DENVER (CO)
Crux
August 7, 2018
By Inés San Martín
Rome – “We need for the Church to understand that those of us who come forth are not the enemy. We want to help the Church clean itself, so there are no other Mauricios drugged and raped in the seminary, so there are no other Sebastians forced to massage a bishop so he feels pleasure, so there’re no other Marcelos forced to receive oral sex, and so there’re no other Johns raped by their spiritual directors.”
The stories are real. They belong to Mauricio Pulgar, Marcelo Soto, Sebastian del Rio and a fourth person, who will be described as “John Doe.” He’s asked not be identified because he’s not ready to go public with the allegations, but he represents many others.
Crux spoke with the four victims, and several others, in the past week. All are former seminarians of the Chilean diocese of Valparaiso, some 60 miles from Santiago, the country’s capital. They’ve provided the complaints that they handed to ecclesiastical authorities over a period from 2010 until this June, when a papal representative was in the country to look into Chile’s clerical sexual abuse crisis.
Crux also has obtained a copy of a letter by a Chilean bishop acknowledging that as of 2008, the Holy See had an allegation against a brother bishop. In addition, Crux has also obtained video and audio recordings and an email of one of the priests acknowledging guilt and trying to buy one of his victims’ silence.
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