"It destroyed me, but I didn't tell anyone": Costa Rica's rebellion against pederasty in the Catholic Church

Ariel Flores thought about it a lot before being here.

He sits in the modest living room of his parents' house and looks straight at an old photograph where he appears with Father Óscar Meléndez.

He has waited a long time to tell the truth about him.

And since he has waited so long he takes one last breath.

He adjusts his cap over his graying hair, takes a deep breath, and when he opens his mouth, the words come out on their own.

“I was about 17 or 18 years old when the father abused me,” he says.

“Now I am 45 years old and those moments still come to mind, I still remember and I feel upset with myself, I still feel hate because nobody did anything to stop it.

That burden turned into an ordeal: "It destroyed me, but I didn't tell anyone."

Flores grew up in a humble and devoted family from Alajuela, in central Costa Rica.

Putting on the best clothes and going to mass every Sunday was out of the question, as it was for the majority of the population.

Four out of ten Costa Ricans identify themselves as Catholic, a number that has fallen in recent years, in part, due to scandals of pederasty and sexual abuse within the Church.

In the late nineties, the story was different.

At that time, the Flores family was going through financial problems and his father, the only source of income in the house, had a drinking problem.

When his mother found out that the church she went to was looking for a sacristan, she encouraged him to apply for the job.

It was as much a matter of faith as of necessity.

“My brothers and I were taught that priests were like living saints: they had to be respected and they were never wrong,” she relates.

When they gave him the job, his mother was overwhelmed with pride.

It wasn't just any church.

Flores worked in the Parroquia del Santo Cristo de La Agonia, one of the most emblematic temples in the country.

Father Meléndez was a tough and charismatic Nicaraguan.

From a very young age he joined the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer and in 1996 he became the first Central American parish priest to lead La Agony.

He only spent a couple of years as head of the parish, according to the records of the Redemptorist Brothers, as the order is also known.

The relationship between the two was distant at first.

Little by little, Flores began to identify the first signs that puzzled him.

Ariel Flores shows a photograph with the priest Óscar Meléndez during the interview at his parents' house in Alajuela (Costa Rica).Carlos Herrera

“Ariel, can I ask you a question?” a very poor Nicaraguan boy once said to him, who subsisted thanks to the support of the parish.

“What do you think about a priest asking for sex for money?

It's that Father Óscar gives me money for letting me penetrate ”, he recounts.

Hearing this, Flores turned livid.

He advised her to report him, but after a short time he did not see him again.

The sacristan's suspicions grew when he noticed that the priest was inviting several boys to his room, right there, next to La Agony, although until that moment he had not witnessed anything else.

One day, Father Meléndez asked him to help him pack his bags before leaving on a trip.

He packed all the things and suddenly it was late.

Brother Óscar offered him to stay in a corner of the church and Flores lay down on the ground, exhausted.

At dawn he felt a hand touching him.

First, outside the pants and then, inside.

He half-opened his eyes and saw that it was the priest's hand.

"I woke up immediately and felt my heart racing," he says.

He left terrified and waited for dawn outside the parish.

He couldn't sleep from rage.

“Everything fell apart for me,” he says.

The next morning he recounted what happened to a member of the upper echelon of the congregation.

"Boy, this is very delicate," one of the Redemptorist commanders told him.

"You stay quiet and let me figure it out."

Flores did everything possible not to coincide with Meléndez, even with the help of other members of the order, but after a month nothing changed.

He found a new job, left behind his vocation to enter the seminary and knew that he was not going to set foot in The Agony again.

"I felt that no one was going to believe me," he lamented.

“And it damaged me so much psychologically that I no longer thought I was fit for the priesthood,” he admits.

A few years ago, one of the new Redemptorist pastors sought him out to meet in person.

"He asked me if something had happened with Father Óscar and he apologized on behalf of the church," he recalls.

Óscar Meléndez had a career of more than 30 years within the order and spent the final stretch of his life seriously ill.

He died in June 2015 from urinary sepsis, after fighting prostate cancer and quadriplegia that paralyzed him for years, according to the medical report that was released.

His remains were veiled in La Agonia, according to his obituary.

This newspaper sought the congregation to make a statement about the accusations against Meléndez, but received no response.

Flores thought for years that this apology was going to be the last chapter of a story that no one was going to know.

Criminally, his case has prescribed and the canonical complaint ceased to be an option after the death of the priest.

By chance, he found an EL PAÍS report on pederasty in Spain and was encouraged to send an email to abusesamerica@elpais.es, the mailbox that this newspaper enabled for victims in Latin America to share their stories, like someone who puts a message on a bottle.

"The world is full of child molesters and I realized I couldn't shut up."

His story is the only one that has been published to date against Father Meléndez.

But it was not an isolated case.

The Spaniard Bartolomé Buigues, bishop of Alajuela, confirms to an express question from this newspaper that the priest was expelled from the Redemptorist order after a disciplinary process endorsed by the Vatican.

The penalty for a proven case of abuse or pederasty, explains Buigues, is removal from the priesthood.

"We feel shame and pain for the damage that has been done to the victims, there is no way to fully repair this," admits the religious.

"But we are here to walk together and try to heal this reality," he adds.

The Redemptorists never publicly announced Meléndez's removal.

When he died, faithful and congregated they filled him with praise on social networks.

"May God have him in his glory."

"The angels lead him to paradise."

"Previously, the instinct was first to protect the good reputation of the institution," says Buigues, "but we did wrong, the good reputation of the institution is guaranteed when we learn about these cases, report them, repair them and seek maximum prevention."

The bishop defends that progress has been made and that there are stricter guidelines to avoid cover-up.

Since he was appointed by Pope Francis in March 2018, there have been accusations against seven priests and two lay people in his diocese for sexual abuse of children and adolescents.

Two of them have already been expelled from the priesthood.

The bulk of the complaints remain under investigation.

The Revolt of the Altar Boys

Several Catholic priests have passed through the courts of Costa Rica.

The great earthquake, however, was in February 2019. Mauricio Víquez, a highly mediatic priest who often spoke on behalf of the Church on issues of family and sexuality, was accused of multiple episodes of pederasty and sexual abuse.

He escaped and hid in Mexico, but was arrested six months later.

Víquez was banned for life from the Church when the scandal became public and eventually, in March of this year, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

An official guards the entrance to the headquarters of the Catholic Church in San José (Costa Rica), on March 7, 2019. JUAN CARLOS ULATE (REUTERS)

The

has also affected the Archbishop of San José, José Rafael Quirós, who is facing civil proceedings for cover-up, accused of knowing about the cases since 2003 and not having acted.

"That matter happened to me" and "I had no experience" have been some of Quirós's justifications.

In March 2019, a month after the first complaints appeared, there was an unprecedented search at the headquarters of the Costa Rican Catholic Church to search for evidence of cases of pederasty and sexual abuse.

At the same time that agents removed the boxes with evidence of canonical denunciations that were archived and the press brought out a different scandal every day for religious abuses, the worst crisis in the history of the Catholic Church in Costa Rica was unleashed.

"It was tremendous," acknowledges Bishop Buigues.

The men who brought Víquez down were his former altar boys, children who thought no one would believe them after suffering abuse, who came from vulnerable backgrounds and who were silenced by the power of their aggressors.

Anthony Venegas and Michael Rodríguez's fight to put the priest who abused them behind bars lasted nearly 20 years.

They filed ecclesiastical complaints and waited for years for a resolution, but nothing happened.

“They always minimized the impact of what they did to us, they intimidated us, they delayed the processes so that the cases prescribed,” Venegas accuses.

"This is how the cover-up machine of the Catholic Church works."

“It wasn't until we decided to make the case public that something was done,” explains Rodríguez.

They searched the media and criminal justice for what they did not find in the ecclesiastical courts: they were multiple complaints against one of the best-known priests in the country and the archbishop of the capital.

They themselves traveled to Mexico to follow the trail of his aggressor and encouraged other survivors to raise their voices.

Due to these ingredients, the pressure to solve it for the authorities was enormous.

"We paid a very high cost, people made fun of us and called us everything," he says.

"That implies denouncing in a country like Costa Rica," he says.

The complaints triggered a kind of

against politicians, religious pastors, artists and university professors, as well as other Catholic priests.

Carlos, another former altar boy, had denounced before the Church a diocesan priest whom he accuses of abusing him from the age of 10 to 15.

"I never had a father figure and he presented himself like that, he began to become my father," says the boy, who agreed to speak on the condition that his name or that of his aggressor not be mentioned so as not to hinder the legal process that It has opened.

Under the pretext of "taking care of his son," the young man narrates, the priest "checked" his penis, testicles, and buttocks.

Then there were touches of all kinds, without an excuse.

"He stole my innocence," he laments.

The situation was so evident to some parish workers that they offered to help him confront the priest, just a year after the abuse began.

Before meeting, the priest called him and asked, "Would you like to see your dad in jail?"

Carlos had not entered puberty and, confused, said that nothing had happened.

Soon after, the priest asked for another favor.

She told him to confess to him and admit that she had stolen some alms, even if it was a lie.

The boy did not understand, but he agreed.

The news spread throughout the town and Carlos went to live with an uncle, ashamed of being seen as a thief.

Suspicions about the priest, says the boy, also vanished.

When Carlos turned 19, his father sent him a text message in which he remembered something he used to tell him: "Now that you're of legal age, you're going to be able to throw a party with all naked men."

After reliving everything, the boy decided to file a canonical complaint in 2015. He was never followed up on and four years later he had to file another one, from scratch.

"I felt cheated and when I saw the cases of Anthony and Michael I filed a criminal complaint," he says.

As with Víquez, the criminal prosecution accelerated the canonical process.

In legal documents to which EL PAÍS has had access, Carlos also claims that there have been constant efforts by the Church to downplay his case and protect the aggressor from him.

The first reaction to his complaint was to transfer the priest to another parish, a common practice in handling other cases.

He was not sent very far: only 11 kilometers from the previous one.

When the case broke in the media, the parish said that the father was leaving the post for “personal” reasons, although when public pressure increased, the Archdiocese of San José acknowledged that it was due to legal problems.

In the middle of the whole process, the priest unearthed the old confession that led Carlos to leave his town.

The priest recorded the conversation with the complainant, but it was not admitted as evidence because it was about a child who was recorded without consent.

In the canonical process, Carlos did not give credit to the answer he received last year: the ecclesiastical court found in the priest "a profile with a tendency to abuse minors", but decided that he could return to a parish with the only condition that not practice confessions to children.

After more than six years of litigation inside and outside the Church, all that remains is for a date to be assigned for the start of the criminal trial.

Agents seize documents after the raid on the headquarters of the Archbishopric and the Metropolitan Curia of San José, on March 7, 2019. JUAN CARLOS ULATE (REUTERS)

Has anything changed?

That is the question that circles over the heads of the whistleblowers who paved the way.

"A new shake is needed, we need Rome to really turn to see what is still happening in Costa Rica," says Venegas.

Reconciling the idea that there has been progress in a context where abuses have not been completely eradicated is difficult.

Heal all damage, too.

After the rebellion of the altar boys, the Justice extended in 2019 the prescription times of sexual crimes in 15 years so that more people denounce.

Venegas and Rodríguez have become a safety net that supports people who have suffered sexual abuse.

“We are survivors because we have gone through things that a person normally does not go through in his life, but at least we are not alone anymore,” says Venegas.

"It has cost me a lot to trust people again, including myself," says Carlos.

"Despite this dark episode in my life, I feel very proud because the adult I have become has been able to stand up for the child I was and who could not defend himself," he says, after opening a successful business and beginning his first couple relationship.

"The only thing I want is for justice to be done," says Flores, who broke the silence so that his three children are not exposed to what he experienced.

After giving this interview, the former sacristan finally told his mother everything.

They cried and hugged each other.

She was only sorry that she had to spend so much time.

If you know of any case of sexual abuse in the Church in Latin America that has not seen the light of day, write to us with your complaint at

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