SPAIN
El Pais
JUAN G. BEDOYA Madrid 4 NOV 2015
“Publish it.” The two words were an entreat (or perhaps an order) made by Pope Francis to the theologian José Manuel Vidal, when the latter handed him a folder containing information about alleged sexual abuses at an organization of religious and lay people created in Barcelona.
The Missionary Community of Saint Paul the Apostle and of Mary, Mother of the Church (MCSPA in its English acronym) has since extended to other countries in Africa and Latin America, where the association carries out significant development work besides its religious outreach.
The founders of MCSPA had already been reprimanded by the Archbishop of Barcelona in 1995.
But now, new testimony in the hands of the pope seems to confirm the existence of widespread sexual abuse within the group.
“I have been a labor slave and a sexual slave for a group of depraved people, who were protected by Church officials,” writes one of the alleged victims, now 36, in his letter to the pope.
“In the three years I spent at the mission in Nariokotome, in Kenya, I was treated like a beast of burden. There were around 30 people, and on top of the slave work there was the sexual slavery. They would tell us that an active sexual life is something that God wants, and that He also wants us to go around naked, because that is the way He made us. Help me, Francis. Soothe my broken soul a little. Don’t let other youths endure this hell.”
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