EL PAÍS launched in 2018 an investigation of pedophilia in the Spanish Church and has an updated database with all known cases. If you know of any case that has not seen the light, you can write to: abusos@elpais.es. If it is a case in Latin America, the address is: abusosamerica@elpais.es.
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The echo of the abuse scandal sweeping the Jesuit order in Bolivia has reached Rome and the Pope has sent one of his greatest experts on the subject to La Paz. The Spanish priest Jordi Bertomeu, who has participated in numerous missions in Latin America (he was also in charge of the investigation of the abuses of Father Maciel in the Legionaries of Christ and in the Chilean Church, which ended with the cessation of practically the entire ecclesial dome of that country) will remain several days in the South American country, Just when the number of known cases increases and the political agenda has placed this issue at the center. The local episcopal conference, aware of the gravity of the situation, requested the presence of one of the Pope's trusted men in the matter.
The official idea – explained in a statement by the local ecclesial authorities – is that formation issues will be addressed and that the visit was scheduled. But the profile of Bertomeu (Tortosa, 1968), official of the disciplinary section of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the gravity of the situation inevitably invite us to think of a more far-reaching work that was not foreseen before the scandal.
Bertomeu was one of those responsible for the investigation in Chile that provoked in 2018 the radical change in the approach that the Vatican maintained until then on this issue. Bertomeu had been in Paraguay the previous week, carrying out another fact-finding mission into abuse at the Catholic University of Paraguay alongside the archbishop of Rio de Janeiro, Cardinal Orani João Tempesta. The mission of the delegates of the Holy See was to gather all the information and submit a report on it.
In less than a month, the publication of the secret diary of the Spanish Jesuit Alfonso Pedrajas, where he admitted that he abused dozens of children in Bolivian schools and that his superiors covered it all up, has shaken the pillars of the entire Bolivian Church. Despite the quick reaction of the Jesuits — the provincial removed eight former high-ranking officials for cover-up at the beginning of May — public institutions have also stepped forward. The Prosecutor's Office opened an investigation of the Pedrajas case and President Luis Arce presented two weeks ago a draft law to make imprescriptible the crimes of pedophilia and create a truth commission to investigate these cases and repair the victims.
The Government, in addition, advanced this Saturday that it studies control mechanisms to review the background of clerics who enter the Latin American country. "Priests cannot come to be spiritual guides of our children, rapists to teach what God's way is to our children while abusing them, that is inconceivable," the minister of the presidency told the media two days ago. On the other hand, the attorney general of Bolivia also proposes to review the "status" that the Jesuits have in the country. A hard blow for the Society of Jesus in particular and for the Bolivian Church in general.
And it is that the denunciations – both in the courts and in the offices of the Society and in the press – have grown in recent weeks, not only against Pedrajas, but also against other of his fellow Spanish Jesuits. Some, like Francesc Peris, developed their religious career in Spain, but the order moved them to Latin America amid accusations of pedophilia. Peris went to Bolivia in 1982, where he is accused of abusing several girls between 1983 and 1984 in a school of the order in Cochabamba and returned to Spain a year later. Recently, new victims accuse him of abuse in a center in Barcelona.
The Jesuits have also been forced to acknowledge several allegations of which they were aware a few years ago and which until now they had not made public or communicated to the authorities. The most notorious is the one that points to the Spanish archbishop Alejandro Mestre, who died in 1988 and was prelate of La Paz. The order received in 2021 a victim who accuses him of abusing him in 1961, when Mestre was a teacher at the San Calixto school in La Paz. Mestre was also secretary general of the Bolivian Episcopal Conference, a position of great influence that he held during the dictatorship of Luis García Meza, which lasted from 1980 to 1981. The Jesuits reported this case to the Bolivian Prosecutor's Office on May 9.
The Public Prosecutor's Office, in response to these new allegations, formed a commission of prosecutors to investigate all cases and has already ordered several searches at the Company's properties, including its headquarters in La Paz, to seek information and documentation from the accused.
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