(MEXICO)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
November 24, 2025
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
The recent deaths of four priests offer a glimpse into changing perceptions of Catholic clergy and its relationship with sexual abuse.
Cases from Mexico, Brazil, France, and the U.S. force to rethink how the sexual abuse crisis changes perceptions of the Catholic priests.
Trying to prevent these changes by going back to opacity when addressing sexual abuse cases would only further hurt trust in the Catholic Church.
Back in the 1980s, when one got news of the killing of a priest in Latin America, one thought about cases such as that of Argentine Padre Carlos Mugica Echagüe (1974) or the many priests and nuns killed in El Salvador during the civil war there, beginning with the now-saint Oscar Arnulfo Romero (1980), or perhaps about Polish Priest Jerzy Popiełuszko (1984).
One used to believe, perhaps even conditioned, that whenever the assassination of a priest happened, there was some political motive behind what then was perceived as a heinous crime, perpetrated by either Soviet-inspired regimes as that of Cold War Poland or military or paramilitary far-right groups in Latin America.
These days, when news about the death of a priest come it is increasingly hard not to wonder what was behind his death, and more so in months such as October and November of 2025 when the deaths pile on. Over the last two months, two priests have been killed in Mexico, one more in Brazil, and the body of a fourth priest, a French Salesian, was found in Normandy, in the Atlantic coast of Europe.
Of the four priests dead over the last seven weeks, the motives are not as clear cut as with Mugica’s, assassinated, point blank, after presiding over Mass at a oratory in what used to be his parish or Romero’s, shot to death while presiding over Mass at his cathedral in San Salvador.
Geographies of death
In Mexico, Bertoldo Pantaleón Estrada, lost his life sometime before October 6, three weeks before reaching 59 and three months after celebrating the 31st anniversary of his priestly ordination. His body was discovered that day, and according to the diocese of Chilapa-Chilpancingo, they lost track of his whereabouts two days before being murdered.
Estrada’s former parish, that of San Cristóbal Mezcala, Guerrero, is located in the so-called “Golden Triangle,” a region in Mexico where poppy grows with relative ease, facilitating the production of heroine. Even worse, it is a small, isolated, town, halfway between the state capital of Chilpancingo, and Iguala, where back in 2014, more than 40 students at the teachers’ college of Ayotzinapa “disappeared.”
English Edition
Ayotzinapa: 42 Students and One Soldier Rescued — the Hidden Version
Eleven years after the violent night of September when the students disappeared, there is no hope of a potential solution to that crime. Even if there were a couple of arrests, Bertoldo’s crime remains a mystery. It is a very violent region, and it is not hard to imagine him as the victim of that environment, as at least three other priests in that region of Mexico have been over the last ten years or so.
Little less than a month later, on November 12, another Mexican priest lost his life. At 43, with 15 years as priest of the diocese of Cuautitlán, Ernesto Hernández Vilchis was the pastor of the parish of Santa Cruz (Holy Cross), in Tultepec, an exurb of Mexico City, engulfed by the growth of the metropolis over the last 40 years or so.
Bertoldo Pantaleón Estrada, priest of the Mexican diocese of Chilpancingo-Chilapa, weeks before his assassination, 2025. From the diocese’s social media.
Two days later, on November 14, a group of teenagers killed Alexsandro da Silva Lima, a Brazilian priest of the diocese of Dourados, in the eponymous diocese of the state of Matto Grosso do Sul, close to the border with Paraguay, 550 miles or 880 kilometers West of São Paulo.
At 44, with 14 years as a priest, he was already the pastor of the parish of Our Lady of Aparecida, the coordinator of the clergy in the diocese, and the advisor for diocesan permanent deacons. They are Catholic married males who perform a limited number of priestly functions, in baptisms and weddings, but are not presbyters or priests, as Silva Lima was.
Hernández Vilchis’s and Da Silva Lima’s murders are almost identical. Both were victims of groups perpetrating an ambush of sorts to dispossess them of their belongings, in both cases, mostly their automobiles.
However, Hernández Vilchis’s case is far more complex. The probe’s initial findings have as a main character in his assassination a sex worker with whom he had some prior contact, who ultimately drugged him to facilitate his murder.
If one follows the official reports, his disappearance was reported to the authorities on the very last day of October. The last time someone saw him was on Monday, October 27, so there were four days between those two dates and at least twelve days until his murder. So far, there is little available knowledge about what actually happened over those fateful 16 days between the last day someone saw him and the estimated date of his murder.
Alexsandro da Silva Lima, priest of the diocese of Dourados, Brazil, presiding Mass in an undated photo. Social media of the diocese of Dourados.
Though the case is not yet solved, local authorities are moving at an unusual fast pace, the kind one sees in political assassinations and is absent, for the most part in other, less known cases. More so, as the swift handling of his case occurs amidst an intense national debate over widespread violence. In that regard, Hernández Vilchis’s fast-tracked probe becomes a convenient political narrative for Mexican authorities dealing with other, at least as brutal, assassinations.
The speed with which Hernández Vilchis’s murder has been addressed so far, is at least similar as that of the autopsy of Jean-Marie Petitclerc, a French priest found dead on Monday November 17 in a beach in Langrune-sur-Mer, in the Atlantic coast of Normandy.
The cover of the Spanish-language translation of one of Petitclerc’s books: Praying with St. John Bosco.
Unlike any of the three Latin American priests, the French priest was, at 72, a national celebrity in his country, being a Knight in the National Order or Merit in France since 1996, twelve years after his ordination, and pages in the French– and English-language editions of the Wikipedia way before his death. Some of his books had been even translated to Spanish and other languages.
His work to address violence in marginalized neighborhoods in France, made him famous. He was among the first representatives of a French national institution to try to address the violence that ultimately became what we know as the “2005 riots.”
On Monday, French media, Catholic and civil, published the news of how Petitclerc’s corpse appeared in the beach. Originally, there was neither evidence nor a report of violence during his death.
Jean-Marie Petitclerc after a conference in Lille, France, 2012. Photo by Peter Potrow, Wikimedia www.commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jean-Marie_Petitclerc_(cropped).jpg.
However, it was already known that back in October he was found guilty by a judge who charged him with “voyeurism” (voyeurisme sur mineur) of a male minor, while dismissing a charge of “sexual assault” (atteinte sexuelle) according to the story published by French Catholic media Famille Chretienne (content in French) or in the press release published by the French Salesians when news about his sentence emerged (content in French).
Oddly enough, a few hours after Petitclerc’s corpse appeared, Xavier Ernst, the Salesians’ superior in France and Southern Belgium seemed already convinced that there was no way to go deeper into why Petitclerc died. As reported by Catholic newspaper La Croix, Ernest answered a question about Petitclerc’s death saying, “we will never know; the sea took Jean-Marie’s last breath.”
It is unclear what was Ernst’s goal when saying that. Given the way Petitclerc died and what French penal law provides for an “unassisted death” an OML, an Obstacle Médico-Légal (content in French) was set on Petitclerc’s remains, forcing an autopsy to figure out if his dead was a suicide, accident, or homicide before burial.
In that regard, the Salesian superior’s quote, as grabbed by La Croix, was premature to say the least, if not an outright attempt at nipping at the bud a probe on Petitclerc’s death with the potential to uncover a more troubling reality for the now deceased priest and, perhaps, his order.
[IMAGE: A panoramic view of the beach in Normandy, France, where Petitclerc’s corpse was found on November 17. Source: Google Maps.]
Despite Ernst’s attempt to leave to the Atlantic Ocean the secret of Petitclerc’s death, the local authorities in Normandy performed an autopsy, ruling his death a suicide on Tuesday November 18 (content in French).
If those relatively recent deaths of priests were not enough, the same Monday November 17, over at National Catholic Reporter, Jason Berry unearthed a case in Louisiana from the 1980s, where a predator priest lost his life when two of his victims had had enough of the abuse and the gaslighting coming from him.
Half-brothers Bernard Joseph and Marcus Hamilton are serving life terms in the infamous Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana for the 1988 murder of Patrick McCarthy. He was a priest and member of the order of the Josephites, as was his partner in abusing both half-brothers when they were minors, Paul Oberg.
It is impossible to go over the details of Berry’s account of what happened there but, at some point, with one of them under the influence of narcotics, they decided to put an end to the abuse, killing McCarthy who was 37 at the time.
To no one’s surprise Berry’s story gets acclaim for him as the author, but also plenty of sympathy for the brothers Bernard and Marcus, as they are perceived as the real victims in a convoluted case that even if, legally, crossed all the tees, more than 30 years later has morphed in ways only Berry’s account is able to describe.
Erosion of trust
What matters for the purpose of this piece is how the perception of Catholic priests has eroded, even among devout Catholics such as NCR’s readership, as a consequence of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
It is the story of the loss of trust in the ability of the institution to protect its faithful, but also the byproduct of the steady attempt of the Catholic hierarchy and their partners in the political elites to cover up crimes, protect the priests’ good names and the Catholic Church’s institutional prestige at the expense of the victims of abuse.
One only needs to pay attention to the ongoing debates over French social media after Petitclerc’s death. A fellow French priest, Phillippe de Kergorlay, used his Facebook account to post early Thursday, November 20 an indictment of his own Church, blaming Petitclerc’s death and the loss of trust in the Catholic Church on the Sauvé Report.
Over several installments this series has relied heavily on the findings of the Sauvé Report also known as CIASE Report. The acronym comes from the French Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church set by the conference of Catholic bishops in France after they confronted the painful reality of their own inability to deal with the effects of clergy sexual abuse following the “Three D or 3D” approach: Deflect, Dismiss, and Deny.
English Edition
Playing the victim: a template at the Legion of Christ
Said approach has been explained in greater detail in the previous installments of this series linked before and after this paragraph. Despite its many failures and negatives effects, De Kergorlay’s post in his social media and the reactions to it from French-speaking Catholics, prove there is still an appetite to stick to that way of “handling” clergy sexual abuse.
English Edition
Resilience or stubbornness: a crisis of credibility in the Church
Despite the fact that several entities of the Catholic Church have acknowledged the crisis of credibility that the installment of this series linked before this paragraph documents, for De Kergorlay, there is no doubt that Petitclerc was “grilled” by the public opinion and pretty much forced into what he was already classifying as a suicide before the official autopsy emerged.
De Kergorlay’s ardent defense of Petitclerc is available in the French original over Facebook here, a translation appears after this paragraph, as it is representative of what one finds in Catholic clergymen’s defense of their colleagues going through this kind of accusations:
“Death of priests
“Father Jean-Marie Petitclerc’s, a remarkable educator, drowning saddens us all. And forces to ask a lot of questions. He was, apparently, very affected by the accusation of “voyeurism” and the suspension of the ministry he had been subjected to. He immediately appealed a decision that seemed to him completely baseless.
“He is not the first one.
“In a few years, we count a dozen suicides of priests, falsely or rightly accused. Never seen before.
“Since the CIASE (Sauvé) report, the ecclesiastical authorities have decided zero-tolerance. Any accused priest is immediately suspended and his name in the media to provoke further possible complaints. Even before the conclusions of a judicial investigation, the priest is “grilled” in public opinion. He’ll never find his place. Even if there is no formal case against him, it is over.
“The priest is a man of mercy. Pope Francis used to repeat to the confessors: ‘Forgive, always forgive.’ But this probably doesn’t apply to those accused of sexual offenses.
“In this case, the mercy he preaches fades before the justice system, and a justice more ruthless than civil criminal justice. In the Church, there is no prescription or presumption of innocence. We punish first. Maybe God will have mercy next.
[IMAGE: Phillippe de Kergorlay, French Catholic priest, 2012. From his Facebook profile.]
“We think about this hadith where Muhammad first stoned an adulterer woman so that she can then benefit from Allah’s mercy. When it comes to sexual abuse, our authorities become Muslims.
“We wonder why Jesus never speaks in terms of guilty and victims, why he speaks of so much mercy and so little justice, why he chose apostles with a heavy past like the tax collector or the zealot, or ready to betray like Judas or to deny like Peter. Jesus was very naïve and didn’t know about sexual assault.
“The National Education or the Ministry of Youth and Sports pay more attention to their staff. They know that teachers and coaches have a tough job and can have vulnerabilities. No need to risk a suicide spree by early media exposure. Investigations are more discreet but not less rigorous.
“The church hierarchy have just changed, both at the level of bishops and the religious. One can expect more delicacy and more attention to really contemporary issues. The alerts issued by CIVIISE about the 300,000 children abused every year in France, the worrying increase in sexual assaults committed by minors or the exponential growth of cyber-pedocriminality require the mobilization of all.
“And above all, teaching about true love is a priority where the Church has its place.
“Father Philippe de Kergorlay, priest.”
Abusing Said
De Kergorlay is a French priest living in Izmir, Turkey. Perhaps that plays a role in his contradictory take on clergy sexual abuse; how he “edits” Biblical passages talking about a “Muhammad” casting the first stone against the adulterer woman and how he uses Muslim as derogatory to criticize his own Church.
He is willing to “Orientalize,” following Edouard Said’s understanding of Orientalism, his own Catholic Church to preserve priestly privilege when dealing with abuse, further eroding any will to actually believe the Church’s commitment to prevent and punish clergy sexual abuse.
As a resident of Turkey, De Kergorlay is a priest operating outside his own country and his own Church’s main area of influence and yet, instead of showing a more nuanced understanding of societies with Muslim majorities, he uses “Muslim” as adjective to charge against the French bishops while attempting a rather contradictory defense of Petitclerc.
Instead of acknowledging the many instances where Catholic priests and their allies in the hierarchy and the laity have destroyed the lives of victims of clergy sexual abuse, their relatives, and friends by describing them as “enemies of the Church,” “communists,” and the usual flurry of “niceties”, he doubles down on priestly privilege, to implicitly ask for the return of the “good old days” of secrecy and not so veiled attacks on victims and their friends as the standard operating procedure of a Church unwilling to acknowledge its own mistakes.
According to De Kergorlay’s social media indictment there is not enough mercy for priests such a Petitclerc. He says so despite the fact that French authorities set no restrictions on Petitclerc’s ministry, even to minors, and that, if one follows Catholic medium Famille Chretiene’s account, it was him and the Salesians who decided early, when the accusation emerged, to remove him from such ministry.
Policy or slogan?
So, despite De Kergorlay’s unsupported claims about the role of zero-tolerance in whatever happened to Petitclerc, as it is easier to find instances of dismissal of a true zero-tolerance approach than an abundance of examples of bishops way too zealous when enforcing said approaches, he has no issue when calling “Muslim” any attempt at transparency and accountability when dealing with sexual abuse.
English Edition
New cases of abuse at the Legion of Christ: Zero-tolerance is a slogan
This is more relevant as prior installments of this series, see above and below, proved that the zero-tolerance approach in the Catholic Church is more a slogan than an actual policy when dealing with clergy sexual abuse.
English Edition
Is the Catholic Church‘s talk about zero-tolerance for real?
Far from a uniform policy, what those installments found was a patchwork of excuses to actually avoid following a true zero-tolerance policy when dealing with reports, accusations, and even in those cases where a priest has been sentenced and is or has been in prison because of his behavior, as Julio César Grassi’s case illustrates.
Grassi, an Argentine priest, is the first of the seven cases summarized in the story linked below. Despite being jailed after a sentence ratified after the appeal process, he remains a priest, and his superiors allow him to attend his parole hearings wearing clerical attire.
English Edition
Seven stories of clergy sexual abuse
So, it is really hard to credit De Kergorlay’s criticism about a way too strict take on zero-tolerance, and more so when he goes to say, with no evidence, that “in a few years, we count a dozen suicides of priests, falsely or rightly accused. Never seen before.”
There are several problems with De Kergorlay’s take. First, as several previous installments of this series dealing with French cases prove, zero-tolerance remains a distant goal, even in Marseille, Cardinal Jean-Marc Aveline’s see, who is the current president of the conference of Catholic Bishops of France, as the section “The Exorcist” of the story linked after this paragraph proves.
English Edition
The trouble with Catholic movements: the visitation to the Emmanuel
Also, he offers no actual evidence of his claim about “dozens of priests” dying because of overzealous bishops willing to punish them immediately. Also, Petitclerc was already in his third judiciary process for some kind of sexual offense. Back in 1999 and 2014 French authorities probed him.
If that was not enough, among the few known reported cases of priests committing suicide, some of them were clearly identified by victims of clergy sexual abuse as their predators.
Argentine nightmares
One shocking case comes from the archdiocese of La Plata, Argentina, during the short tenure there of current prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Tucho Fernández.
Back in 2019, when confronted with his imminent arrest, Argentine diocesan priest Eduardo Lorenzo killed himself with a gunshot to the heart at the offices of Catholic Charities. A “friendly” voice told him that the local police had already a warrant for his arrest and that they were closing in on him.
Eduardo Lorenzo committed the sin for which there is no potential pardon in Catholic theology on December 16, 2019, nine months after now-Cardinal Fernández publicly supported Lorenzo despite the allegations against the already then-embattled priest for the sexual abuse of underage, marginalized males.
Víctor Manuel Fernández, then archbishop of La Plata, Argentina, concelebrates Mass with Eduardo Lorenzo; the composite image also includes a separate portrait of Lorenzo taken weeks before his 2019 suicide. Social media of the Archdiocese of La Plata.
Despite the many requests from the faithful in La Plata, the capital of Argentina’s most populous province, Fernández concelebrated a public Mass with Lorenzo, as to endorse his pastoral work even if he balked on his decision to appoint Lorenzo as chaplain of a local Catholic school.
Fernández did so despite the fact he was relatively new to the position as he had been appointed only in June of 2018, and most of Lorenzo’s crimes happened during Héctor Rubén Aguer’s 20-year long tenure as archbishop of La Plata (1998-2018), which had been marred by other cases with open judiciary processes up until now in Argentine courts.
Allegations regarding Lorenzo’s abuse of teenagers accumulated during Aguer’s tenure who, in 3-D fashion, dismissed them while moving his influence to protect Lorenzo and other priests.
Lorenzo was, until his death, Julio César Grassi’s confessor, so it is not hard to imagine that the same powerful clergy networks protecting Grassi up until today from laicization or defrocking, were also moved to protect Lorenzo until they were unable to do so.
A long-standing body of knowledge and jurisprudence in the English-speaking world regards suicides by individuals accused of heinous crimes as a reflection of their own admission of guilt. This is also captured by the authors of this 1957 note on the judicial interpretation of suicide, who state:
The suicide attempt of an accused between the time of his alleged crime and his trial has uniformly been admitted against him on the theory that it shows deserved remorse or a desire to escape deserved punishment.
In contrast to De Kergorlay’s “theological” framing, calling “Muslim” his own church for advancing some measures of accountability, secular law, at least in the Common Law tradition, has a long-standing principle that views such a suicide, especially when executed before a trial as presumptive evidence of guilt and fear of consequences.
This principle, though more prevalent in the Common Law tradition than in the Civil Law systems of Latin America, illustrates the notion of “admission by conduct,” that explains the need to probe suicide cases with similar standards to those of a homicide, as to figure out what was behind the decision of an alleged guilty party to end his or her life. More so if the suicidal subject is leaving accomplices and/or victims behind
Main problem for clerics such as De Kergorlay is that their longing for a complicit hierarchy, willing to stand behind accused priests was the standard operating procedure of the Catholic Church for most of the 20th century.
Memories of Seville
Even if it is impossible to accurately track the prevalence of clergy sexual abuse in the 19th century, in Latin America there is a written, even if incomplete, record of how the Church itself used to deal with this issue from the 16th through the 18th centuries, when the Holy Inquisition was an entity of the Spanish Empire, operating out of Seville, with the authority to investigate and punish its own priests.
The Inquisition’s historical record proves that the Church did, at one time, possess formal, centuries-old systems for self-investigation. The “circling the wagons” approach of the 20th century was thus a retreat from accountability, chosen during the Cold War under the guise of protecting the institution from authoritarian regimes and the perfect excuse to develop and apply the aforementioned 3D approach, as in “Deflect-Dismiss-Deny.”
De Kergorlay’s corrosive defense of clerical privilege, while seemingly aimed at protecting accused French priests, using Petitclerc’s death to spread guilt over victims unwilling to keep quiet, uncovers the kind of troubling foundations allowing for the toxic legitimization and naturalization of clergy sexual abuse, which follows the faulty comparison between clergy sexual abuse and abuse coming from relatives, doctors, teachers, and friends of the families where those crimes happen.
To be sure, any sexual abuse merits condemnation, more so when the victim is an underage person, but it is impossible to compare the kind of institutional cover that Catholic, Anglican, or Mormon religious leaders get for their crimes with the rather limited cover that a predator within a family could get on his or her own when abusing a relative.
And even worse, De Kergorlay’s contradicts himself. He does so when praising CIVIISE’s take on abuse in other-than-religious contexts in France, but that entity, the Independent Commission on Incest and Sexual Violence Against Minors, credits CIASE, the entity behind the Sauvé Report, as its own inspiration to achieve their goals as stated in their website (content in French) when it describes its origins as:
Inspired on the model of the Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Church, it seeks to listen at all the victims of incest and sexual violence during their childhood and to develop policy suggestions.
Moreover, it is not as if De Kergorlay is proposing something new. In actuality he seems to be seeking a return to the “Deflect-Dismiss-Deny” approach that put the Catholic Church and many other religious institutions where they are these days.
Trust in the Catholic Church?
Back in September, an installment of this series, linked after this paragraph, was devoted to a very basic analysis of the numbers coming from the Latinobarómetro series on trust and membership in the Catholic Church.
English Edition
Latin American Catholics lose trust, is sexual abuse the culprit?
One finds similar numbers in Canada, the United States and Europe, as the installment after this paragraph told, so it is really hard to figure out what is De Kergorlay’s silver lining when going through the maze of his depiction of his own church as “Muslim” when it pays attention to the victims of clergy sexual abuse.
English Edition
Spain, Argentina, Germany, and UK: the sexual abuse crisis
The return for institutional secrecy De Kergorlay advocates as a solution for France is the kind of secrecy one finds in Mexico from the Catholic and Luz del Mundo churches, forcing their survivors to seek the protection of the U.S. justice whenever possible to achieve justice there.
But that is also why Leo XIV’s interview with Crux, where he offered a take quite similar to De Kergorlay’s about “innocent priests,” becoming the target of hyperactive victims all too willing to render any interaction with priests as suspect of being clergy sexual abuse is troubling too. The story linked after this paragraph went over the risks of the new Pope following such approach.
English Edition
Leo XIV and sexual abuse, a slip of the tongue or a prophecy?
In Latin America, however, it is necessary to also beware of swift moves to solve crimes such as the murder of Ernesto Hernández Vilchis near Mexico City, conveniently coinciding with the government’s need to calm the national debate over widespread violence, is the ultimate manifestation of this failure.
The Hernández Vilchis case, located near the capital’s political center, seems to be on a fast-track route to a quick and easy solution, while the Estrada case, deep in the Guerrero cartel heartland, seems to follow the traditional turtle-speed of Mexican law enforcement.
[PHOTO: Ernesto Hernández Vilchis, pictured in an undated photo from the social media of the diocese of Cuautitlán, Mexico.]
Early this year this series took a deep plunge into how the clergy sexual abuse crisis has been happening in the neighboring diocese of Izcalli, a “daughter” of the diocese of Cuautitlán, as it was created with territory from it back in 2014 and where Hernández Vilchis was incardinated or associated.
The section “Murder in the vicary” of the story linked after this paragraph goes into more details of what is now a “cold case” for the Mexican authorities, the assassination of the then Judicial Vicar of the diocese of Izcalli, back in 2018.
English Edition
The Church’s loss of moral authority and transparency allows the political elite to easily manipulate the narrative around the death of a priest for immediate political gain. It is way too early to figure out what will happen there. Is there a more conflicted relationship between Father Ernesto Hernández and his assassins about to emerge in Mexican media?
If so, the Mexican Catholic Church, with its adherence to the 3D approach will have a hard time portraying itself again as the victim of a conspiracy to hurt it. Little more than a year ago the country went in less than 48 hours from the sorrow of the alleged disappearance of Salvador Rangel Mendoza, the elderly emeritus bishop of Chilapa-Chilpancingo, to the pain and mockery of the prelate who emerged at a public hospital of Cuernavaca, Morelos, after being drugged over a visit to a short-term hotel in that region, as the story linked after this paragraph told at the time.
English Edition
The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week of the Church in Mexico
What is clear is that both the Catholic Church and the Latin American republics need better approaches to deal with their own issues, and not the “crowd pleasers” dispensed by De Kergorlay over his social media.
Perceptions of the role of priests as social and religious leaders have changed. If back in the 1970s or 1980s the assassination of a priest had the potential to shock full communities and even countries, as Mugica’s, Romero’s and Popiełuszko’s, nowadays the perception is clouded by doubts about their actual role in public and private activities.
[PHOTO: Then bishop of Chilpancingo-Chilapa Salvador Rangel Mendoza and two seminarians during the pilgrimage to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, 2020. Social media of the diocese.]
It would be naïve to dismiss the role of clergy sexual abuse has had in this change, but one must be warned about building an idealized past, as the stories of Louisiana brothers Bernard and Marcus prove. Violence has been there for many decades, perhaps even longer. The key issue is how the institutions deal with it and try to prevent it.
What should be clear, however, is that clerics’ takes such as De Kergorlay’s aiming at going back to opacity and what this series calls the “3D approach” when dealing with clergy sexual abuse are marred with inconsistencies and contradictions and would be counterproductive for all parties involved.
Post-Data
Late on Saturday November 22, the Bollettino of the Holy See informed that Pope Leo XIV had accepted the resignation of the bishop of Cádiz, Spain, Rafael Zornoza Boy. A previous installment of the series dealt with his case. Sadly, his record remains, at least for now, untouched. Catholic-Hierarchy, a trusted source of information on these issues, has him as “emeritus” and “retired.”
In the mean time, Pope Prevost appointed Ramón Darío Valdivia Jiménez, the auxiliary bishop of Seville as the Apostolic Administrator of the diocese of Cádiz. The story linked after this paragraph has more details of Zornoza’s case.
English Edition
Is Leo XIV signaling the need for a new model to tackle abuse?
A summary of this installment of the series is available for listening after this paragraph.
Note: This installment uses a detail of Gustave Klimt‘s The Jurisprudence (1918) as the thematic background for most of the illustrations. The main collage image uses photos of Fr. Bertoldo Pantaleón Estrada, Fr. Alexsandro da Silva Lima, and a congratulatory card for Fr. Hernández Vilchis (all sourced from diocesan social media), as well as a photo of French Salesian Petitclerc by Claude Truong-Ngoc/Wikimedia Commons, dated 2015. Fr. Estrada’s pictures appears in two different sizes and illustrations.