph. As in many other cases in Latin America, the Paraguayan authorities seem to be unable to provide any measure of justice to the victim of Juan Rafael Fleitas López.
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The Oblates and the “geographic solution” to clergy sexual abuse
A third story with pictures of that priest going back into public ministry during the ordination of a new priest presided by bishop Steckling appears after this paragraph.
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Seven stories of clergy sexual abuse
Interregnum
On top of these issues, already enough to discourage and prompt the anger of victims of clergy sexual abuse and their relatives, there is the issue of Pope Francis’s health.
Los Angeles Press has been extremely careful in handling the information about the Pontiff’s health out of respect for him, and the faithful of his Church, but it is clear—as I write these lines in the early hours of Sunday February 23rd—that he is extremely ill and that even if he survives this episode, his health will be fragile.
It is true that the secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, already has a letter of resignation that Pope Francis himself wrote and signed in the event that he faced a situation that would render him alive but unable to carry his duties.
Makes no sense to speculate over whether or not Parolin will ever use it. What is clear is that it is just a matter of time for the Catholic Church to face the issue of electing a new Pontiff and the election will not be easy, because there is going to be pressure from the most conservative wings of that institution to align itself with the Trump administration.
The ongoing narrative in the global far-right is that Trump has a “mandate” to do whatever he pleases. The narrative is weak, as the actual difference in the Popular Vote was of only 1.5 percent (49.8 percent for Trump as compared to 48.3 for Kamala Harris), but the inability of the Democratic Party to articulate a credible message, coupled with the effects of the Electoral College, lend some credibility to the idea of a wide, overwhelming mandate.
It is possible to assume that U.S. Cardinals Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, and Raymond Burke, the emeritus prefect of the Apostolic Signature, will lead the charge to do it.
Despite the idea that Pope Francis somehow appointed enough Cardinals to guarantee his own legacy, there is no way to assume that. Back in 1978, the same College of Cardinals that elected John Paul I on August, elected John Paul II in October.
Whatever expectation of a sustained effort to support Paul VI’s timid reforms ended when John Paul II assumed as Pontiff on October 22nd, 1978, inaugurating a 26-years era of erasing Paul VI’s legacy, even at the expense of legitimizing the many conspiracy theories against him by the Catholic far-right.
It should not be hard to figure out that the appeal of aligning the Catholic Church with Trump’s global and U.S. agendas is there, helped by Trump’s war on “gender ideology,” which—together with the death of Roe v. Wade—gained him the sympathy and blessings of Dolan, Burke, Naumann, and other key figures at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Naumann’s will to amplify MAGA talking points on the alleged migration crisis, even at the expense of affecting the U.S. Catholic bishops working at the Mexican border, prove how close they are and how willing is a wing of the bishops’ conference to mimic Trump’s narrative.
Same could be said for the immediate support Cardinal Dolan and bishop Robert Barron were wiling to offer to J.D. Vance’s take on the “Ordo Amoris”, the “order of love,” so disruptive of Catholic teaching that prompted the letter Pope Francis issued back on February 11th, reminiscent of an encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI back in 1937 decrying Nazi policies and discourse in Germany, as the story linked below tells.
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Pope Francis decries US migration policy under Trump
One only needs to look at what has happened in New York City with Mayor Eric Adams, how the corruption charges on him disappeared after he was willing to cooperate with cruel raids of undocumented workers.
What is worse, one only needs to look at one episode of the first Trump administration, when he sent Army General Salvador Cienfuegos back to Mexico in 2020, dismissing his arrest at the Los Angeles airport on charges of aiding feared Mexican drug cartels in 2020, to notice how inconsistent Trump’s understanding of his own alleged priorities is. Indeed, with both Adams and Cienfuegos, Trump forced the Justice Department to retract its prosecutions against them.
If he was already aware of the threat posed by Mexican drug lords and the many questions about the efficacy of Mexican law enforcement, why he sent back Cienfuegos to Mexico?