EL PASO (TX)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
July 5, 2024
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Twin cities, Ciudad Juárez and El Paso share the pain brought by clergy sexual abuse, but their bishops’ responses are vastly different.
Although twinned by their location, the Roman Catholic dioceses of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez offer contrasting and contradictory responses to clergy sexual abuse.
In El Paso, bishop Mark Seitz published a list of clergy abusers, publicly apologized, and has compensated victims, while José Guadalupe Torres Campos harasses the victims in Ciudad Juárez.
hat Ciudad Juárez and El Paso are united by something more than the common history of the founding and the separation that came after the war of 1846-8, does not prevent their citizens from being aware of the many differences between the twin sister cities at the border.
The differences do not end or begin with language, currency, the way of measuring distances or temperatures. They can be seen dramatically in the stories of clergy sexual abuse at the hands of Roman Catholic priests.
It is not that clergy sexual abuse is worse in El Paso or Ciudad Juárez. Each of the sister cities has had its share of sexual predators.
The difference between the cities separated by the Rio Grande or Rio Grande, depending on which side of the border one is on, is that while El Paso faced the facts, like many other dioceses in the United States, Ciudad Juárez lives in denial.
The Catholic Church in the United States has learnt the hard way that attacking the victims, humiliating them, discrediting them is worse for the Catholic Church. In Ciudad Juárez, as in many other dioceses in Mexico, bishops bet on amnesia, on oblivion, on the victims dying or on the corruption of the Mexican authorities to address the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
When one sees the cold numbers in table 1, it is possible to notice the similarities between both dioceses. Back in 2021, El Paso reported to Rome 79.8 percent of its population as Roman Catholic, just under 719 thousand of a total of just over 900 thousand people in that corner of Texas.
Its Mexican sister reported that same year 79.57 percent of the population of that territory of Chihuahua as Roman Catholic, just under one million 333 thousand of the almost one million 700 thousand people living there.
Ciudad Juárez operates in almost 30 thousand square kilometers, just over eleven thousand square miles, from seventy-seven parishes with 121 priests, with an average of eleven thousand Catholics for each of those priests. El Paso operates in a territory of almost 70 thousand square kilometers, just under 27 thousand square miles, from ninety-nine parishes with 118 priests, and an average of just over six thousand Catholics for each priest.
To fulfill their duties, priests of El Paso must cover much greater distances than their counterparts in Ciudad Juárez who, on the other hand, must serve a larger number of people in a smaller territory.
Outside of that, it is difficult to say that things are radically different in the seven Catholic temples dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, as compared to the temples of the two parishes dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe in El Paso, Texas.
Even the buildings, their designs, all speak of the same religion, a similar culture practiced, however, in two different institutional contexts. That is what changes.
With all the defects that can be attributed to justice in the United States and especially in Texas, starting with its race- or ethnic-driven biases, which means that Latinos and African Americans are always at greater risk of being blamed for a crime in Texas, the reality is that the U.S. judicial system offers clergy sexual abuse victims greater opportunities to find some relief and reparation.
Mirrors
The fifteen kilometers or just over nine miles that separate the parishes of Our Lady of Guadalupe, in Guadalupe, Chihuahua, from Our Lady of Guadalupe in Fabens, Texas, do not change anything about the narrative of the apparitions of Guadalupe, or the beauty of the holidays of December 12th. One is a perfect mirror of the other and vice versa.
What changes is that, while in Texas victims of clergy sexual abuse have some hope of receiving a measure of justice, in Chihuahua, the victims’ complaints end up becoming artifacts against themselves.
A report to the authorities is not the beginning of a process to offer justice and restore the social fabric and trust; lawyers at the service of those who can afford their fees, easily turn reports of clergy sexual abuse into the nightmare that Javier, Margarita’s father has experienced.
Margarita, the pseudonym of a girl whose identity I am preserving, ended up at the now defunct government shelter in Pradera Dorada, at the request of the lawyers of the Roman Catholic diocese of Ciudad Juárez. There, Margarita became the victim of sexual abuse of another female inmate.
The diocese’s lawyers were trying to prove that she was subject to abuse in her own family, as a way to discredit her and her father’s denunciation of the sexual abuse she suffered there and the molestation she suffered at the hands of Istibal Valenzuela Olivas. Los Angeles Press provided a detailed account of her case in a story, available only in Spanish, linked after this paragraph.
It is not that Mark Joseph Seitz, the bishop of El Paso, Texas, has a gift making him especially better or superior to José Guadalupe Torres Campos, the bishop of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.
The fact is that, Chihuahua makes it easier to perpetrate crimes. The system of justice in Chihuahua makes it easier for crimes to remain unpunished and facilitates that trials are not a door for justice; rather, they are a door to fabricating guilty parties, as Guadalupe Lizárraga has proved repeatedly at Los Angeles Press.
While bishop Seitz and his lawyers have had to recognize the need to be transparent, to listen to and care for victims of sexual abuse north of the Rio Grande, bishop Torres Campos evades any reparation or responsibility by seizing the many failures of the municipal and state police, the so-called ministerial police, a distant equivalent of the Criminal Investigations detectives in Texas and other states in the U.S., the office of the Chihuahua State’s Attorney, and the judges.
It is not that he can always win, as the case of Aristeo Baca demonstrated, but as that same case proves, Torres Campos uses a vast repertoire of resources to avoid any responsibility by “convincing” the victims’ and their relatives that he has all the contacts in the right places.
The difference
Although Roman Catholicism is similar on both sides of the border, for victims of sexual abuse the difference between living south or north of the Mexico-United States border is relevant.
It is enough to consider that from the webpage of the diocese of El Paso it is possible to know of the existence of thirty priests accused of sexual abuse linked to that Texas diocese since the 1950s. And it is not just El Paso. The diocese of Las Cruces, in New Mexico, has also published a similar list, as have had other dioceses in the United States.