ARGENTINA
Digital Journal
By Eric Morales
Buenos Aires – Pope Francis is accused of looking the other way when sex abuse occurred while he was still the Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Pope Francis is just one year into his papacy and is considered by many as a champion of the poor, and the marginalized and on a day when the Bishop of Rome meets with victims of sexual abuse at the hands of priests, a report by Bishop Accountability could not have come at a worse time.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio now known to the world as Pope Francis served as archbishop of Buenos Aires from 1998 until his election as pope last year, and before that as a bishop in Buenos Aires and Auca from 1992 until 1997. During that time, according to Cardinal Bergoglio’s conversations with Argentine Rabbi and friend Abraham Skorka, his diocese didn’t have to confront child sex abuse.
“In my diocese it never happened to me, but a bishop called me once by phone to ask me what to do in a situation like this and I told him to take away the priest’s faculties, not to permit him to exercise his priestly ministry again, and to initiate a canonical trial.”
However, others would strongly disagree, according to BishopAccountability.org over 100 priests in the archdiocese of Buenos Aires offended against children, the watchdog organization goes on to allege in its report that at least a dozen of these such cases were known to Bergoglio.
Five cases of note are pointed out by Bishop Accountability that most certainly were known to Archbishop Bergoglio. In 2009, Fr. Julio César Grassi a priest in the suffragan diocese of Morón was convicted of molesting three young boys at a home for street children run by the Fundacion Felices los Niños (the Happy Children Foundation) which Grassi founded in 1993. As a suffragan diocese Bergoglio had limited authority in Morón, he could only step in at the sign of neglect by church authorities according to Canon Law.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.