VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
May 6, 2025
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Some Catholics deride survivors’ calls for change as wealthy donors offer billions in exchange for influence over the Conclave.
With the papal Conclave about to being, deep divisions emerge in the Catholic Church as disillusioned survivors watch from afar.
Hours before the Conclave in Rome, deep cleavages emerge among the faithful. Who should they be worried about? Survivors talking truth to power or wealthy donors willing to buy Peter’s throne?
It is almost impossible to figure out what are the key issues affecting a Conclave’s outcome. The nature of the process, the way the electors are chosen, and a long-standing tradition of uncertainty summarized in the old Italian saying “Chi in conclave entra papa, esce cardinale”, roughly translatable as “who enters a Pope at the Conclave, comes out a Cardinal.”
Over the last week or so, there has been a seemingly endless stream of information in almost any language about the potential candidates. In many cases, the wealth of information leads to a certain sense of overwhelm but also forces to exchange takes with other people following what happens in Rome, and the potential outcome of the election.
Over Sunday, while the Vatican News social media accounts were informing about Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s last will to turn one of the so-called Pope-Mobiles he used during his Papacy into some mobile pediatric clinic for the service of civilian inhabitants of Gaza, the social media accounts of the Argentine equivalent of SNAP issued their own statement about the upcoming Conclave.
The rather brief piece, displayed in Spanish as it appeared over Facebook, has as title “Argentine cardinals, electors of the new pope and candidates for papacy at the same time”.
Five sentences written by Claudia Silva, an advocate for the Argentine network, summarize the depth of the pain caused by the sexual abuse crisis in Bergoglio’s home country:
My limit is silence and complicity in the face of sexual abuse and any other form of violence. Even more so when that silence (not to mention cover-up) comes from the highest authority of an institution such as the Vatican State, and all the people and institutions shaping and endorsing it.
There is NO possible argument.
Either you work with the victims, or you mourn the death of the Pope.
You cannot do both, because they stand in contradiction.
Claudia Silva
The network signs off their statement with this final sentence on the issue, paired with pictures of the four Argentine Cardinals with the right to vote, as the image displayed after, with the original text in Spanish, shows:
“All these top authorities remained silent and covered up clergy abuse against victims and survivors in Argentina.” Their brief statement is available, only in Spanish, here.
Not a social media strategy
The Argentine survivors’ attitude is not a PR or social media strategy. Previous installments of this series on clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church have gone deep into the Víctor Manuel Fernández, known as Tucho, while he was archbishop of La Plata, a key jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Argentina, as it is the capital city of the most populated state there, the Province of Buenos Aires.
Sex-related blunders, the never ending story at the Catholic Church
In the story before this paragraph, the section dealing with Argentina goes into the situation at La Plata, resulting from the different cases of abuse reported there and at the Province of Buenos Aires at large.
The story after this paragraph, goes in the first of its seven stories over one of Argentina’s ugliest cases of clergy sexual abuse, that of priest Julio César Grassi, who remains as such despite the fact that he has been sentenced by the authorities in his country, and he has been in jail for several years now, and all the accusations against him come from underaged males who used to be a clear cause to defrock a priest.
Seven stories of clergy sexual abuse
What is worse, Tucho Fernández dismissed the relatives of a victim of clergy sexual abuse whose predator, priest Eduardo Lorenzo, decided to kill himself when he knew he was about to be arrested by the authorities of the Province of Buenos Aires. The story linked below, available only in Spanish, goes over that case.
Tucho Fernández y el cura argentino que se suicidó en 2019
But even if one was willing to put Grassi’s and Lorenzo’s cases aside, there is the issue of the instability in that archdiocese, as right after Fernández’s promotion to Rome to become the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, in July 2023, there was what is now perceived as a failed appointment of his successor.
Less than a month after Fernández’s appointment in Rome, Pope Francis named Gabriel Antonio Mestre as the new archbishop there. Oddly enough, he resigned from the position less than a year later, so by June 2024 when he was barely 55, 20 years before retirement, he was the emeritus archbishop of that diocese.
More questions than answers
It is not clear what happened there. All we know is that now he is a parish priest in the diocese of Chascomús, 70 miles or 120 kilometers South of Buenos Aires, the national capital. He retains the title of emeritus archbishop, but his duties are those of a parish pastor in a suffragan diocese of his former archdiocese.
The fact that Fernández spent some time there as archbishop before taking over as prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the authority launching the Church’s probes, the so-called apostolic visitations, when things go wrong in dioceses and religious orders, makes the instability and the perception of chaos in La Plata even worse.
More so when Fernández became the target of attacks from the radical Catholic far-right angered with Fiducia Supplicans, the Vatican’s timid attempt at allowing for some informal, off-the-cuff, blessings of so-called “irregular couples,” including same-sex couples, that became a thorn in Pope Francis’s relation with the Trumpian wing of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and their African allies.
Even Cardinal Daniel Fernando Sturla Berhouet, the head of the archdiocese of Montevideo, Uruguay, seemed to jump ship on Francis after the Vatican decided to go public with that document. The story linked after this paragraph, goes over the kerfuffle that came as a response to Fiducia Supplicans.
In that respect, going over Francis’s pontificate milestones one has to wonder if when he used the Italian homophobic slur frociaggine (see the stories linked above and below), he was not trying to force his own Church to actually look at its own rank and admit what many are well aware of: many priests identify as gay, and any and all attempts from Rome or individual bishops going all the way back to the 5th century, have ended up bad for the Church.
From blunder to blunder: Roman Catholicism and sexuality
What lies behind Pope Francis‘s second use of a homophobic slur?
Histories of similar cases of missing information, halfway “punishments”, and the seemingly endless unwillingness of Catholic leaders to actually set some restrictions on ministry for predator priests fill Facebook groups where victims of clergy sexual abuse share their pain.
Some are public and open, as Legioleaks, the one administered by survivors of abuse at the hands of Marcial Maciel’s disciples, but the same rather sad or angry attitude dominates the exchanges at the private groups of the French survivors of abuse at Bétharram, as it happens also with the victims choosing other social media platforms to voice their anger as a way to make their voices heard.
Way too tired
What emerges is a perception, perhaps biased, that victims and most of their advocates are way too tired to get involved in the process to elect a new Pope. As far as it is possible to gather from their exchanges in social media, they perceive the process as distant, arcane, and absent of any measure of accountability, regardless of who gets the white cassock.
For most of the survivors there is no actual expectation of a significant change coming after the election of a new Pope, as they seem to perceive their actual chances of real improvement in the institutional and individual behavior from the Church at large and from the specific bishops as slim to none.
They have gone in some cases through decades of systematic and institutional gaslighting with disappointment and the only possible outcome, so there is little or no interest or ability to try to drive the Conclave, its outcomes, or some other process within the Church dismissing and discrediting them.
On Monday, the members of Tutela Minorum, the Commission set up by Pope Francis as part of his timid attempt at dealing with the crisis issued a statement. There, they echo what survivors disappointed at the Church’s dismissive attitude towards them have said elsewhere.
The key paragraphs say:
We unite our voices with the People of God in a plea for discernment guided by the Holy Spirit—and shaped by the cries of those harmed by abuse within the Church.
We pray for Cardinals who carry the grave responsibility of choosing the next Successor of Peter, that they may be guided by courage, humility, and a commitment to safeguarding.
We are heartened by the fact that the protection of children and vulnerable people from abuse has been a priority for the cardinals present in Rome in discussions leading up to the Conclave. The Church’s credibility depends on real accountability, transparency, and action rooted in justice.
Task for the ages
Sadly, finding the statement is a task for the ages, as there is no banner linking at it in the website home or main page, and it is harder if one is not able to read English, as there is no trace of the statement in either Spanish or Portuguese, the other two languages of the commission’s website.
The full, English-speaking statement is available here, but there is no equivalent for that page in Spanish or Portuguese.
There is, a minor accomplishment, a Spanish-speaking story about the statement, on Vatican News, the news outlet of the Holy See, with a partial translation of the statement, but there is nothing similar in the Portuguese-, Italian-, French-, or the German-speaking versions of Vatican News.
In that regard, it is still as if the Holy See’s take on the issue is to limit their efforts to the minimum required to give a sense of interest and engagement. That there is no French-speaking version of the statement is harder to understand when one takes into consideration that François Bayou, Emmanuel Macron’s Prime Minister in France will face a tough hearing to answer questions about his role on the crisis at Bétharram.
Bayrou, French Prime Minister, to testify on sexual abuse
How could one believe that they are really aware of the potential effects of the issue on the Church’s credibility, as the Tutela Minorum’s statements says, when they are unable to make the effort to translate it to languages relevant for countries with large number of victims as it would be the case, to name the most obvious at this point, of France?
In this respect it is increasingly hard to understand why the days leading up to the conclave have been filled with “warnings” about the survivors of clergy sexual abuse making their voices heard. And again, it is not as if they are expecting that the ghost of “future Conclaves” was about to bring them the miracle of a Catholic hierarchy following Ebeneezer Scrooge’s Christmas conversion, waking up the day after the Conclave to find a Pope willing to bring about actual change. Quite the opposite.
One should not be surprised. It is not as if there was not a memory of what their own lives have been. A person who was a victim of clergy sexual abuse in the 1970s or 1980s, who is now north of 50, has gone through the many promises of at least three now deceased Popes.
Measures of justice
In some, mostly English-speaking countries, actual measures of justice have been provided, but mostly it has been out of fear from the bishops of the consequences of the action of police, district or State attorneys in the United States or their equivalent in other countries, and judges.
But even that experience is not the same in countries with very effective systems of justice as the United States or Canada, when compared to others such as Belize or many of the African and Caribbean-English speaking countries, following the same Common Law tradition of the former British dependencies, but with police, barristers, and judges, years-light apart from those in Britain.
And the experience in Spanish-speaking countries following the French and Spaniard or Portuguese traditions of written, highly codified law, is even worse, even in the case of the former metropolis of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, and even in France, the country famous for its secularism or laïcité laws (opens the Wikipedia page in French), as the Bétharram case and many others there prove.
So, assuming that there is some conspiracy from the survivors of clergy sexual abuse to try to influence the outcomes of the Conclave is ludicrous to say the least, and I would even go further to say that they are so disappointed of the Catholic Church that they could not care less.
It has been up to the media, civil or Catholic, to figure out what would be the role of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Conclave as it is clear that there is a record of abuse damaging specific Cardinals. Last week installment of this series, linked below, offered information on the role of Norberto Rivera Carrera and Roger Mahony, both non-elector Cardinals, as they are older than 80, who went along with a mechanism taking predator priests in central Mexico to the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, in California.
The Catholic Church, unable to rule itself
The same and probably something worse could be said about Óscar Andrés Rodriguez Maradiaga, the now emeritus archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, who saw fit to go back to the limelight, offering statements to the press in Rome, perhaps way to willing to hear from a cleric who was forced out of office in the middle of a scandal that was never actually cleared.
And the main issue is not if Rodrígez Maradiaga sustained over the years or not a relationship with Juan José Pineda Fasquelle, his former auxiliary bishop of that diocese. If that is the case, as the U.S. and Italian far-right media showcased the issue it is ultimately irrelevant.
The main issue is that, on top of that alleged relation, there were several accusations of now former seminarians of the seminary of the archdiocese of Tegucigalpa about Pineda Fasquelle’s “long-hands” and the constant harassment they were the victims of.
Mocking Francis
That issue was the talk of the Internet for several months in mid-2018, as this story from The Associated Press proves. The Catholic far-right media in the United States, Italy, Spain, and other countries used that case to mock Pope Francis, rendering him as some sort of fool, way too willing to be merciful with Rodríguez Maradiaga despite the abuse perpetrated by his former auxiliary.
When Rodrígez Maradiaga finally left Tegucigalpa, on January, 2023, the very same day he reached 80, in full Vatican fashion, there were no explanations, as there were not, when Pineda Fasquelle was forced out of office when he was 57, back on July 20th, 2018, almost 18 years before the age or retirement.
In both cases, as it happened with Peruvian cardinal Cipriani, there was no indication from Rome about potential restrictions or “punishments”, as symbolic as they could be, set on them because, sadly, this is where Catholicism is as far as the issue of “punishments”, the enforcement of said “penalties”, and the overall chaos described in this series previous installment dealing with how that church is unable to rule itself.
After Pope Francis’s death Rodríguez Maradiaga Vatican News immediately put out statements from the Cardinal over their social media accounts, where users reminded both the Cardinal and their friends at the Vatican news outlet about the memories of Pineda Fasquelle’s legacy in the Honduran capital city.
If any is interested and able to influence the Conclave’s outcomes is not the survivors who ultimately warn the Church, for many of them their former Church, about the potential consequences of dismissing once again the issue of clergy sexual abuse.
It is not as if the survivors are not stating what would be needed to achieve some measure of justice for them, their families and friends. In actuality, the main risk comes from the far-right corners of the Catholic world, way too willing to even accept Donald Trump’s “jokes” about the Conclave, which is only a joke in the sense that there is no way he would give up being President of the United States to take over as Pope.
What should not be perceived as a joke is what he said about his preference for the Cardinal and archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, who has an awful record of dismissiveness towards survivors of clergy sexual abuse from the different dioceses where he has been a bishop.
Not silent
And he is not alone. There is the support of Hungarian Presidente Viktor Orban for Cardinal Péter Erdő, as there is the support and multiple symbolic vetoes issued the Italian “soveranisti,” the Italian version of MAGA, who at points seem to support Pietro Parolin, or some other Italian or even foreign Cardinal willing to play along with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
That does not mean that the survivors’ groups, their friends, advocates, relatives, and families have been silent. Going back to late February, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, SNAP published a press release highlighting the need to go over the record on clergy sexual abuse of potential Popes.
Their statement, available in full here is pristine, although when released some Catholics perceived it as out of touch with Pope Francis’s then current situation at the Gemelli Hospital of Rome.
And yet, it is impossible not to think that as out-of-touch as SNAP’s February statement was, it is far more serious and humane that what the National Catholic Reporter, the venerable U.S. Catholic medium reports in a story by Brian Fraga about how Tim Busch, heir of the Anheuser-Busch fortune and patron of the Napa Institute, was willing to brag in Rome about his ability to raise “a billion to help the Church so long as we have the right Pope”.
And they are not alone. Back in 2022, when it was already clear that Pope Francis’s health was not the best, Paris-Match, the “daddy” of French legacy media, threw its support in the French-speaking world behind Robert Sarah as a potential successor for the then already ill Argentine Pope.
They did so despite the Guinean Cardinal having blocked a timid attempt at reform from Pope Francis opening a door to allow for the ordination of married male as presbyters, priests, for the service of the Church in difficult regions, as the Amazon. Or perhaps precisely because of that.
Sarah went as far as to fool then already emeritus Pope Benedict XVI to allow for the publication of an old manuscript, written well before being elected Pope, to chastise Francis’s reform.
Ever since, Sarah is one of the darlings of the global Catholic far-right, that these days spread alleged “prophecies” about an “end-of-times” election of a “black Pope”. Even Marca, a sports medium, published a piece dealing with that idea worth of an episode of the X-Files.
And something similar could be said of the ever-present farms of trolls in the service of the Kremlin supporting other darlings of the Catholic far-right as Péter Erdő, the Hungarian Cardinal or Timothy Dolan, Trump’s favorite for the Conclave.
It would be impossible to go over all the instances of the support from the darkest corners of the Internet to the darlings of the Catholic far-right, most of whom have awful records when dealing with sexual abuse cases.
It is clear, in this respect, that as hard as it is for the Church to accept the rather harsh criticism coming from SNAP in the English-speaking world or from the Red de Sobrevivientes de Abuso Eclesiástico in Argentina, they have a better understanding of what is at stake in the upcoming conclave.
It is impossible not to wonder if the Cardinals with the right to vote are actually aware of it.
The Latin American voice at the Conclave, A shifting tide?