Inside Cost Rica - May 3, 2010
Chile Shaken by Sex Abuse Allegations against Revered Priest
By Daniela Estrada
SANTIAGO (IPS) - A small group of feminists demonstrated outside the Metropolitan Cathedral in the Chilean capital Thursday to express their condemnation of an influential Catholic priest accused of sexually abusing at least five teenagers.
"Imagine what a shock it is for those of us who did not know what was really going on with these priests," 44-year-old Edita Andrade told IPS, as she watched the protest by a score of representatives of Articulación Feminista Por la Libertad de Decidir (Feminist Network for the Right to Choose).
"I think it's a good thing for people to wake up and react. Religion cannot be used to cover up these crimes," Andrade said. A few steps away Sonia, another Chilean woman, was calling for priests involved in sexual abuse to be specifically named. "We need to avoid generalising, because not all priests are the same," she told IPS.
"Many things are damaging the Catholic Church. Covering up child sex abuse crimes is one of them," Octavio Rojas, who joined the symbolic protest in Santiago's main square, told IPS.
This South American country of 17 million people has been shaken by the case of Fernando Karadima, formerly parish priest at the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the well-to-do Santiago neighbourhood of Providencia, who is under investigation by the justice system for alleged sexual abuse committed two decades ago involving at least five teenage boys.
The 80-year-old Karadima, who is described as a charismatic, influential and highly respected cleric who trained many priests, some of whom are now bishops, denies the allegations. He has been defended this week by members of religious orders and ordained and lay Catholics.
James Hamilton, a 44-year-old gastroenterologist, and Juan Carlos Cruz, a 46-year-old executive living in the United States, denounced Karadima in an article published Apr. 22 in The New York Times. [see below]
Hamilton, Cruz and three other men who were allegedly abused by the priest, starting when they were under 18, talked about their experiences on the Informe Especial programme of the state Televisión Nacional de Chile channel on Apr. 27.
Previously, on Apr. 21, the president of the Chilean Bishops' Conference, Monsignor Alejandro Goic, formally apologised to Chilean society for the cases of sexual abuse committed by priests.
Goic, who is also bishop of Rancagua, said 20 priests have been accused of paedophilia in Chile. Five have been convicted, another five are being actively investigated by the justice authorities, and the rest have either been absolved or their cases are still under review.
Four days later, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz admitted in a letter read out at mass in every Catholic church that he had suspended an investigation into Karadima's alleged behaviour in 2005, in order to await "further evidence" and to consult experts in canon law.
He said the investigation was resumed in 2009, when he handed over the evidence against Karadima to a new Church "Promotor of Justice", appointed last year, for a thorough investigation of the facts, for either "a declaration of innocence or the necessary measures."
"There is no room in the priesthood for those who abuse minors and there is no pretext whatever that can justify this crime," said the cardinal, who called on victims to report their experiences.
"Citizens have a duty, not only to discuss all the details of these cases in public, but also to demand punishment," Adriana Gómez of Articulación Feminista, an umbrella group of some 20 organisations, told IPS.
"Women's organisations have been struggling over the last few years against a Catholic Church that imposes a very strict morality and harsh rules on us, and then we see impenetrable secrecy as they close ranks around those who committed these crimes, which are treated as misdemeanours, human failings," she complained.
In Gómez's view, the recent statements by the Chilean church leadership are not enough. "I don't think there is complete transparency yet. It seems some are more protected than others. So far there have been few criminal penalties. I'm sure Karadima will only be punished by sending him on 'spiritual retreat'," she predicted.
As well as penalties for priests found guilty of child abuse and reparations for the victims, Articulación Feminista is demanding that the Catholic Church refrain from interference in state matters and desist from its "control over people's bodies, sexuality and reproduction," a reference to the country's complete ban on abortions, among other issues.
Ena von Baer, official spokeswoman for right-wing President Sebastián Piñera, said Wednesday in reference to the Karadima case that the government "will always be on the side of the victims" while it waits for a judicial verdict.
Amid the global scandal over paedophile priests, on Apr. 12 the Vatican posted guidelines from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which says that the facts in these cases should "always" be reported to the civil authorities.
According to the last census in 2002, nearly 90 percent of Chileans over the age of 15 believed in some form of religion. Of these, 70 percent said they were Catholic, 15.1 percent were protestant, and 4.4 percent belonged to other faiths.
This article was found at:
http://www.insidecostarica.com/special_reports/2010/2010-05/chile_child_sex.htm
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New York Times - April 22, 2010
Chilean Abuse Case Tests Loyalty of a Parish
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO and LAURIE GOODSTEIN
SANTIAGO, Chile — The Rev. Fernando Karadima is one of Chile’s most respected and influential priests. Some go so far as to call him a “living saint,” who for half a century trained dozens of priests and helped mold thousands of young Catholics from Santiago’s elite.
Now four men who were once devoted followers have filed a criminal complaint alleging that Father Karadima, now 80, sexually abused them in secret for years.
One man said he had reported the abuse to Father Karadima’s superiors in the archdiocese of Santiago as many as seven years ago, but they took no action. All four men filed formal complaints last year with the archdiocesan tribunal and, receiving no response, spoke publicly for the first time this week.
But the allegations have been largely met not with anger at Father Karadima but with outrage at the accusers by many of his parishioners, a prominent conservative politician and church officials. They say a man so respected over so much time could not possibly have abused his followers, though as the news broke this week, a cardinal here confirmed that the church has been secretly investigating claims of sexual abuse leveled against the priest.
The case, in one of Latin America’s most staunchly Catholic countries, comes at a time when the Roman Catholic Church worldwide is under increasing scrutiny over how it handles accusations of sexual abuse of minors by the clergy. It also underscores the church’s continuing vulnerability as new instances of abuses are alleged around the Catholic world — some, as in Chile, against well-known and trusted figures.
Chile’s Catholic Church officially asked for forgiveness earlier this week for priests involved in some 20 cases of sexual abuse against minors.
In this new case, Chilean bishops are confronted with the prospect of weighing their loyalty to a revered, elderly priest against expectations — coming now from the Vatican as well — that they handle abuse cases with greater transparency. Last week the Vatican’s secretary of state and second in command, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, spent six days in Chile. The accusers said that church officials told them that Cardinal Bertone held discussions about how the church should respond to the accusations against Father Karadima. Church officials deny that the cardinal had any formal talks with the accuser’s lawyers or Chilean bishops during his trip.
Like many pulled into Father Karadima’s orbit, James Hamilton said he worshiped him almost from the moment he was chosen at the age of 17 to be part of his Catholic Action youth movement. The priest became his confessor, his spiritual adviser, his father figure.
“He was God’s representative over me,” said Dr. Hamilton, now 44 years old and a gastric surgeon.
For weeks after joining the movement, he shrugged off kisses on the mouth and pats on his genitals from the priest, he said. Then one day, while on a retreat at a seaside town west of Santiago, Dr. Hamilton said, Father Karadima took his intimate play much further.
“I was paralyzed, frozen,” Dr. Hamilton said. “I was destroyed.”
What ensued, according to Dr. Hamilton, was 20 years of sexual abuse at the hands of Father Karadima.
A criminal complaint filed in court here on Wednesday alleges that the priest molested at least four young men — three while they were minors — over at least two decades.
Parish officials and Father Karadima’s lawyer denied the charges this week.
As news broke Wednesday about the allegations, El Bosque, the parish where Father Karadima is based, rallied around the priest. At a packed mass, Bishop Andrés Arteaga briefly expressed solidarity for Father Karadima in a sermon. Outside the modest-looking church with the red-colored walls, most parishioners expressed unwavering support.
“This is the devil’s work,” said María Eugenia Trenova, 65, who said she attended Mass every night. “I have known Father Fernando for 30 years. He has never done anything wrong.”
Alejandro García-Huidobro, a conservative congressman and a former member of Catholic Action, dismissed the claims out of hand, saying the priest was “absolutely innocent,” to rousing applause outside the church.
A disciple of Juanita Fernández Solar, a Jesuit priest and Chile’s first saint, Father Karadima has trained some 50 active priests and five bishops over his long career, said the Rev. Juan Esteban Morales, who leads El Bosque parish, which serves some of Santiago’s most influential families.
Father Karadima reinvented Catholic Action, founded by Father Alberto Hurtado as a sort of youth movement to help the poor, and installed it in El Bosque.
Dr. Hamilton was one of them. His great-grandfather founded St. George, one of Santiago’s most prestigious English boys schools. His mother attended Villa María Academy, an exclusive Catholic school for girls.
Dr. Hamilton’s father disappeared from his life for a decade. He found solace and direction in El Bosque during the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
“It was the place where all the doubts and anguish about dictatorship dissipated, where they spoke of the power of Pinochet as coming from God,” he said.
Impeccably dressed and with perfectly groomed nails and slicked-back hair, Father Karadima cut an aristocratic figure, appealing to both young and old in Chile’s elite.
In 1983, Dr. Hamilton was invited to join Catholic Action, which he considered to be a great honor. Some 300 young people would gather once a week before Mass to listen to Father Karadima talk of “sainthood,” which he saw as “based on absolute obedience and the humbleness of recognizing our weaknesses and sins.”
The priest offered to be his confessor and spiritual guide. “ I felt like I was being chosen by God,” Dr. Hamilton said.
The priest said that to guide someone, he had to know the person completely. At first most of their confessions were focused on Dr. Hamilton’s sexuality.
Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean who is now a corporate executive in the United States, said that when he was a 17-year-old seminary student who had just lost his father, Father Karadima also used confession as way to abuse him, touching his genitals and kissing him on the mouth. He said that in confession he had told Father Karadima that he was confused about his sexuality. He said the priest took advantage of that knowledge to intimidate him into remaining silent.
“This man had total power over me,” Mr. Cruz said. “I just wanted to commit suicide but I wasn’t brave enough to do it and I didn’t want to do that to my mother.”
Now 46, Mr. Cruz said he eventually recovered with the support of psychologists, his family and friends. But he said that in Santiago, Father Karadima’s sexual transgressions with his young followers were an open secret, and that it was not hard for his victims to find one another other.
Dr. Hamilton characterized the trauma of the abuse as so great that it continued until he was 38, even after he married, to a woman who regularly confessed to Father Karadima. The couple would go to Mass every night and often be invited to dinner with the priest. Father Karadima would sometimes ask Dr. Hamilton to accompany him upstairs to his room to attend to a nagging medical condition. The sexual contact would continue, even as his wife and children were downstairs, Dr. Hamilton said.
In 2004 Dr. Hamilton filed an official claim of sexual abuse to a church official outside the parish. No one ever responded, he said.
Shortly thereafter, he began intensive psychotherapy. Then last August, Dr. Hamilton and Mr. Cruz and one other former seminary student made an appointment with the tribunal in the archdiocese of Santiago, gathered their courage and filed formal complaints about Father Karadima. Three of the four complainants spoke to The New York Times.
They say they are not asking for money, only that the truth finally come out about the powerful priest.
“We just want this man taken out” of the ministry, Mr. Cruz said.
(Alexei Barrionuevo reported from Santiago, and Laurie Goodstein from New York. Pascale Bonnefoy and Tomás Munita contributed reporting from Santiago.)
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 30, 2010
An article last Friday about accusations of sexual abuse against the Rev. Fernando Karadima, a priest in Chile, erroneously attributed a distinction to a Jesuit priest he considered himself a disciple of, the Rev. Alberto Hurtado. It was Juanita Fernández Solar — not Father Hurtado — who was Chile’s first saint.
This article was found at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/world/americas/23chile.html
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A Chilean diocese is in an uproar over a bishop who defended an abuser
ReplyDeleteBy Inés San Martín, Crux Vatican correspondent March 12, 2015
ROME — A decision by Pope Francis to assign a bishop in Chile linked to one of the country’s most notorious clerical sex abusers as the new leader of a local diocese has locals gathering signatures to try to block the appointment.
Bishop Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid, previously Chile’s military chaplain, was appointed in mid-January as the new bishop of the small Osorno diocese and is scheduled to be installed on March 21.
Barros is one of four bishops mentored by the Rev. Fernando Karadima, a longtime point of reference for Catholic clergy in the country. In 2011, the Vatican sentenced Karadima to a life of “penitence and prayer” after finding him guilty of pedophilia and abuse of his ecclesiastical position.
The victims of Karadima have accused Barros and three other bishops — Andrés Arteaga, Tomislav Koljatic, and Horacio Valenzuela — of covering up for Karadima while he sexually abused devoted followers during the 1980s and 1990s.
The four bishops defended their mentor and tried to discredit the victims, even after the Vatican ruled against him. Although there’s no record of any formal process against the bishops under Church law, the Chilean Bishops Conference nevertheless forced the four to publicly apologize for supporting Karadima.
Since the Vatican announced the transfer of Barros to Osorno, laity in the diocese, as well as clergy and even local politicians, have written to the papal envoy in Chile to void the transfer. More than 1,000 signatures were sent to Rome, but to date there’s been no signal the move is under reconsideration.
Some observers have seen the appointment by Francis as a demotion for Barros, since he leaves oversight of a national army with more than 123,000 soldiers to serve in a minor city with just 145,475 inhabitants.
Nevertheless, German Rev. Peter Kliegel, who serves in Osorno, fears that the Church will lose credibility if Barros takes over. He voiced fear that the installation Mass will be “an enormous scandal.”
“It’ll be a sad spectacle for Osorno and a shame for the Church. The laity is on watch, and I believe they have the right to be so,” Kliegel told Crux via e-mail.
“Some of them will be enemies of the Church, taking advantage of the moment. But others will be faithful Catholics who love the Church,” he said.
Kliegel made headlines in Chile last January for sending a letter to the papal envoy, Italian Archbishop Ivo Scapolo, questioning the appointment because of Barros’ closeness to Karadima.
In the letter, made public by the priest after Scalpalo didn’t answer it, Kliegel maintains that the community of Osorno is “confused and irritated” and says that he has no answers for the questions, doubts, and concerns of the laity.
Kliegel then led a group of 30 priests and deacons to sign a public declaration questioning the assignment. In it, they say that the mere fact of having been one of Karadima’s closest collaborators and having remained quiet while the abuses were taking place makes Barros a “non-credible person.”
“I personally spoke to the victim Carlos Cruz,” Kliegel told Crux, “[and] he confirmed the reports that claim that Barros was present during these dishonest acts.”
Since Barros claims to be innocent of any wrongdoing, Kliegel says it’s “one testimony against the other” and that “one doesn’t know who to believe.”
Yet the clerics who signed the letter are convinced that for ethical reasons and for the public good, Barros shouldn’t take leadership of the diocese.
continued below
A bishop has to unify the flock but his appointment causes disunity, despondency, disorientation, and huge rejection from the faithful and citizenship,” Kliegel said. “It hurts, because we see the scandal coming, and the Church in Chile doesn’t need another one. The Karadima case has already cost us a lot of credibility.”
ReplyDeleteSources both in Chile and in Rome, who asked to remain unnamed because they’re not authorized to speak on the issue, told Crux that at least two Chilean members of the hierarchy have asked Pope Francis to rescind the appointment.
Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, archbishop of Santiago de Chile, reportedly discussed the issue with the pontiff while he was in Rome last month. On March 6, Archbishop Fernando Natalio Chomalí Garib of Concepción, who was also the interim apostolic administrator of Osorno, reportedly used an audience with Francis to raise the division the appointment has generated.
Approached by Crux hours after the private audience, Chomalí refused to comment on the grounds that he had to first speak with the priests of Osorno and the rest of the Chilean bishops.
Two days earlier, on March 4, Barros went to Osorno to have a first meeting with his future priests. During the encounter, Kliegel publicly asked him to resign the position “as a sign of love to the Church.”
But, Kliegel said, the bishop confirmed his decision to assume his role in the diocese “shielding himself behind the fact that he’d been appointed by the Holy Father.”
There are at least two recent cases of designated bishops who didn’t assume their offices.
In 2009, Gerhard Maria Wagner was appointed as auxiliary bishop in the German diocese of Linz, but because of a polemic among the local clergy that was brought to the attention of Benedict XVI, he never took the position. In that case, the controversy had nothing to do with sexual abuse.
The Rev. Carlos Alberto Novoa of Argentina requested not to take a position as auxiliary bishop of Lomas de Zamora shortly after being appointed by Francis in 2013.
The Karadima case has been a major blow to the moral authority of the Catholic Church in Chile.
Three of the survivors, James Hamilton, Fernando Batlle, and Juan Carlos Cruz, denounced Karadima for sexually abusing them at his residence at the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Santiago de Chile in the early 1980s, when they were 17 years old.
The first complaints to the Vatican were made in 2010, when Karadima was already 80 years old. The criminal justice courts in Chile closed the case without ruling and without hearing from the victims. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith instead opened an administrative process, and less than a year later found Karadima guilty of pedophilia and sentenced him to a life of “penitence and prayer.”
Soon after the verdict, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errazuriz, then archbishop emeritus of Santiago and currently member of Pope Francis’ council of nine cardinal advisors, publicly apologized for not believing the first accusations made against Karadima in 2004.
He currently lives in a female convent in the outskirts of Santiago, with no contact with the faithful or the priests who he helped form during his 50 years ministering in the Sacred Heart of Jesus church.
After the Vatican’s ruling, a Chilean judge reopened the case but dismissed it because the statute of limitations had expired. She did determine that the abuse allegation were truthful and did so with the help of the Church.
In a move that at the time was considered unprecedented, the Vatican’s secretary of state answered Chile’s Supreme Court request for information on the canonical process conducted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and it was provided.
http://www.cruxnow.com/church/2015/03/12/a-chilean-diocese-is-in-an-uproar-over-a-bishop-who-defended-an-abuser/