William Lori, archbishop looks at Paul Jan Zdunek, chair of the Committee of Sex Abuse Survivors representing all victims in the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s bankruptcy case as they update the bankruptcy proceedings resulting from decades of child sex abuse within the Catholic church.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore’s bankruptcy case moved closer to the critical mediation phase Monday, as attorneys for the Catholic church, its insurance carriers and a committee of sex abuse survivors reached a tentative agreement on the terms for upcoming negotiations.
The agreement is tentative because the lawyers still need their clients’ approval for a last-minute detail hashed out in the hallways outside of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Baltimore: Whether the archdiocese will drop its breach-of-contract lawsuit against its insurers, and what the survivors’ role would be should they choose to refile it later.
Scheduled for a contested hearing Monday, attorneys in the case settled their differences in time to avoid debating legal issues in court. After being briefed on the tentative agreement, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michelle M. Harner credited the lawyers for “creating a mediation structure that’s acceptable to all.”
During mediation, attorneys and their clients get together with independent mediators to negotiate the amount of money the archdiocese and its insurers each have to contribute to settle survivor claims, as well as an eventual reorganization plan for the church featuring protocols designed to prevent the scourge of clergy sexual abuse from happening again.
The tentative agreement reached Monday would allow the archdiocese’s insurers to jointly nominate a third mediator, in addition to the two already proposed by the church and the survivors committee: Robert J. Faris, chief judge of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Hawaii, and attorney Brian J. Nash, an attorney who specializes in mediation.
Attorneys would be able to challenge the mediator proposed by the insurance companies.
Baltimore’s diocese, America’s oldest, declared bankruptcy Sept. 29, two days before Maryland’s Child Victims Act took effect. That law lifted previous time limits for people who were sexually abused as children to sue their abusers and the institutions that enabled their torment.
Legislators passed the child victims law following the release of a state attorney general report which found that 156 clergy and other officials in the Baltimore diocese tormented more than 600 children and young adults, dating to the 1940s. The abuse spanned the diocese’s jurisdiction, which covers Baltimore and nine counties in Central and Western Maryland.
When the archdiocese declared bankruptcy, survivors who planned to sue the church had to repurpose their stories into claims in the bankruptcy proceeding. Harner set a May 31 deadline for survivors to file. That deadline came and went with hundreds of claims being filing in the case, though the exact number has not been disclosed publicly.
Baltimore Archbishop William Lori recently struck a unified tone with leader of the survivors committee, Paul Jan Zdunek, but tensions remained with the church’s insurance companies.
The church sued its insurers alleging breach of contract for failing to cover, or indicating they would not provide coverage for, claims of sexual abuse of minors. The survivors’ committee, which was also at loggerheads with the insurance companies, sought standing in that lawsuit. The insurers pushed back on the committee’s request at the same time it sought to argue the lawsuit, asking for the complaint to be moved from bankruptcy court to the U.S. District Court in Baltimore.
That lawsuit still was pending as of Monday, but the archdiocese tentatively agreed with insurers to dismiss the complaint. They reserved the right to file suit again and, if they do, the attorneys tentatively agreed that the survivors’ committee would have standing in that case. The details over the lawsuit were the one item attorneys had to consult their respective clients with.
Which of the archdiocese’s insurance policies were applicable to the sexual abuse at the time it occurred — and how much money those companies are on the hook for — will be subject to mediation. The church and survivors’ committee each hired expert insurance lawyers to examine the policies, which are numerous.
Edwin Caldie, an attorney for the survivors’ committee, said in court Monday that the tentative mediation agreement the church and committee struck with insurers was the subject of great “cooperation” and “candor,” adding that the dialogue “created more trust and a bit of hope for the mediation process.”
The Roman Catholic archbishop of New Orleans has said the allegations at the heart of a child-sex trafficking investigation being conducted by state police against his archdiocese are a “sin”, “evil” and a crime – but he has insisted he was oblivious to them when they unfolded during a bygone era earlier in his career.
Gregory Aymond’s comments, in an interview published on Sunday by New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper, were his first about an investigation which erupted into public view in April as Louisiana state troopers served the archdiocese’s headquarters with a search warrant that accused the institution of potentially having run a child-sex trafficking ring responsible for “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades”.
A sworn statement attached to the warrant added that the institution – which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020 when faced with dozens of lawsuits stemming from the decades-old clerical molestation crisis engulfing the global church – also purportedly covered up the abuse and failed to report it to law enforcement.
The inquiry which Aymond addressed in Sunday’s interview started in part after attorneys representing clergy abuse claimants seeking damages from the archdiocese provided a 48-page memorandum asserting that there was evidence of many of the allegations cited in April’s warrant within internal documents that the church was compelled to produce during the bankruptcy.
That memo recounted how Aymond “worked, socialized and/or lived with at least 48” clergymen accused in bankruptcy claims alleging child sexual abuse, starting in 1973 – when he became a teacher at a New Orleans high school primarily catering to boys interested in the priesthood – through 2000, which was his 14th and final year as the rector-president of the city’s Notre Dame seminary.
The state police warrant alleged that investigators had spoken with victims who reported being brought to swim nude in the pool at the seminary – which trains priests – and get “sexually assaulted or abused … [while] members of the archdiocese were present”.
Yet Aymond told the Times-Picayune that he “never experienced any of those things”.
“Maybe I lived a naive life,” Aymond said to the newspaper. “I don’t think so. But they say these things happened and I would love to know where, when and by whom?”
Aymond made clear that he viewed the fallout of the clergy molestation scandal as a mess that he inherited from the three preceding New Orleans archbishops: Philip Hannan and Francis Schulte, who have died; and Alfred Hughes. He said the abuse that spurred the scandal “should have been reported”, and it was “wrong” for it to not be.
“But it was a sign of the times” when pedophilia was less understood, Aymond remarked to the Times-Picayune.
Aymond served various roles under Hannan and Schulte, including as a high-ranking aide known as a vicar general whose responsibilities would have included administering misconduct complaints against archdiocesan clergymen. He became the bishop of Austin, Texas, in 2000 and returned to New Orleans to succeed Hughes as archbishop in 2009.
Reportedly, while in his home gazing at a photograph of him, Hannan, Schulte and Hughes all standing together, Aymond told the Times-Picayune: “I don’t think any of those men … intentionally tried to hurt people.
“Did they knowingly or unknowingly make terrible mistakes? Yes, knowingly or unknowingly they made terrible mistakes that have cost the church reputation and financially.
“But I cannot judge their hearts.”
Despite Aymond conceding that his predecessors’ management of the clergy molestation scandal hurt people, his administration has left Hannan’s name on an archdiocesan-run high school. And Schulte’s name still graces an imposing building at Notre Dame seminary.
‘I know my legacy’
In other parts of the wide-ranging interview, which the Times-Picayune reported conducting over three days, Aymond for the first time pledged to make archdiocesan files detailing the local church’s clergy abuse scandal publicly accessible after resolving the bankruptcy. He also indicated his willingness to meet privately with small groups of abuse survivors to hear their stories.
And he said he’s frustrated that the focus on the child molestation scandal enveloping his archdiocese has overshadowed some of the good things he described the church having accomplished. He mentioned increased mass attendance, how 200 adults had recently been baptized and confirmed within the archdiocese, and growing youth ministries, among other things.
“I know my legacy will be ‘he dealt with sexual abuse,’ but I did more than that,” said Aymond, 74. “I have taken seriously the role of bishop, being a pastor and being a shepherd.”
As the Times-Picayune noted, Aymond’s interview with the outlet came more than five years after he released a November 2018 list disclosing the names of about 50 clergymen faced with substantial child molestation allegations while working locally. He meant the move to be a conciliatory gesture over the ongoing clergy abuse scandal.
But Aymond has drawn criticism as the list has since grown to about 80 names. And the number of priests, deacons, nuns, religious brothers and lay staffers named in abuse claims filed as part of the archdiocese’s bankruptcy is more than 300, the bulk of whom the church has not labeled as credibly accused.
At the time his archdiocese filed for bankruptcy, Aymond indicated his administration believed it could resolve the proceeding at a cost of about $7m, including compensation for abuse victims. Yet the unsettled bankruptcy had cost the church about $40m just in fees for legal and other professional services while abuse claimants still had not gotten a cent as of Sunday.
The archdiocese’s bankruptcy attorneys at one point were prepared to argue that most of the abuse claims were worth relatively little because they had been brought past filing deadlines known as statutes of limitation. But that strategy absorbed a blow when the Louisiana state supreme court in June upheld the constitutionality of laws temporarily allowing child molestation victims to pursue civil damages no matter how long ago their abuse was.
Furthermore, the archdiocese anticipated the documents spelling out its history of clergy abuse would remain under a court seal while the bankruptcy was unresolved. But they have repeatedly leaked into news media reports, showing how the church had gone to unusual lengths to suppress the truth about the abusive conduct of some of its priests and deacons – and to generously provide for them financially, including under Aymond.
Another source of unflattering headlines for the archdiocese: the pending prosecution of retired priest Lawrence Hecker, 92, who was criminally charged in September with raping a child in 1975 or 1976 at a church attached to the New Orleans high school dedicated to educating prospective priests.
Aymond was either in his third or fourth year on the school’s faculty at the time the purported rape occurred. And in 1976, the year after his ordination into the priesthood, Aymond assumed the title of “business manager” at the school, according to his archdiocesan personnel file.
That same year, as he has acknowledged, Aymond confiscated sexually suggestive, handwritten letters which another priest – Robert Cooper – sent two of the school’s students. The letters have since purportedly disappeared yet led to Cooper’s dismissal from the school.
Meanwhile, Hecker’s alleged victim maintained he reported his alleged rape to the principal of the school, Paul Calamari, who – along with Cooper – was later named in Aymond’s 2018 list as a credibly accused clergy predator.
Hecker appeared on the 2018 list, too. He had confessed in writing to his superiors in 1999 that he had molested several other children whom he had met through work – but the archdiocese let him minister for three more years before allowing him to quietly retire with lucrative benefits, some of which he still gets.
Aymond was carbon-copied on an archdiocesan letter welcoming Hecker back to work after his acknowledgment to abusing minors repeatedly. He was a high-ranking aide to the New Orleans archbishop at the time, Schulte.
The credibly accused list which Aymond released nine years into his tenure as Hughes’ successor was the archdiocese’s first public acknowledgment that Hecker retired in the wake of his admitted serial child molestation, according to investigative reporting conducted by the Guardian as well as the New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana.
The former student pressing the criminal case against Hecker has told authorities that his school paid for him to receive mental therapy after the abuse – yet campus administrators never notified police about the crime. He finally took matters into his own hands and denounced Hecker to law enforcement in the summer of 2022.
‘Blind, incompetent or a liar’
The ensuing investigation not only resulted in criminal charges being filed against Hecker. It also spurred the child sex-trafficking investigation that Aymond commented on in his interview Sunday with the Times-Picayune.
Mere days before the interview’s publication, a priest ordained in Nigeria who Aymond invited to work in Texas and near New Orleans was charged in Florida with possessing child abuse imagery and sexually assaulting two women for whom he served as a spiritual adviser.
Church officials in Austin first suspended Anthony Odiong from ministering in that region in 2019. Their counterparts in New Orleans waited until this past December to do the same. That second suspension came two years after one of the women to speak out against Odiong had filed a clergy abuse claim in 2021 in Aymond’s archdiocese’s bankruptcy case.
Aymond on Sunday did not address Odiong’s arrest.
Lawyers who have the largest contingent of clergy abuse claimants in that bankruptcy issued a statement Sunday saying it beggared belief for Aymond to portray himself as having been unaware of the predatory and abusive behavior around him during his rise in the church.
“He is either deaf and blind, incompetent or a liar – and we know which one he is,” said the statement from Richard Trahant, Soren Gisleson and Johnny Denenea.
Aymond told the Times-Picayune that “it is simply not true” to call him a liar.
“I am a man of integrity,” he reportedly said, “and I do not lie.”
After a Washington Attorney General’s Office investigation alleging that the Dioceses of Seattle, Spokane and Yakima used charitable funds to cover-up sex abuse was halted by a superior court judge on Friday, clergy abuse advocates are still demanding accountability.
Abuse survivors and reform advocates from the Catholic Accountability Project (CAP) traveled from Seattle to Spokane and Yakima on Tuesday promising that the AG investigation into alleged abuse cover-ups would be appealed to Washington’s Supreme Court.
“It was a very sad day last week for survivors in court to have that kind of a setback, but we’re very hopeful about what the attorney general has committed to do in appealing this case,” CAP advocate Sarah Pearson said.
Pearson helped to organize thousands of pages of abuse documentation ahead of the AG’s office filing investigating subpoenas against the three dioceses. She asserted that Bishop Thomas Daly’s office was actively avoiding addressing the issue.
“Those were 7,500 pages of evidence that contained some of the worst things I’ve ever read…and a large portion of that material is from the Diocese of Spokane,” Pearson said. “Bishop Daly of Spokane is actively obstructing that investigation by refusing to cooperate.”
Mary Dispenza, a co-founding member of CAP and a clergy abuse survivor, is looking forward to the AG’s office appealing the investigation subpoenas, which would allow investigators to review materials that could purportedly show the use of charitable funds to hide systemic child sex abuse across dioceses in Washington.
“For a while I thought ‘the Church is just too big, you cannot fight the Church,’ but I had to let go of that very quickly, because I want to win. I want to win for survivors, and for truth, healing and justice,” Dispenza said.
CAP cofounder Tim Law cited the 2023 Washington Supreme Court case Wolf v. State as a good sign that the Seattle Superior Court order turning down the investigative subpoenas could be overturned in favor of abuse survivors.
Wolf v. State ruled that the statute of limitations on filing sex abuse charges against an institution does not begin when the crime took place, but rather when the victim becomes aware of the negligence of the organization that allowed said abuse to happen. It opened the way for the prosecution of decades-old cases and was a major win for clergy abuse advocates.
CAP members say they met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Bowers and Assistant Attorney General Nathan Bays on Wednesday. As current AG Bob Ferguson (D) runs for governor, Pearson says that his office has assured them that the investigation into the Church will continue past Ferguson’s administration.
“It’s absolutely essential that survivors are central to the whole process. We are so pleased that we’ve been able to have this meeting–it was long overdue. We have made plans to meet again to continue discussing how survivors can be involved in this process–especially when it comes to outreach and support,” Pearson said.
The Diocese of Spokane referred back to a statement sent to media outlets on May 9 stating that it is unaware of any new abuse allegations and asserting that all information about sexual crimes committed by clergy has been shared with the public.
Peter Isely, an abuse survivor and CAP member, said that the dioceses are hiding behind lawyers and obfuscating their responsibility to be truthful about the use of charitable funds to protect the Church’s image.
“They have to be held accountable. There’s a principle of justice that a decent society uses when there’s an issue that involves children…What’s in the best interest of the child?…They refuse, categorically, to cooperate in a state-wide child abuse investigation,” Isely said.
CAP continues to call upon survivors to report clergy abuse to the attorney general by calling (833) 952-6277.
While the attorney general’s lawsuit is requesting permission to subpoena Catholic dioceses for alleged sex abuse documentation, several kinds of Roman Catholic priests do not fall under the direct authority of diocesan bishops. Members of religious orders, as well as Catholic sisters and nuns, are under the authority of their provincials.
A history of sexual abuse of Indigenous peoples and students at institutions run by religious orders such as the Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits has motivated CAP to call for additional subpoenas of Church institutions not under the direct authority of the Spokane, Seattle and Yakima dioceses.
In the long term, reform advocates hope that the Church will actively participate in healing from decades of silence in the face of abuse by religious leaders.
“It will never be the Church it can be until it deals with the past,” Dispenza said.
— Anthony Odiong, prohibited from ministering in Texas and Louisiana amid criminal investigation, arrested in Florida
Anthony Odiong delivering a homily in which he refers to members of the LGBTQ+ community as ‘monkeys and animals and chimpanzees’, in November 2023. Photograph: St Anthony of Padua church of Luling
A Catholic priest under criminal investigation for sexual misconduct with multiple women – and consequently prohibited from ministering in two states – has been charged with illegally possessing child abuse imagery depicting girls.
Anthony Odiong was arrested Tuesday as he was leaving his home in Ave Maria, Florida, on a warrant obtained by police in Waco, Texas, charging him with possessing child abuse images showing disrobed children. According to sworn statements in support of the arrest warrant that were obtained by the Guardian, police said they discovered the illicit pictures while investigating complaints from at least four women that made officers aware Odiong, 55, could be “a potential serial sexual assault suspect”.
The Waco police statements say that at least some of the women’s complaints are too old to prosecute due to statutes of limitation. But the police said statutes of limitation in Texas are irrelevant if “probable cause exists to believe that the defendant has committed the same or similar sex offense against five or more victims”. And they have asked anyone with information about Odiong to contact them as they weigh the possibility of charging him with the women’s complaints.
Odiong drew media scrutiny that eventually landed him on the police’s radar in February, when the Roman Catholic diocese of Austin – which administers Waco’s church institutions – revealed he was removed of his ability to minister there in 2019.
That revelation came nearly two months after Louisiana’s most important diocese had similarly suspended him. The suspensions stemmed from complaints by women – including two he encountered while they were at the Baylor University campus in Waco – who publicly accused Odiong of trying to use his influence as a priest to pursue sexual contact they either did not welcome or could not consent to participating in.
Anthony Odiong after his arrest in Florida on Tuesday.
Texas is one of about a dozen states with a law that says it is impossible for there to be a consensual relationship between clergymen and adults who emotionally depend on their spiritual advice.
And in March, less than a month after the Guardian published a report detailing how the prior allegations against him ranged from sexual coercion and groping to fiscal abuse, an unidentified person walked into the Waco police department and accused Odiong of sexually assaulting her in 2012.
Police subsequently secured judicial permission to access an email account belonging to Odiong and found messages from another woman who had never come forward explicitly detailing sexual encounters with the priest, including one where her colon was injured.
Investigators later spoke with the woman, who “came forward to admit that” she had met Odiong under “the same circumstances” and been subjected to some of the behavior his prior accusers had, according to the police’s sworn statements.
From there, a judge permitted police to search Odiong’s iCloud online data storage account. Waco police detective Bradley DeLange later wrote under oath that he “discovered images depicting a clearly prepubescent child”, which had been saved to the account in September 2020.
DeLange said there were also “two images of what is believed to be [another] child” with what appears to be an adult touching an unclothed body part.
While none of the images show the face of a child, DeLange said it was evident that at least some of the images displayed someone “under 10 years of age which … may enhance the eligible punishment that may be assessed”.
McClennan county, Texas, judge Thomas C West on 5 July signed off on DeLange’s request for a warrant to arrest Odiong in connection with the child abuse imagery, records show. The judge’s suggested bail was $1m.
Attempts to contact an attorney who has previously represented Odiong was not immediately successful.
Kristi Schubert, an attorney for most of the women who have spoken out against Odiong, said she hopes the cleric’s arrest convinces “Catholic leaders that priests who sexually abuse adults can no longer be given a free pass”.
“A predator is a predator,” Schubert said. “And if they will sexually exploit an adult, they aren’t safe around children either.”
It was not immediately clear when Odiong – who was clad in clerical garb at the time of his arrest – may be transferred to the custody of Waco police from Immokalee. He would be sentenced to at least 15 years in prison if eventually convicted of possessing child abuse imagery depicting a minor younger than 10.
Revival of questions
The charges against Odiong are almost certain to revive questions about the way Catholic church bureaucrats have managed his career, which began with his ordination in the diocese of Uyo, Nigeria, in 1993.
When it suspended him from ministry in 2019, the Austin diocese did not disclose that move to the public – but later the organization assured congregants that it had provided notification to Catholic church leaders in south-east Louisiana, where Odiong was allowed to work until this past December.
That’s when the New Orleans archdiocese declared that it had banned Odiong from ministering in its community, too. The archdiocese emphasized at the time that the allegations against Odiong exclusively involved adults – since May 2020, the institution has been in federal bankruptcy court trying to dispense of a mound of litigation associated with a decades-old clergy child molestation scandal.
The decision to remove Odiong from New Orleans’s archdiocese was the responsibility of the city’s archbishop, Gregory Aymond. As bishop of Austin in an earlier assignment, Aymond had invited Odiong to minister there beginning in 2006.
Aymond later became archbishop of New Orleans, and he invited Odiong to work there as well.
Over the years in Texas and Louisiana, Odiong was tasked with working at a church in Luling, Louisiana, south-west of New Orleans, as well as the St Peter Catholic Student Center – which is on Baylor’s outskirts and ministers to students of that university as well as McLennan community college.
Odiong was able to build a loyal following in the US in large part by claiming he had a special understanding with the Virgin Mary through prayer. The charismatic clergyman would hold so-called healing masses after which some parishioners reported recovering from major medical ailments, improving church attendance as well as boosting his popularity with both congregants and diocesan officials.
But cracks in the public image Odiong fostered began to form when one woman whom he encountered at Baylor reported him for making an unwanted sexual advance toward her shortly after she emerged from the sacrament of confession.
A second woman whom Odiong met at Baylor then recounted how he pressured her to leave her troubled marriage and enter into a “spiritual marriage” with him, at one point forcefully kissing her on the mouth and groping her.
A third woman from Pennsylvania who met Odiong while he studied for a master’s degree in theology from Franciscan University in Ohio alleged that he coerced her into an abusive, cross-state relationship from 2007 through 2018.
She said Odiong forced her to perform oral sex on him as well as give him significant sums of money. She said she could not consent to sexual activity with Odiong – or willingly give him money – because he was her spiritual adviser.
Those three women eventually told their stories to the Guardian as well as various church and law enforcement officials. In particular, the third of those women sought damages from New Orleans’s archdiocese through its bankruptcy proceedings in 2021 while also reporting him to the sheriff’s office which patrols Luling.
A sheriff’s office report obtained by the Guardian explains that the New Orleans archdiocese’s general counsel, Susan Zeringue, claimed she was not even given the complaint in question to investigate until this past December. The sheriff’s office ultimately concluded that there was not enough evidence to establish that a crime had occurred.
Notably, unlike Texas, Louisiana does not automatically criminalize sexual contact between a clergyman and an adult parishioner – in the way it does, respectively, between teachers and students of age as well as corrections officers and incarcerated grown-ups, given the inherently imbalanced power dynamics at play.
Nonetheless, at that point, the New Orleans archdiocese revoked permission to minister in its region from Odiong – who, like all Catholic priests, had promised to remain celibate. And that expulsion garnered enough media attention to trigger the Waco police investigation which led to his arrest.
Waco police have since sworn that Odiong would inflict sexually abusive acts against his accusers during private masses he celebrated with them or in sessions dedicated to spiritual counseling – all while “wearing priest wardrobe items”. He would then communicate constantly with his accusers over email, Facebook and text messages, Waco police said in documents.
‘All things shall be revealed’
The case against Odiong is among multiple pending criminal matters with links to New Orleans’ archdiocese.
A prominent one centers on a search warrant that Louisiana state police served on the archdiocese in April as part of an investigation into whether the institution and its leaders had operated as a child-sex trafficking ring responsible for “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades” that was “covered up and not reported to law enforcement”.
Whether Odiong’s arrest attracts much interest from the Louisiana state troopers investigating the archdiocese with which he most recently worked remains to be seen.
But what Odiong has already made known is his defiance to the allegations against him.
Odiong told his followers that Austin and New Orleans church officials had run him out over his opposition to Pope Francis’s attempts to be more welcoming to LGBTQ+ people, who are not allowed to marry within the Catholic church.
He also apparently ignored orders to return to his home diocese of Uyo and openly boasted about having plans to work at a Catholic university whose campus is about one mile away from the $400,000 home outside of which Odiong was arrested.
His most recent Facebook post was an open letter in which he accused the Guardian of carrying out “a false, salacious, one-sided smear campaign” against him. He also said he looked forward to pursuing “any and all legal remedies” to clear his name as well as to “continue to faithfully serve God’s people”.
Odiong’s post generated about 180 generally supportive comments, including one which implored Odiong to “believe, in time, all things shall be revealed, all things shall be exposed”.
After Odiong’s arrest Tuesday, Waco attorneys Christopher King and Robert Callahan reportedly announced that they would sue both the priest and the Austin diocese for damages on behalf of one of the clergyman’s accusers.
The Waco police detective investigating Odiong, DeLange, said anyone with information that may be helpful to him can reach him by telephone at (254) 750-7609.
“If you have been victimized by Anthony Odiong anywhere in the United States, we need to hear from you,” said DeLange, who assured that the privacy of any new cooperating witnesses would be protected. “You are not alone, and you do not have to continue to live with the trauma of this experience alone.”
Although credibility has been at stake since the sexual abuse crisis exploded, this is the first time a Vatican document officially admits its pervasive effects.
In Spain, the Catholic bishops announced a plan to offer reparations to victims of clergy sexual abuse, but it is not clear how they will do so.
This week the issue of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church became a priority at the global scale and even more in Spain.
At the global scale, the most recent document of the ongoing Synod, a meeting of bishops and other church officials that has happened with certain regularity in the Roman Catholic Church since the early seventies, gave prominence to the issue when it acknowledged the risk of not paying attention to the causes and consequences of clergy sexual abuse.
In the Spanish-speaking world, the Conference of Bishops of Spain heralded a plan to compensate the victims of dead predator clerics and even the victims of crimes that have already prescribed there.
If the Spanish bishops are up to the task they have set, theirs would be a first in the Spanish-speaking Catholic world, where the Catholic hierarchy has been playing, since the 1980s, a game of hide-and-seek.
The overall assumption was that the issue only existed in the English-speaking world, despite the prominence of cases such as Marcial Maciel’s in Mexico, and Carlos Miguel Buela’s in Argentina.
Not that those are the only two cases, but those are two of the most prominent cases and where it is easier to trace links between the two sexual predators and the English-speaking world.
In Maciel’s case the links between him, his order, and the U.S. and Irish hierarchy have known since the late 1990s. It was because of the work done in the United States by Jason Berry, that in the Spanish-speaking world and more precisely in Mexico, it was possible to know what was happening in the so-called Legion of Christ in the United States and in Mexico.
Maciel had used the links between the Mexican elites and their U.S. counterparts to expand the reach of his order. First, in the diocese of Rockville Centre, in the state of New York, and from there to the U.S. Eastern seaboard, and other places in that country.
Maciel was able to do so because he recruited candidates to the priesthood in Ireland, where he also set up an English language school to train his own priests, and where—already in the 1980s—he was providing services to future Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who required some command of English when he left his position as nuncio in Santiago, the capital of Chile, in 1988 to become John Paul II’s secretary of the Roman Curia, then in 1989 secretary for the Relations with the States of the Holy See and, finally, in 1990, secretary of State.
Benedict XVI and Carlos Miguel Buela, from the Institute of the Incarnate Word social media.
In Buela’s case the story is less known and more complex. Buela followed Maciel’s blueprint, so his Institute of the Incarnate Word entered the U.S. in a similar fashion, in the Eastern seaboard, but without the support that Maciel was able to get from rich Mexican families.
Despite that and other absences, Buela was able to target Cardinal Sodano in Rome, and the then bishop of Brooklyn, N.Y. Thomas Vose Daily and James Hickey, then archbishop and Cardinal of Washington, D.C.
Buela’s ability to settle his order in the capital of the United States, would be key to develop a relation with now disgraced and defrocked former archbishop of that city Theodore McCarrick, who helped Buela open the doors of different dioceses in the United States, and who was an active advocate of the Argentine predator priest in the Roman curia.
In exchange, Buela assigned McCarrick seminarians from his order to be their personal assistants, as the report published by the Secretary of State of the Holy See in 2020 details in pages 200 and 363 through 365.
Footnote 1114 of the report talks about how McCarrick «provided $10,000 to the Rector of the Institute of the Incarnate Word House of Formation (in Mount Rainer, Maryland) for the “expenses of the seminary” and noted that he appreciated “that I have the special privilege of enjoying the help of the seminarians of the Institute in arranging my transportation and in so many other important parts of my responsibility. I know that this comes with a price tag in purchasing gasoline and in many other ways.” »
The Vatican’s 2020 report names Buela himself for having «engaged in misconduct with adult seminarians» (p. 364). The accusations against Buela are like those against McCarrick, which only emerged later in the second decade of the 21st century, after U.S. media published detailed accounts of abuse perpetrated by McCarrick, as chapters XXVI through XXVIII of the report state (pp. 433-42).
The Synod’s acknowledgement
As far as the official working paper, the so-called Instrumentum Laboris, of the Synod, that will come to some sort of conclusion next October, the Church acknowledges that the clergy sexual abuse crisis is linked, on the one hand to a culture of “clericalism” that has been denounced repeatedly by Pope Francis himself with little or no success in the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
The Synod’s document states:
«75. In our time, the demand for transparency and accountability in and by the Church has come about as a result of the loss of credibility due to financial scandals and, even more so, sexual abuse and other abuses of minors and vulnerable persons. The lack of transparency and accountability fuels clericalism, which is based on the implicit assumption that ordained ministers are accountable to no one for the exercise of the authority vested in them.
«76. If the synodal Church wants to be welcoming, then accountability and transparency must be at the core of its action at all levels, not only at the level of authority. However, those in positions of authority have a greater responsibility in this regard. Transparency and accountability are not limited to sexual and financial abuse. They must also be concerned with pastoral plans, methods of evangelization, and how the Church respects the dignity of the human person, for example, regarding the working conditions within its institutions».
However, far from prompting major changes, the Francis’s critique of clericalism has clashed with the idea that there is a way for the Church to resist what many clerics see as “attacks” on the institution, even if to do so they must destroy the reputation of the victims.
In recent weeks, Los Ángeles Press has published pieces comparing, on the one hand the extremely different approaches with which the Roman Catholic bishops of the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, have dealt with clergy sexual abuse in their territories.
While in El Paso, as in the rest of the United States, bishop Mark Joseph Seitz actively acknowledges the reality of clergy sexual abuse in that territory, on the other side of the fence, bishop José Guadalupe Torres Campos, as most Mexican bishops, avoids acknowledging any malfeasance from his priests.
What is worse. Bishop Torres Campos uses the same repertory of chicanery and assorted legal tricks that one sees from the lawyers defending drug lords and leaders of criminal organizations in Mexico, to exculpate accused priests and even to actively discourage victims from reporting sexual abuse.
In a similar fashion, Los Ángeles Press has compared also what happens in the twelve Roman Catholic dioceses of California, United States, with the four dioceses in the Mexican Baja Californias.
What the comparison proved is that despite the alleged adherence to a similar set of principles and beliefs, the key to understand the response to clergy sexual abuse is the policymaking will of the State legislature in Sacramento, California to provide a solution to the damage brought by predator clergymen.
In contrast, on the other side of the fence, no similar approach exists in the States’ legislatures in Mexicali, Baja California, and La Paz, Baja California Sur. Quite the opposite, so the Mexican victims of clergy sexual abuse are alone in their plight.
And in that regard, Los Ángeles Press has proved how in Mexico less than half the Roman Catholic dioceses in the country have complied with the request made by Pope Francis to create in each diocese a commission to prevent, not even to solve, only to prevent, clergy sexual abuse.
Los Ángeles Press proved also how a similar pattern exist in the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America, with some countries, like Colombia or Peru, having a national body while other follow a model similar to Mexico of diocesan commissions to deal with the issue.
However, the most populous country in the region, Brazil, the one with the largest population of Roman Catholics worldwide, does not have neither a national body nor diocesan commissions dedicated to preventing clergy sexual abuse.
It is unclear whether the synod will see the two paragraphs already quoted as relevant enough as to issue specific recommendations or statements on the clergy sexual abuse crisis at large.
True Scale
Sadly, when dealing with the Roman Catholic Church, there is always the risk of their leaders exacerbating the alleged risk of acknowledging the true scale of the crisis.
As a consequence, it could be perfectly possible to have by November of this year some sort of boiler plate statement about the clergy sexual abuse crisis, with no real will to actually address the issue, because the bishop of some diocese alleges that “communists” or more broadly speaking “the enemies of the Church” will use it to try to destroy it.
Archbishop Bernardito Cleopas Auza, nuncio to Spain.
Even in the remote case that the Synod was willing to put aside other issues during the sessions in Rome in October, there is no clarity as to when and how will the bishops of each specific country deal with the crisis.
One must keep in mind that way before the publication of the working paper, the members of the so-called Tutela Minorum, the Commission set by Pope Francis to prevent clergy sexual abuse have repeatedly stressed the negative consequences that the Church’s attitudes toward the victims have had for the Church itself.
hat is why that commission saw original members as Irish survivor Mary Collins resign their positions there, tired of the inability of the bishops and cardinals to understand the extent of the damage done by clergy sexual abuse.
No wonder there has been little or no real change in the last 40 years. The changes that have happened in the English-speaking world came as the consequence of a more thorough law enforcement and the publication of the reports commissioned by the Canadian bishops in the late 20th century, by the U.S. bishops in the early Aughts, and the findings of commissions with a degree of involvement from the governments in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia.
More recently, a conscience of the true reach of the crisis have emerged because of the publication of reports in France (the so-called Sauvé Report) and Portugal, and the partial knowledge we have of what has happened in the German-speaking world.
In the German-speaking world, although there are reports released at the diocesan level in Germany, and a partial national report in Switzerland, we do not know yet the true reach of the crisis in that world.
In the Portuguese-speaking world, although the national conference of bishops in Portugal published in 2023 a report with valuable insights, we know little or nothing about the true reach of the crisis in Brazil and even less about its reach in the African Portuguese-speaking countries of Angola, Cape Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe, where there are sizeable populations of Roman Catholics.
What is worst, even if the report by Pedro Stretch, a reputed Portuguese psychiatrist, provides valuable information, the website for the report no longer exists. The original URL is under attack, and the only way to retrieve the contents, including the documents in Portuguese and English originally published in February 2023, is through the Internet Archive (available here).
If it were not for the dedication of the Internet Archive, all the contents of that website would not exist by now, because the national conference of bishops of Portugal decided that it was not worth to keep them.
Hence the significance of the announcement made on July 9th by the national conference of Catholic bishops of Spain. Sadly enough, they were less than willing to request an independent report as the one commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to the John Jay College of Criminal Law (available here), or the Sauvé Report commissioned by the bishops of France.
Credibility
Back in 2022, the bishops of Spain decided that it was somehow good for their own credibility to request their first report from a lawyer’s firm specialized in corporate and private law (Cremades & Calvo Sotelo) whose main partner (Javier Cremades) is a “layperson” but who is also a member of the Opus Dei, a Roman Catholic “order” who was immediately suspect of bias by former members or sympathizers of that order, as this letter in Spanish proves.
Although the report published by Cremades & Calvo Sotelo (available here) offered nothing new, the conference of Catholic bishops of Spain dismissed the number of 1,383 victims estimated by that report.
According to a story published by El Debate (available here in Spanish) the bishops acknowledge a smaller number of victims, only 806.
However, when going over the data published by the bishops (available only in Spanish here), on the 21st of December 2023, there is no way to find that figure in the bishops’ report. The only mention of 806 as a number is the page with that number in the report.
El Debate and other media in Spain talk about a mere 205 “proven” cases; “70 unproven but credible,” and “280 unproven”. They also talk about twenty-four cases “excluded.” El Debate says that the bishops classify another seventy-five cases as “pending of resolution,” 13 more are “filed,” and three more cases are “false”.
These figures appear, however, on a separate summary of the report, available only in Spanish and only as a word document at a different URL. A PDF version of that file appears in the box immediately after this paragraph. I am unable to explain why the full report does not include these figures or how they get these numbers.
The bishops’ spokesperson Josetxo Vera, who appears in the message posted then at what used to be Twitter renders their report as a summary of data provided by the diocesan commissions in Spain, the ombudsman of Spain (Defensor del Pueblo) and by the report originally offered, at the bishops’ request, by Cremades & Calvo Sotelo.
However, the full bishops’ report states on page 343 that “is difficult to provide a closed number both of victims and of aggressors,” as can be seen here in their report titled in Spanish To illuminate (Para dar luz).
The bishops’ report cites repeatedly the report of the Spaniard ombudsman, issued back on October 27th 2023 (available here). Although this report is an official source of information, it is almost impossible to derive from it an estimation of the number of victims of clergy sexual abuse in Spain.
Magic numbers
From page 708 through 710 of the ombudsman’s report, it is possible to find the table 3.4 of the study titled “Number of victims and distribution by sex and age”. Although some dioceses as Astorga, provide a specific number of victims, others such as Albacete, Huelva, Huesca, Oviedo, and Vic, to name only a few, report no victims, dioceses such as Barcelona or Madrid, the two most populated metropolitan areas of the European country, provide only a number followed by a “V”.
The report states that the “V” stands for a “minimum number of victims” since there is no precision as to the number of total victims in that diocese. In that regard, the Archdiocese of Barcelona reports a total number of 47V, so the only thing we know for sure is that there have been at least forty-seven victims in the second largest metropolitan area of Spain.
The image that follows takes the tables as they appear, in Spanish, in the ombudsman’s report, so the reader can see what dioceses in Spain appear with a V in that table. A larger view of the table is available clicking with the right-button of your mouse on the image.
Table. Number of victims by age and sex distribution, Ombudsman of Spain.
Source: Report from the Ombudsman of Spain.
The archdiocese of Madrid reports 32V, so we know of a minimum of thirty-two victims, not an actual total number of thirty-two victims. Valencia, another major archdiocese in Spain appears in that table with 24V so, again, we know about a minimum of twenty-four victims, but there is no way to affirm that there are only twenty-four victims there.
Overall, as it is possible to see in the last row of the table there is a total of 509V; again, the V stands for a minimum of victims, not an actual total number of victims.
How would the bishops of Spain translate the data from the ombudsman or any other report into the numbers that some media in Spain reported back in December 2023, is pure alchemy, because there is no explanation for what they do.
Despite this and other issues, on July 9th, 2024, the bishops announced a new program called PRIVA, which stands for “Plan for the Integral Reparation of Victims of Abuse” (the full title in Spanish is Plan de Reparación Integral a Menores y Personas Equiparadas en Derecho, Victimas de Abusos Sexuales).
PRIVA was announced by the chair of the national conference of bishops, Luis Javier Argüello García, head of the archdiocese of Valladolid.
Luis Javier Argüello García, chair of the conference of Roman Catholic bishops of Spain. From their YouTube channel.
Argüello heralded PRIVA as a proof of how close they are to both Pope Francis and to the victims of clergy sexual abuse. However, he insisted during his presentation on the alleged need “to respect the autonomy” of the Church in Spain, as if the Catholic Church was under siege.
The day before the bishops’ announcement, the national government issued its own announcement regarding the clergy sexual abuse crisis there. Félix Bolaños, minister of the Presidency, Justice, and Relations with the Judiciary, held a meeting with survivors’ associations (a report from the Spanish national government is available in Spanish here).
The survivors were anxious about the announcement they knew the bishops were about to make the next day, as the government of Spain was. Hence Bolaños’s calling the bishops to address the survivors’ needs.
The minister framed his message as a continuation of a previous official announcement made on April 23rd 2024 (available in Spanish here) regarding a response to the ombudsman report of October 2023.
Bolaños said in April that the government’s plan would materialize a series of reforms from 2024 through 2027, but as the bishops’ announcement of PRIVA proves, there is now a certain urgency on the Church’s side to render the Church as active on the issue.
Meeting of Minister Bolaños with survivors of clergy sexual abuse. Palace of La Moncloa’s social media.
It could be that there is a real acknowledgment on the severity of the issue, but the plan itself is ambiguous. If bishops’ report is obscure regarding an estimate of the number of either victims or aggressors in the Catholic Church in Spain, the PRIVA plan is when providing an explanation of how will the bishops select whose victims deserve a compensation, what will be the amount of the compensation, and how they will give the compensation.
The PRIVA is laid out in three separate but rather short documents, with a total number 23 effective pages, available only in Spanish here.
Despite all these shortcomings and doubts regarding the true reach of the bishops’ calculations or how will they calculate the compensations for the victims, Argüello’s announcement of PRIVA was immediately greeted by the nuncio in Spain, the Filipino bishop Bernardito Cleopas Auza, who congratulated his fellow bishops on behalf of Pope Francis.
What is worse. The bishops and the media closest to them in Spain presented themselves as advocates of the survivors of clergy sexual abuse when there are no elements to support that portrayal.
Gamechanger?
Bishop Argüello offered an enthusiastic presentation of PRIVA as if it was somehow a gamechanger while Vida Nueva Digital, a Spanish-speaking Catholic medium, published last week an editorial calling to avoid playing games with “with the abuses” (available in Spanish here).
And the government’s attitude was not especially different. It is not as if the issue of sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise, was new in Spain or at a global scale. What is a fact, however, is that as the recent cases in Spain, Chile, and Bolivia prove, the laws and courts in the Spanish-speaking world are not ready to deal with the reality of sexual abuse.
Change has happened. In Mexico and Chile, sex-related crimes no longer prescribe as it used to be. However, in Chile, a proposal to go over the cases of sexual and other types of abuse ended up constrained to dealing with only the cases in the so-called Servicio Nacional de Menores, a national agency similar to the offices of Child Services in local governments in the United States.
For Chilean survivors of clergy sexual abuse, their government should launch a probe to go after predators in the Catholic and other churches there.
The cases emerging from Bolivia these days could end up implicating the Church in Spain. Luis Roma Padrosa, a now deceased Jesuit, identified through his own diary and statements he made before his death to his superiors in that religious order ended up in Bolivia, as other Jesuits from Spain for reasons that remain unknown.
However, there is a chance that Roma Padrosa’s superiors in both Spain and Bolivia were aware of the abuse he was doing in South America. Instead of reporting him to their superiors in the Church or to the civil authorities in Bolivia, they let him move around from parish to parish, as a super-predator of girls
If that was the case and the Church in Spain is ready to deal with the abuses perpetrated by already dead priests, then there would be necessary to discuss whether the Spanish province of the Jesuits should compensate the Bolivian victims of Roma Padrosa in South America.
What is clear is that there is no more room to accept the way bishops in Mexico and other countries of Latin America deal with this issue. Even if the bishops in Spain are dragging their feet and trying to reduce as much as possible the number of cases they accept as such, their attitude reflects awareness of the potential effect of the politization of the issue.
In Mexico and other Latin American countries, however, bishops are still betting on denying the very existence of cases. One can see priests acting out as trolls in social media attacking victims and their advocates, demanding full disclosure of extremely complex cases in the 160-character limit imposed by former Twitter.
Also, one can also find that the very few bishops willing to acknowledge malfeasance from clergy predators, try to force the victims to follow therapies chosen by the Church.
Said therapies seek to blame the victim and to provide the bishop and the predator priest with an easy way out of the situation, as long as the victims avoid a legal process, as the story linked immediately below, available only in Spanish, describes.
Miraculous catch?
If they choose a legal process, then the fury of the lawyers paid by the bishop falls upon the victims, with no will to even acknowledging the very possibility of abuse while launching character assassination campaigns against the victims, their relatives, friends, and even their employers as to chastise them. That is what explains the loss of credibility that the Instrumentum Laboris for the Synod acknowledges.
The loss of credibility goes hand in hand with the arrogance of clergymen, who are oblivious to the victims’ plight.
If one pays attention to the account in what used to be Twitter broadcasting the Spanish bishops’ messages one will notice that the account sports, as its cover picture art originally made by noted sexual predator Marko Rupnik.
The account of the national conference of Roman Catholic bishops of Spain at what used to be Twitter sporting one of Rupnik’s mosaics.
The mosaic is not from Fatima or Aparecida, two of the Roman Catholic basilicas where Rupnik’s art is in full display as if nothing ever happened between him and his victims.
The piece, titled “The miraculous catch” comes straight from the chapel of the conference of bishops of Spain in Madrid, as can be seen with great detail in the Centro Aletti’s webiste or in this story about the most recent meeting of the conferences of Roman Catholic bishops in Europe from March 13th, 2024, where the bishops of Spain talk about supporting with their prayers the victims of the war in Ukraine.
In that regard, the elaborated speech of archbishop Argüello about the victims of clergy sexual abuse, available in full below, seems almost impossible to reconcile with Pope Francis’s idea of a “spirituality of reparation” or with the most basic understanding of the victims’ plight.
And that is where any cleric willing to find the root cause of the loss of credibility should look.
