LA PAZ (BOLIVIA)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
August 12, 2024
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
- The Bolivian government’s decision to file formal charges against the Jesuits makes more relevant to question about the roots of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
- The ongoing probe in Bolivia shows how the Church sticks to a system prone to sexual abuse and the government unwillingness to go deeper into the crisis.
- The appointments in the Bolivian Jesuits and the Episcopate reveal the extent of clergy sexual abuse as a common practice shaping the current crisis.
Last Thursday, the Bolivian government announced it was formally charging three former leaders of the so-called Jesuits with trying to cover up the sexual abuse of a now deceased bishop and member of the largest religious order in the Roman Catholic Church, with a global “army” of over 24 thousand members, when considering both priests and the non-ordained religious males.
The most recent filing (opens the Nation’ Attorney’s statement in Spanish) touches the current leader of the Bolivian Jesuits, Bernardo León Mercado Vargas, a relatively young priest, born in 1981, with graduate studies in social sciences, and his predecessors, Osvaldo Chirveches Pinaya a Bolivian Jesuit born in 1971, and Ignacio Suñol Esquirol, born in Barcelona, Spain in 1943.
Chirveches Pinaya was the leader of the Bolivian Jesuits from 2010 through 2016. That year, their order appointed Suñol Esquirol (opens the Jesuits’ statement in Spanish) as his successor, and he remained as boss until 2022. It was then that Mercado Vargas succeeded him.
Although there are other cases currently under probe in Bolivia, most notably against Alfonso Roma Pedrajas, another Jesuit sent to Bolivia by the province of that order in Spain, the most recent charges pertain to a probe regarding the role of former coadjutor archbishop of La Paz, Alejandro Mestre Descals, when he was a priest teaching in one of the Jesuit schools in La Paz.
Mestre died back in 1988, so the probe would be useful to figure out what happened at an institutional level, but even if there was some proof of Mestre Descals’s being responsible of some wrongdoing there is no way to punish him, although if the Jesuits play this wisely, they would be able to compensate Mestre Descals’s and other predators’ victims that will continue to emerge in the coming weeks.
Despite that potential outcome, which would be an anomaly for the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America, it is not clear if the probe will go beyond his own role as sexual predator. Will the probe go over his role in bringing predator priests as Luis María Roma Pedrosa, known as Lucho Roma, and the aforementioned Pedrajas, known as Padre Pica, to Bolivia in his capacity as Jesuit?
Will it include his own decision making as bishop in either Sucre, where he was an auxiliary from 1976 through 1982 or in La Paz, where he was coadjutor archbishop, from 1982 through 1987?
In 2023, the Jesuit order in Bolivia issued a statement on the internal probe regarding Mestre Descals’s role as a sexual predator going back to 1961, available here in Spanish.
In that regard, the Bolivian attorney is not actually uncovering a new case. The Bolivian and global public opinion were aware of the case against Mestre Descals in May 2023, as this story on a Bolivian medium proves (available only in Spanish).
Jesuits’ mistake
The Jesuits’ mistake was that, despite their formal filing in December 2021, they waited until they closed their internal probe to publicize the accusation, although they claim they had been actively seeking for other potential victims.
The Bolivian Jesuits’ statement also claims they informed the Bolivian Conference of Catholic Bishops, the archdiocese of La Paz, the apostolic nunciature to Bolivia, the global leaders of their order, the so-called General Curia, headed by Venezuelan priest Arturo Sosa Abascal and, the dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, currently led by Argentina cardinal Víctor Manuel Tucho Fernández.
Although there is no reference as to whether or not they filed a formal report with the Nation’s Attorney.
It is impossible to miss the fact that Bolivia, as the rest of Latin America, has been erratically dealing with sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church, in other religious institutions, in schools, hospitals, prisons, and even in the families of the presidents of the countries in the region.
Zoilamérica Ortega Murillo the daughter of Rosario Murillo, Vice President of Nicaragua and wife of Daniel Ortega, the Nicaraguan strongman, accused Ortega of sexually abusing her when she was an underaged girl back in 1998 (story available only in Spanish).
Similar accusations have been raised against former Bolivian President, Evo Morales (story available only in Spanish). In both cases, nothing has happened beyond the usual flurry of headlines and the stampedes of memes and videos in social media.
More recently, for the last week or so, Argentina has been in the whirlwind of the accusations of abuse raised against former President Alberto Fernández.
Despite the abundance of cases of sexual abuse, there is no indication of a major change in how the countries in the region deal with sexual abuse accusations, clergy or otherwise.
Nothing like the lookback windows in the states of California and New York in the United States, to allow the victims of sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise to get some measure of justice.
[English Edition: A new wave of bankruptcies shakes the Catholic Church in California]
In that regard, the Bolivian hierarchy has been following the Roman Catholic “standard operating procedure” in these cases: circling the wagons, blaming others for their own mistakes, and calling out the many other cases of sexual abuse happening in their country, to divert attention form their own responsibility.
When compared to other national conferences of Catholic bishops, the Bolivian prelates have been more willing to set commissions to prevent clergy sexual abuse, as proved in the story linked immediately after this paragraph, that offers a report on how the region’s conferences of Catholic bishops have dealing with the issue.
[English Edition: Commissions to prevent clergy sexual abuse in Latin America, a report]
The fact remains, however. Despite the frequent claim from the bishops and other Catholic leaders that clergy sexual abuse is an issue coming out of the individual behavior of the proverbial “bad apples” in their basket, the reality is that the problem is institutional in nature and far more complex that they are willing to accept.
Even if the Bolivian nation’s attorney, Juan Lanchipa Ponce, move raises questions as to its timing and potential secondary effects, Mestre Descals’s case is paradigmatic when trying to understand the crisis of clergy sexual abuse in Bolivia and elsewhere in Latin America.
It is not only that, as we know now, Pope Paul VI appointed him as bishop despite having abused an underage male in 1961, when he was a professor in La Paz. His appointment as coadjutor archbishop in La Paz raises all kinds of questions and doubts to whoever pays some attention to its details.
The Royal Academy of History of Spain, an institution that could hardly be seen as interested in advancing any agenda regarding the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church highlights how hard is to understand why Mestre Descals was appointed to such position, as a short entry published by said Academy, available only in Spanish here proves.
Incomprehensible promotion
A summary of the entry highlights how John Paul II appointed him coadjutor archbishop of La Paz on June 28th, 1982, in a rather “incomprehensible promotion”, since the archbishop he was going to help as coadjutor and who he was scheduled to succeed when he died or offered his resignation, Jorge Manrique Hurtado, was almost the same age as Mestre.
Manrique Hurtado was born in 1911 while Mestre Descals was born in 1912. Whatever advantage was expected from such appointment is hard to understand, as the Spaniard Royal Academy stresses. Just for the sake of comparison, when the then apostolic delegate to Mexico Girolamo Prigione maneuvered to appoint José Fernández Arteaga as coadjutor archbishop of Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1988, Fernández Arteaga was 55 years old, while archbishop Adalberto Almeida Merino was 72 years old.
It is in that regard that any probe dealing with such a complex figure of authority in the Bolivian Roman Catholic Church back in the eighties would have to dig deeper as to include other Bolivian prelates. More so when dealing with the issue of clergy sexual abuse.
One would be archbishop René Fernández Apaza, archbishop of Sucre from 1981 through 1988, although he was also the military bishop in Bolivia from 1975 through 1986. With him it would be necessary to go over other auxiliary and coadjutor bishops at the time at both Sucre and the Bolivian military diocese.
Another bishop whose tenure would require attention is the already mentioned Jorge Manrique Hurtado, who was archbishop of La Paz from 1967 through 1987. Even if Mestre Descals was adjutor there, Manrique Hurtado remained the head of the archdiocese and, as stressed by the Royal Academy of History of Spain, there was a one-year difference between them.
In that regard, it would be necessary to probe his tenure there too. More so if John Paul II was appointing Mestre Descals as coadjutor to address some trouble under Manrique Hurtado’s tenure.
Any realistic probe of clergy sexual abuse in Bolivia or any other Latin American needs to go deeper than the odd bishop here or there.
[FISCAL GENERAL INFORMA QUE SE EMITIÓ LA IMPUTACIÓN FORMAL EN CONTRA DE TRES SACERDOTES POR EL DELITO DE ENCUBRIMIENTO DENTRO DEL CASO PEDERASTIA EN LA PAZ (See link to prosecutor’s X post here, and see the full notice here.)]
As far as Bolivia is concerned, one must keep in mind that back in 1987 Franciscan bishop Luis Sáinz Hinojosa, then auxiliary bishop of Cochabamba was appointed as archbishop in the national capital, but he resigned less than ten years after, when he was only 60 years, with 15 years left before being forced to tender his resignation.
Luis Sáinz Hinojosa’s tenure there has all the signs of trouble because of his early resignation and the fact that he went Cochabamba as auxiliary. To my knowledge, there has never been a clear, credible, official explanation as to why Sáinz Hinojosa resigned in 1996, and why it was up until 2001, five years after his resignation, that he went back to his original position as auxiliary in Cochabamba.
Key location
Cochabamba is a key location in the current crisis of clergy sexual abuse in Bolivia because both Luis María Roma Pedrosa and Alfonso Pedrajas spent periods there in their capacity as priests and members of the Jesuit order.
Roma Pedrosa was headmaster at a Jesuit school in Cochabamba and died in 2019 in that department (equivalent to state or province) of Bolivia. Pedrajas also died, ten years before, in Cochabamba, and the first report on abuse was originally filed in the eponymous capital city of that province.
It seems impractical to limit the probe to Mestre Descals and the leaders of the Jesuit order in Bolivia without going over the tenures of both Sáinz Hinojosa and Fernández Apaza, or even more precisely to go over the archdioceses of La Paz and Cochabamba.
Same must be said about the need to go over what was known at the time in the same Jesuit order in Spain. So far, all the known predators have been clergymen going from Spain to Bolivia.
It would be hard to believe that Bolivian clergymen are exempt from that behavior, but the fact that there is at least four cases of Spaniard clergymen accused so far, should be enough to raise questions as to how or why those predator clergymen ended up in Bolivia. Was it self-selection? Were their superiors in Spain aware of their behavior and they sent them to Bolivia as part of the Church’s “geographic solution”?
[English Edition: The Oblates and the “geographic solution” to clergy sexual abuse]
It is impossible to go at this point to the details of how troubled the archdiocese of La Paz was on the second half of the 20th century. Suffice to say that the idea of probing Mestre Descals’s tenure as either a priest or archbishop without taking into consideration the role of other bishops in Bolivia seems to be insufficient to address the issue of clergy sexual abuse there.
While more information comes from Bolivia, this case proves how over the last four decades shaping the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church, a proforma explanation to the many cases of victims, both male and females, adults and underaged, is that what academics and journalists digging the root causes of the crisis see are “isolated cases”.
Even if one only takes into consideration Roma Pedrosa, as if he was the “isolated case” the Roman Catholic leaders claim he is, he would be responsible for sexually attacking at least 70 girls in Bolivia. How would that be an “isolated case”?
The very idea that what happens in the Roman Catholic Church is the byproduct of a series of “isolated cases” holds no water, it is untenable. More so, when one takes into consideration the many other cases reported over the last 40 years of this crisis.
[English Edition: The Ides of March and the 41st year of the sexual abuse crisis]
It is not as if the entire Roman Catholic Church is in denial on this issue. Back in July a document issued by the teams organizing the Synod of that Church, to be held in October 2024 at Rome, acknowledged, for the first time in the last 40 years, that there is an undermining effect on the Church’s credibility.
Los Ángeles Press dedicated a story in this series to that acknowledgement, linked after this paragraph, and before that, a story available only in Spanish (available here), about the perceived effects of the sexual abuse crisis on religious affiliation polls in Chile, linked after this paragraph.
[English Edition: Vatican admits sexual abuse undermines the Church’s credibility]
Chile proves how severe has been the undermining of the Church’s credibility. A Latin American country where Pope Francis was dismissed by Chileans who went unmoved by his pastoral trip there back in January 2018, he had to drop the appointment of Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid, a bishop associated with one of the many predator priests that have ravaged the Catholic Church there, the infamous Fernando Karadima.