Archbishop Alberto Taveira during a mass.
A silent scandal haunts the masses of the numerous and always crowded churches of Belém, in the north of Brazil, a Catholic capital.
According to the latest census of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, in 2010, 860,000 of the 1.39 million inhabitants of the city declared themselves Catholic and every year in that city the Cirio de Nazaré takes place, a religious procession considered one of the largest manifestations of the Christian faith in the world, which has the participation of millions of people from all over Brazil.
Last August, four former students of the traditional San Pío X Seminary of Ananindeua, a municipality in the metropolitan region of the capital of the State of Pará, filed a complaint with the Prosecutor for sexual harassment and abuse against the Metropolitan Archbishop, Monsignor Alberto Taveira Corrêa .
The events narrated to the prosecutors, who asked the Civil Police to open an investigation that takes place under summary secrecy, allegedly occurred at least six years ago, in 2014 - and also in previous years - while the young people were studying to become priests or were about to leave the seminary.
They were all between 15 and 20 years old.
The complaint was also sent internally to the Catholic Church.
The Vatican sent an apostolic mission.
A kind of investigation commission foreseen in Canon Law, was in Belém this semester and listened to all those involved, but so far no conclusion has been made public.
EL PAÍS interviewed two of the four complainants in the capital, Belém.
One of them, who did not want to identify himself and who we will call A., is now 26 years old.
He says the archbishop started harassing him at 15, even before entering the seminary, and that he sexually abused him when he was 18, in the process of expulsion.
According to his account, the highest authority of the seminary threatened to "tell everything" to his family.
The other, whom we will call B., says the clergyman started harassing him when he was 20 years old, but managed to get away before he was physically abused.
EL PAÍS also had access to the content of the complaint of the other two young people.
One of them, whom we will call C., who was 16 years old when the events allegedly occurred, is allegedly the one who suffered the worst abuse of the four, was traumatized and even tried to kill himself after leaving the seminary.
The stories told by the four complainants describe the archbishop's methodical behavior, who identified young people whom he considered homosexuals (rightly or wrongly), gained their trust as a father figure, lured them to his home under the pretext of helping them get rid of his homosexuality, harassed them and finally committed the abuses.
Monsignor Alberto Taveira Corrêa has chosen not to grant an interview to EL PAÍS about the case.
As the only response, the archdiocese has referred to a video and a note that the archbishop issued earlier this month, before the investigations against him became public knowledge.
During a mass in the basilica at the beginning of December, Monsignor Corrêa surprised the faithful present by taking the floor and talking about the case, although in a veiled way.
"God has given me the courage to advance in the eye of scandal, the scandal that was mounting and God gave us the grace to get ahead," he said on that occasion.
“If someone, by chance, due to the action of the devil, thought that he was going to destroy the Catholic Church and the Church of Belém, he was completely wrong,” he said to applause.
On social media there is a
hashtag
in support of it.
Days before, the archbishop had published a video on the official channels of the Church where he said that he was the subject of "accusations of immorality."
"I tell you that a few days ago I sadly received the information that there were investigation procedures with serious accusations against me, without having previously been questioned, heard or had the opportunity to clarify these alleged facts mentioned in the accusations," he says in the notice.
“I reinforce that I am fully available to the authorities, both ecclesiastical and civil.
(...) I advance that the Holy See is following the entire process ”.
On the same day, December 5, the archbishop sent a signed letter to the priests and deacons.
“I have been accused of moral crimes, without having had the opportunity to be heard.
The complaints were sent to the Holy See, prompting an apostolic visit, which ended this week;
now a process has begun with the civil authorities, "he says in the letter on the archdiocese's letterhead.
"The imminent disclosure in the national media, it seems, will cause me irreparable harm and profoundly shake the Church," he said.
It seems that he feared that the information about the investigation would come out in a report on the Globo chain, but it did not.
“I am clearly aware that the accusations made against me are inadmissible and, for the moment, I am obliged to await the investigation procedures carried out by civil authorities under summary secrecy.
As I could not stop doing, we have appointed lawyers to accompany the process, "he says in the letter.
“I assure you that I am calm, I am in the hands of God, as we all should always be.
I am sure that in Him is the solution to this situation, which I would never have imagined that I would live ”, he says in another passage, just before saying goodbye“ with a heart full of pain and hope ”.
Spiritual guide
The four complainants claim that they agreed to participate in private spiritual orientation sessions at Corrêa's home at different times and for different reasons, but that this was very common among the seminarians.
They say that since he arrived in Belém in 2010, Monsignor Corrêa attended the seminary regularly and was very attentive and open with the students.
"Some Saturday mornings, he would come home and there was a queue of boys waiting for him to attend to them," B. told EL PAÍS.
“It was considered normal.
There, I think he felt he could, he was seeing how far he could go, he put us to the test ... ”, says the young man whom the archbishop allegedly began to harass at the beginning of 2013, after the seminary leadership discovered that he maintained a love affair with a colleague and they expelled him, at 20. “I had oriented myself before, but everything had been very superficial, I did not give rise to anything.
When they expelled me, I went to speak with Monsignor Corrêa and asked him if there was still hope for me.
He told me that there was a way, but that I had to open up to his spiritual healing method, ”says B.
To that end, the former seminarians report that the archbishop used the book
The Battle for Normality: A Guide to Homosexuality (Self) Therapy, by the
Dutch psychologist Gerard Aardweg, which he gave away to students.
As he said, the objective of this spiritual orientation was to help young people to get rid of homosexuality and sexual temptations of all kinds, but in practice it was not like that.
“I went to the first session and it started: I wanted to know if I masturbated, if I was active or passive, if I liked the exchange, if I watched pornography, what I thought when I masturbated ... it seemed strange to me, but I thought it was his method ”Says B., 28 years old.
After some similar sessions, about five, in 2013 the ex-seminarian said that he met a friend at Mass who was still in the seminary and discovered that he was going through the same thing: “He went through a similar situation that culminated in a threat of expulsion. , and the archbishop took the opportunity to do with him the same as he did with me, only that he had already advanced further.
He confessed to me that he was forcing him to undress, to touch his body, to let himself be touched, "he says.
After that conversation, and scared by the direction the "treatment" was taking, he stopped going to the meetings and walked away from the archbishop.
B. was no longer hopeful or sure he wanted to go back to the seminary.
He began to think about studying a career.
Shortly after, the friend he met at Mass also left the Pius X seminary. It was the first stone of the denunciation that they would make years later, in 2020, after two other former seminarians joined them last year.
With A. it was worse.
After he was also threatened with expulsion from the seminary for having a love affair with a colleague and after having undergone several harassment sessions with the archbishop, such as those described above, Corrêa allegedly blackmailed him when he wanted to resist.
“He said he would tell my family that he was in a relationship with a colleague,” he says.
Corrêa would have promised him that if he agreed to continue with the sessions, he would prevent the expulsion.
That, according to young A., occurred after giving in to the onslaught of religious authority.
He met alone with the archbishop in his office and in his room, and relates that one of the methods the archbishop used during spiritual orientation sessions was to force him to be naked together, looking at the other's body as a form of "Resist temptations."
“Another common thing was to pray next to the body.
He would approach you, touch you and pray somewhere on your naked body ... once it was on your face and I thought he was going to kiss me ", says A." I had to masturbate him, he would grab my penis and try to make me have a erection ... He would get nervous when you couldn't, he would scold you, but always with this story of the treatment, that we are trying to save you ... In each session he would get more aggressive and violent, said horrible things, remembered past events to humiliating you, he said you weren't progressing, he said horrible things to you, that you were a horrible person, it was terrifying ”.
According to A., after more than a dozen meetings with the archbishop over the course of three months, he sent him seven months to an assistant parish, "giving me a break."
After that, he was able to return to the seminary, from where he would be expelled for good a year and a half later.
"I was angry, I got into a lot of fights and trouble, it was no longer for me," he says.
The fourth former seminarian to participate in the complaint was 16 years old when he claims that Corrêa abused him.
According to his account, the archbishop sent his chauffeur to fetch him from the seminary, often at night, to participate in spiritual orientation sessions.
It would have been several sessions during a few months, in 2014. He tells, for example, that the archbishop lay down naked with his legs raised and asked the teenager to penetrate him.
Since he could not maintain an erection, Corrêa became nervous, yelled and abused him a lot.
"We trust the Pope"
When asked why they had decided to report sexual harassment and abuse in the institution only now, after so many years, the two interviewees say that, some years ago, they had formed an informal group of victims with the help of other religious and that, since In mid-2017, they sporadically debated taking action, but were afraid.
"It was precisely on May 9 of last year when Pope Francis published this," says the 26-year-old, showing the Apostolic Letter "Vos Estis Lux Mundi" (You are the light of the world, in free translation from Latin) in her hands.
“This here changed everything.
We saw it as soon as it came out and we said: here is a way, now there is.
The document to which the former seminarian refers is a guideline launched last year that establishes a kind of law within Canon Law with clear mechanisms and norms so that complaints or suspicions of sexual abuse committed by members of the Catholic Church are investigated internally, they are reported to the civil authorities and punished.
The regulation has 19 articles and deals with sexual crimes committed by members of the clergy, who do not have the option of not submitting to it.
The complaint was first presented to the ecclesiastical authorities in the second half of last year and, only this year, to the civil authorities.
"We thought they were not going to do anything, we went to the civil authorities and that was when this apostolic visitation took place," says the current university student.
"We trust Pope Francis and the effort he makes to change the things that are wrong in the Church."
THE COUNTRY contacted the Pará State Prosecutor's Office, which reported, through a press release, that it had received "complaints of possible situations of abuse in relation to the aforementioned case."
“The accusations were sent to the prosecutors with powers in the matter, who requested that a police investigation be opened, which the Prosecutor's Office is closely monitoring.
The institution hopes that these procedures will be concluded in order to adopt the appropriate legal measures in the criminal and civil sphere.
Police procedures are carried out in secret ”.
Monsignor Alberto Taveira Corrêa is 70 years old.
He arrived in Belém in 2010 as archbishop, the highest authority of the Catholic Church in the city.
Before that, he had been the first metropolitan archbishop of Palmas, in the State of Tocantins, a position he held for 14 years from 1996. He was also auxiliary bishop of Brasilia and rector of the seminary of Belo Horizonte, where he began his priesthood in 1973. “Buenos Aiuri days, peace, ”says the response to the request to interview Monsignor Corrêa that was sent to the press office of the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Belém.
“At this time we cannot arrange an interview with the archbishop.
As the investigation is under summary secrecy, due to judicial guidance we cannot meet your request.
At the moment, all the information we can give is what is on our page ”.
Despite everything they say they have happened within the Catholic Church, neither of the two former seminarians has lost faith.
“I go to mass.
I choose a church where no one knows me, I bring my Bible and I attend mass.
I think about life, I pray, I bless myself and I go away in silence ”, says B.