GUADALAJARA (MEXICO)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
September 1, 2025
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
A new case of sexual misconduct at the Mexican diocese of Izcalli reveals the Catholic Church’s unwillingness to learn from its past mistakes.
Seminarian Otoniel seeks sexual partners over social media. When his demands are not satisfied he turns violent.
His sexual behavior mirrors notorious predators such as Fernando Karadima and less known abusers from the same diocese of Izcalli.
This is a convoluted story about a minor and a seminarian, a cleric in training. Originally, this series dealing with clergy sexual abuse in the diocese of Izcalli, an exurb of Mexico City, was planned as a three-installment affair. However, before publishing the third installment, a new survivor contacted the author of these lines over social media.
The first contact was somehow similar to survivors going through the early stages of their reckoning with the effects of such experience. It was a private message, very late at night, so it was only the day after that it was possible to figure out what was the issue, who was the victim or victims.
The messages were fragmentary, broken. It had to do with Izcalli and there was a name, those were the only certainties then. With the name and the reference to Izcalli, it was possible to start the usual wide, goose-chase, kind of search that this series follows due to the lack of searchable archives of priests’ assignments in Mexico and other Latin American countries.
In this case having the name of the aggressor and the diocese led to an initial search over the lists published by the Mexican authority dealing with religious organizations. As good as that source could be, it is not as updated as it should be, so dead priests are still registered.
The search was about to move to the second source: Facebook. Many Latin American dioceses, seminaries, orders, and even parishes and chapels, keep pages there which, as underwhelming as they are, offer in many cases, the sole source to try to figure out the identity, the whereabouts, or even the traces of the damage done by a Catholic priest.
If this story seems hard to follow, it is the byproduct of the Catholic Church’s decision to evade accountability. This narrative, with its fragments and dead ends, is what that system looks like and the kind of hell one faces when trying to hold a priest accountable in Mexico and Latin America at large.
The road to accountability led to one dead end after another. The reason for that dead end is best explained by what happened to two journalists in Colombia. There is the recent Colombian court ruling forcing the Church there to release information about where and when its priests are assigned to pastoral or administrative duties.
The ruling came after two journalists, Miguel Ángel Estupiñán and Juan Pablo Barrientos confronted the same problem: a system designed to protect itself and force journalists and survivors into a hopeless hunt for information.
While getting ready to waste many hours at Facebook’s pitiful search engine, the same social media sent me a request for friendship. It was the same person over a different account, providing more information: the aggressor’s identity.
The aggressor, Fabián Otoniel Martínez Arredondo was neither a priest, nor a religious brother. He is the member of an in-between category in the Catholic Church, neither layperson nor clergy, a seminarian of the diocese of Izcalli.
Early interactions
At that point it was possible to better understand what had happened and why a message of great anger and despair had been sent very late the previous night. The survivor messaging over Facebook offered more details of what have happened.
Martínez Arredondo and an underage male who will be identified here only as Esteban, a pseudonym, met while engaging on their own with social media accounts of male adult entertainers at what used to be Twitter.
Screenshots of their very early interactions between them, in March of this year, at what is now called X appear as an image after this paragraph. That is the kind of interactions it is possible to safely publish here, where it was all about the kind of friendly conversation anyone could have over that medium and under those circumstances.
Screenshots with fragments of two different conversations between Otoniel and Esteban over social media private messages. March 2025.
In normal circumstances, that kind of interactions would not be newsworthy or relevant for this series. They are because, on top of Esteban’s age, there is the issue of Martínez Arredondo being a seminarian.
A cleric in training, a seminarian must follow criteria and rules set by Pope Benedict XVI barring gay persons from even having a chance at becoming, as Martínez Arredondo is, a seminarian. The document, published in 2005, is available here.
Granted, Esteban being a minor and engaging over social media with adult male entertainers will be enough for many to fall for “blame the victim” fallacy. It is easy even to go and blame the lose rules to open and operate social media accounts worldwide, but that would be deceiving.
Again, Martínez Arredondo is a cleric-in-training, a seminarian, bound by an allegedly strict code of rules set by Benedict XVI to avoid precisely that kind of behavior. Despite said rules, he is displaying some of the features typical of now infamous sexual predators and he does it as a student of the seminary of diocese of Izcalli.
[English Edition
The issue is harder to dismiss when one goes over the abuse perpetrated by clergy of the diocese of Izcalli: Diego Pallares Contreras, the main character of the first installment on this subseries on the diocese of Izcalli, linked before this paragraph. Moreover, what happened with Martínez Arredongo is not an isolated incident.
The diocese of Izcalli has a history of willful negligence, best demonstrated by the case of Morseo Miramón Santiago. He was a former seminarian of the archdiocese of Acapulco. Francisco González Ramos, the bishop of Izcalli, ordained Miramón Santiago as both deacon and presbyter allowing him to later attack at least one underage male in Izcalli.
Neither the dioceses of Izcalli or Acapulco have explained their decision-making when dealing with Morseo Miramón. Was he forced out of the seminary of the archdiocese of Acapulco? Why when most of his cohort’s peers were advancing to become deacons he disappeared? When the Izcalli diocesan seminary decided to accept him were they aware of why had he left Acapulco?
As it stands, the situation is that of a key institution of a Catholic diocese already marred by clergy sexual abuse, allowing its seminarians to engage, late at night, on social media to participate in all kinds of sexually explicit behavior.
Spelling choice or coded message?
To make matters worse, when trying to better understand the situation, first by trying to understand if the seminarian was actually a student at that kind of institution, it was clear Otoniel created a conflicting public persona.
When interacting with Esteban, Fabián Otoniel claimed to be a 24-year-old. However, on his account at what used to be Twitter, has him as an already mature adult, of 40, as he claims 1985 as his date of birth.
Even if there is no age limit to be admitted into seminary, and his pictures all over the Facebook account of the Seminary do not support the idea of him being 40, why would he go for that age as his choice in Twitter?
Searches over what he has published are impossible as his account at X is locked, as it is what seem to be his personal account at Facebook. It uses similar personal pictures of his face and a similar display of the upper part of the altar of a Church in Izcalli.
There are other issues at what is possible to see of his activity over social media. Unlike the “standard” spelling of his name as Otoniel in the Facebook account of the Seminary of the diocese of Izcalli or in what seems to be his personal account at Facebook, over at Twitter, on the account where he pretends to be over 40, Otoniel chose to spell his name as Othoniel.
Minor detail, as both spellings are found in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries, but it is impossible not to wonder what is behind the “H” in Othoniel, his username at what used to be Twitter. Is a timid attempt to say something?
Was Ot(h)oniel taking his early steps as to follow other Catholic clergymen, Marcial Maciel the most famous of them all, able to assume as many alter egos, avatars, as required to fit the occasion?
After all, as a seminarian, he is already walking a fine line, between the impulses leading him to engage with male adult entertainers over social media and the allegedly rigid rules set by Benedict XVI in 2005.
In hostile environments such as a Catholic seminary, closeted individuals often use subtle cues for safety and community building as tools or props when figuring out their own sexual identity.
Those cues are tools to manage anxiety, internalize the attacks gay persons endure in Latin American countries where, despite the changes in the legal framework acknowledging their right to be married, it is still a pre-Stonewall world, where that kind of cues are vital strategies of survival and resistance.
This is more relevant for someone such as Otoniel who, as seminarian, early in his attempt at becoming priest is already the center of dynamics making him a local celebrity in his parish and in those parishes where he is sent as part of his training.
Said dynamics elevate the process of entering the seminary into a sort of epic, turning the seminarian into a sort of hero on the making, forced into a template of perfection, as prescribed by Benedict XVI’s 2005 reform.
Night falls in Izcalli
Esteban tells how, after a few friendly exchanges over direct messages at X, formerly Twitter, they exchanged phone numbers and, in doing so, the ability to send text, pictures, and video over peer-to-peer apps such as Telegram to each other.
Even if over the first days they seemed to enjoy each other’s company and the exchanges of pictures or short videos, some of them unsafe for office, but with courtesies, less than two weeks later, Otoniel was trying to dominate his new acquaintance, someone who he had never met face-to-face.
If early there were spontaneous exchanges of pictures or videos, two weeks later there were already demands, not even requests to do what, turning the situation into anything but friendly exchange.
Also, they would increase in intensity late at night, when most students attending seminary are less likely to be engaged in classes, or other community activities, such as praying the rosary or the Liturgy or Hours or engaged in leisurely internal activities that usually end at the latest at 9 pm.
Per Esteban’s account, around 10 PM the tone, number, and urgency of the requests would increase. When he was unable or unwilling to comply, there would be verbal aggression, the kind of contradictory homophobic verbal aggression so common in Mexican and Latino macho culture, with plenty of insults as to display dominance and command of the relationship.
Over the next weeks of what hardly could be described as a friendship or a relation, Otoniel’s demands would force Esteban to shutdown his devices as to avoid any more attacks on his gender identity by someone who, a few weeks ago was interested in meeting him, getting to know him better and even suggested meeting in the city of Pachuca, 40 miles or 64 kilometers North of downtown Izcalli.
More disconcerting was the fact that Otoniel was willing to threat Esteban with “outing” him, when Esteban actually evaded contact and was Otoniel who was driving the relationship into a dead end.
Even more disconcerting when one takes into consideration that previously Martínez Arredondo portrayed himself as a “high-ranking member of his Church”, as to fit the stated age of 40 he was displaying over his Twitter account? But then, why was he doing that when he told Esteban that he was 24?
Esteban went into searching for Otoniel’s real identity, and that is how he figured out it was only a seminarian, a cleric-in-training who, nonetheless, would continue to harass him either requesting “hot pics” or similar short videos displaying the genitalia.
When the demands were left unattended, Otoniel would go either go into tirades of insults as to prove he was still in command of whatever idea he had of a relationship, or to threaten Esteban with outing and/or doxxing him as a gay teenager.
At that point Esteban thought it was him who would out Otoniel. He sent some of the pictures to the social media accounts of the seminary of Izcalli and even posted some of them as responses to other postings made by that account.
Otoniel escalated with more insults, more threats, but with the support of the community manager of the Facebook account of the seminary he was able to delete the compromising messages.
The community manager was even able to get Esteban’s Facebook account barred and all its postings eliminated from that social media. And it gets worse. In true clerical fashion, Otoniel rendered himself as the victim of an unwarranted attack on his public persona.
When talking to Esteban it was possible to find in his anger towards Otoniel and the institution coming out to help him, at least in Facebook, echoes of the argument behind the National Pride Front’s decision to “out” high ranking Mexican clerics back in 2016. Among the names was that of the former rector of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Diego Monroy Ponce.
[English Edition
[Izcalli and beyond: Aguiar Retes and the tumor of clergy sexual abuse]
As the Frente Orgullo Nacional de México (National Pride Front Mexico) stated at the time when they released the list, available here in Spanish over the Internet Archive, the issue is not the high ranking priests’ sexual orientation, as the authors acknowledged themselves as gay.
More than the Macho insults he received from Otoniel, which are for the most part common in Mexican popular culture, even in familiar contexts, the issue was the contradictory nature of the attacks.
Not your perfect victim
Granted, Esteban will never fit the category of the perfect victim that built the clergy sexual abuse crisis originally in Mexico. He is not a student at a Legion of Christ or Opus Dei school.
He is not the son of a wealthy family, able to lawyer up his grievances. He is a teenager who actively engaged with older males through the social media of adult entertainers.
More so, because he was willing to fight back by posting some of the exchanges he had with Otoniel over social media and messaging apps such as Telegram.
But also, it should be noted that he is not under the kind of rules a seminarian supposedly most follow. As imperfect as a victim as he could be, he is honest about his identity. Overall, the situation led him to seek help, and he is currently engaged in therapy with a professional, so he is on his way to address his own personal issues.
It is impossible to say the same about the other main character of this story. Otoniel already displays what some would call “red flags” of predatorial behavior. It is beyond the scope of this series to dig into his personal life. He is the only one who could figure out what is his sexual identity.
For the purposes of this series the key issue is how this case from the very same diocese of Izcalli stresses the need to rethink the reach of Benedict XVI’s alleged contribution to ending the clergy sexual abuse crisis: his 2005 reform of the education at Catholic seminaries.
Allegedly, the issue of clergy sexual abuse would be solved by expelling gay individuals willing to become priests, and/or religious brothers or sisters to be admitted at the institutions where they study.
Pope Ratzinger took the easiest route when deriving conclusions from the 2004 report commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice on clergy sexual abuse in the United States and launched a global “pink scare” against gay seminarians.
And, indeed, the report highlighted the prevalence of same-sex abuse as a main driver of the crisis, but there is growing evidence that despite the due diligence from the authors of the report, there was a major issue with under-reporting of cases of clergy sexual abuse with females as victims.
Whether Benedict XVI was aware or not about the potential bias of the John Jay Report is hard to discern at this point. Nonetheless that was not the sole instance where him blamed gay persons for the crisis. There is a record of other cases where he chastised them as the main drivers of the situation.
However, as the story linked after this paragraph proves, many bishops around the Catholic world were not so sure about getting rid of that many candidates to enter religious life.
[English Edition
[New interpretation of old rules at Italian seminaries]
As that story tells, over the last months of Pope Francis’s life, the Italian Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a new set of criteria to assess who are fit to become priest, or a brother or sister in the religious orders.
An issue that cannot be dismissed as minor is that Martínez Arredondo is already living, as proved by his social media behavior, a life marked by lies about his age or the kind of verbal violence he would exert in private exchanges against Esteban.
That is what academic jargoon calls “a compartmentalized life”, that is to say a life where a person does his or her best to conceal the worst angles of his character while keeping a “perfect life” avatar for his public persona.
That is the kind of behavior one sees in world renowned predators as Marcial Maciel or Fernando Karadima, as is strikingly similar to the kind of behavior behind Morseo Miramón’s and Daniel Pallares’s cases in the very same diocese of Izcalli.
And it not only Izcalli. In the very same region of Mexico, less than two months ago a small rural community of the neighboring diocese of Atlacomulco went into the usual shock when young deacon Mario Puebla Monroy was arrested by the local police, as the story after this paragraph tells.
[English Edition
[A new abuse case rocks the Catholic Church in Mexico]
His diocese authorized his ordination as deacon less than a year ago, and as in the cases of Morseo Miramón Santiago and Diego Pallares Contreras, his victim was also an underage male at the parish where he was assigned.
What is worse, as it happens now at Izcalli, there is a relatively long record of clergy sexual abuse at Atlacomulco. Putting aside the issue that the diocese’s first bishop was Ricardo Guízar Díaz, Marcial Maciel’s cousin.
The second bishop was Constancio Miranda Wechmann, now emeritus archbishop of Chihuahua, where he had an awful record when dealing with clergy sexual abuse, as the story linked after this paragraph, available only in Spanish, tells.
[Investigaciones
[El abuso sexual en la Iglesia Católica de Chihuahua: el colmo del clericalismo]
If that was not enough, the seminary of Atlacomulco was where Joana a survivor of heterosexual clergy sexual abuse was repeatedly attacked by at least three priests of that diocese, as the story on deacon Mario Puebla Monroy tells.
South American echoes
This pattern is not unique to Mexico. The same willful negligence can be found across the continent, as evidenced by a recent case in Ecuador. Over a year ago, this series published a story, linked after this paragraph, about a suicide at the National congress of Ecuador. The person who decided to end his life, was a victim of a former member of the Salesians of St. John Bosco.
The Salesian province in Ecuador and a bishop affiliated to that order there denied ordination to Franklin Cadena Puratambi. He was able to convince the bishop of the most isolated diocese of that country, the one at the Galápagos Islands that he was worth the risk, despite the implicit warning from the Salesians and the bishop affiliated to that order who denied ordination to Cadena Puratambi.
Ultimately, the will of the bishop of Galápagos to play the ordination casino, played a role in the decision of the male who decided to end his life at the rooftop of the Congress.
In is key to understand that this new case from Izcalli should not be dismissed as the odd case of two misguided young males having gay sexual experiences over the internet.
The only way the Catholic Church will be able to turn the page on the clergy sexual abuse crisis is if it is able to learn actual lessons from past experiences. Otoniel’s attacks on Esteban resonate with a known, extremely famous predator Catholic priest: Fernando Karadima.
As Otoniel did with Esteban, attacking him with an avalanche of homophobic slurs, Karadima would do with Cristóbal Lira Salinas, who was his former protegee and, when Karadima insulted him in public already a colleague priest, he frequently called him Tuki.
Tuki, sometimes Tuqui, and at times Tuki-tuki, is one of those odd words of the Chilean Spanish that one can use for many purposes. As with many homophobic slurs in Spanish and other languages, the meanings are not always clear, they belong to a “gray area” where familiar language collides with insults in unnerving, sometimes condescending, ways.
In any case, when Karadima used it, the available evidence shows he was using it as to set dominance, a power dynamic to set who was in charge, who was the alpha closeted gay male in their relationship. When Karadima used Tuki to attack Lira Salinas he would couple the slur with mockery tirades about Lira Salinas’s way of talking, walking, or even presiding over mass.
Javier Vázquez Aguilar, rector of the Seminary of Izcalli, June 2025. From the diocese of Izcalli social media.
The comparison, an attack to question Lira Salinas’s masculinity is even harder to grasp when one is aware that both Karadima and Lira Salinas were priests, closeted gays, and sexual predators of younger males.
The comparison lacks any logic or sense, as a surrealist movie by the young Luis Buñuel would. Instead of using a knife to cut his own eye, Karadima would compare Lira Salinas with an old lady presiding over mass (content in Spanish).
The point, after all is not to actually criticize the target of the attacks, but to prove that the aggressor has the power to do so, more so as no females preside over Catholic Mass, so the comparison itself is absurd.
It was a dynamic to allow Karadima to reaffirm his control over Lira Salinas and all the other members of the Pious Priestly Union who would meet every Monday at Karadima’s headquarters at the Sacred Heart parish in Santiago.
And Lira Salinas was hardly a model of a perfect priest. He, as Karadima, was accused of repeatedly abusing males and was, eventually in 2019, suspended by the Archdiocese of Santiago (content in Spanish).
What is relevant is how in Otoniel’s behavior there are already hints of Karadima’s attitudes, the way of acting that one finds in narratives about Karadima’s public persona.
Karadima was a gay alfa male who despised other closeted gay males by comparing them with females. It is something akin to a subculture where the religious doctrine that allegedly connects them, Catholicism, is nothing but an excuse to achieve some other, never clearly stated, goals. It was, for the most part, a power dynamic between them.
Even if it is impossible to go into the details of said subculture, one is able to find reflections of it in the way Latin American societies and Latinos in the United States deal with homosexuality.
There is a large and growing body of knowledge, with frequent new entries. A couple of good places to begin understanding it are, in English, “Machismo and Mexican American Men” and in Spanish “La homofobia y su relación con la masculinidad hegemónica en México”.
Catholic doctrine regarding gay persons is far from helpful as gay marriage has turned into one of the major sites of the so-called culture wars, and even if Pope Francis was willing to offer the relative ease of informal blessings of so-called “irregular couples”, including same sex couples, he was also willing to use Italian homophobic slurs at least twice, publicly, during his pontificate (see the story linked below).
English Edition
What lies behind Pope Francis‘s second use of a homophobic slur?