SPAIN
Christian Today
[en espanol – El Pais]
Ruth Gledhill CHRISTIAN TODAY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
04 November 2015
“I have been a labor slave and a sexual slave for a group of depraved people, who were protected by Church officials,” an alleged victim of child sex abuse, now aged 36, has written in a 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.”
The distressing testimony of Paulino, a former member of a Barcelona Catholic religious group, The Missionary Community of Saint Paul the Apostle and of Mary (MCSPA), has been published this week by the Spanish newspaper El País.
El País says Paulino’s seven-page letter is significant because it appears to have reached Pope Francis. The Vatican is understood now to be looking into this and other complaints about the group.
Dominick Kimengich, the bishop who issued the licence that allowed MCSPA to operate in Kenya, wrote to El País: “I am aware of several accusations that were put to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and to the Pontifical Council for the Laity, but they seem to involve events that were investigated in 2006.”
The group was founded in Spain by Francisco Andreo, who died of cancer two years ago, and others.
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