CHILE
Crux
August 1, 2018
By Elise Harris
[Editor’s Note: This is the first of a three-part series exploring ties between Cardinal Francisco Errázuriz of Chile, a close papal confidante, and Peruvian layman Luis Fernando Figari, who’s now accused of sexual abuse and abuses of power and conscience within the prominent lay movement he founded.]
Having accepted the resignation of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick from the College of Cardinals, Pope Francis seems to have passed one important test in terms of his willingness to impose accountability for clerical sexual abuse even on the highest-ranking clerics in the Catholic system.
If Francis is looking around for an opportunity to scale that second mountain in his reform campaign, there’s an increasingly strong case to be made that retired Cardinal Francisco Errázuriz may just be his man.
Errázuriz, 84, is one of the most senior prelates in Latin America, and a clear papal favorite. He was a close friend and ally of then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina, including working together on the Latin American bishops’ 2007 Aparecida document, which many observers consider a vision statement for Francis’s papacy. Errázuriz also serves on the pope’s “C9” council of cardinal advisers from around the world, in effect his chief sounding board.
In recent months, Errázuriz has come under heavy fire over charges that he played a central role in multiple cases of abuse cover-up, the most prominent being allegations that he hid the crimes of Chile’s notorious pedophile priest, Fernando Karadima.
He has also been accused – alongside the current archbishop of Santiago, Cardinal Ricardo Ezzati, 76 – of covering for Santiago’s ex-chancellor, Father Oscar Muñoz, who has been charged with having abused at least seven children, five of whom are his nephews.
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