CHILE
National Catholic Reporter
Melinda Henneberger | Nov. 6, 2014
SANTIAGO, CHILE Officials in Santiago, Chile, are investigating a series of cases in which newborn babies were purportedly stolen from the poor and given to the rich over many years’ time, mostly in the 1970s through the ’90s. At least half a dozen Catholic sisters and one of the country’s most popular priests have been implicated in these long-hidden crimes. The following article is the second in a three-part series that looks at how this appropriation of children happened, and how it stayed secret for so long. Read part one.
Today, 77-year-old Fr. Gerardo Joannon lives in semi-seclusion, suspended from his parish work and expected to refrain from speaking publicly while the state investigates possible charges against him under human rights law that has no statute of limitations.
His order, the Congregation of the Sacred Heart, has already concluded, according to a statement issued by its provincial, that in 1975 and 1983, he helped arrange illegal adoptions for teenage girls from prominent families. He led the girls, his provincial said, to believe that their newborn children had died.
The probe also found that Joannon had said a funeral Mass for one of those children, and a Mass in her memory every year for 25 years. The order also said he had had an “inappropriate relationship” with that child’s mother.
Finally, it concluded that his stated motivation — to “prevent abortions” — doesn’t hold up. Initially, his superiors wanted to ship him off to Spain for two years of prayer and reflection, but civil authorities thought that sounded a little too much like a vacation, or an escape route, and barred him from leaving the country for now.
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Though Joannon has denied all wrongdoing, his provincial, Alex Vigueras Cherres, apologized not only to the families involved, but to the faithful, “because we didn’t act when we had the first evidence, because we doubted the truth of the evidence and because our mistake profoundly deepened and prolonged their pain.”
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