(CHILE)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
February 16, 2026
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
[See the letter by the Berríos survivors in English and Spanish.]
Both Berríos and Rupnik were, at some point in their lives, Jesuit priests. Both have been credibly accused of sexually abusing females.
The Society of Jesus, the so-called Jesuits, separately expelled Berríos and Rupnik, acknowledging the kind of damage both inflicted upon their victims.
However, Berríos and Rupnik remain priests because the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith remains tied to a self-serving set of rules designed to protect predators and clergymen at large.
On Monday, February 9, a group of three survivors of abuse at the hands of Chilean former Jesuit priest Felipe Berríos del Solar published, on behalf of a larger group, a gut-wrenching open letter.
The piece, available in both Spanish and English further down, is a painful and detailed account of the fate many survivors of clergy sexual abuse in Chile, Latin America and the world still confront.
Their story is similar to others coming out of several places in the United States these days with details about how Jeffrey Epstein, his accomplices, partners in crime, and those who still protect them, are able to dismiss the damage they continue to inflict upon their victims. Paradoxically, they do so while trying to become the victims of what they render as schemes to damage their reputation.
It is the so-called DARVO strategy, an acronym standing for Denial, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. First, the perpetrator denies the attack ever happened, then almost immediately attacks whoever is accusing or talking about the accusations raised against him or her; then, turns the table of victimhood, rendering him or herself as the true victim, to end with some kind of offense as to question the credibility of whoever is raising the accusations.
Most recently, it was possible to see Pam Bondi, the head of the U.S. Department of Justice, use DARVO-like techniques during the February 11 congressional hearing to avoid acknowledging the many mistakes made by her teams while releasing the so-called Epstein files.
She did so while refusing to apologize to the victims, some of whom were there, at the U.S. House of Representatives. Instead of that or at least acknowledging some wrongdoing, Bondi portrayed herself and more prominently Donald Trump, a key character in said files, as victims of attacks by “the media.”
Bondi did her best to reverse-victim her and her boss by yelling about how the media is unwilling to acknowledge the “great economy” that the Trump administration claims to be building, as if there was a way to somehow connect the alleged performance of the economy with the still uncertain fate of many of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices.
In the Chilean victims’ letter one finds, as in many other public statements from survivors of abuse, sexual or otherwise, traces of how their predator follows the DARVO strategy.
Berríos del Solar renders himself as the victim of what in MAGA parlance would be “fake victims,” who are actually intent, if one believes the former Jesuit’s account, in destroying him.
However, as the victims stress over several lines of their letter, while Berríos del Solar has had relatively easy and open access to media, legacy and otherwise, very willing to open their mics to him and to amplify his DARVO-inspired tactics, the victims find it hard to access media.
At some point, the Chilean survivors stress how Chilean media are more than willing to amplify Berríos’s portrayal of them as “damaged, weak people,” as to imply they are acting out of spite and not real, actual, grievances. The full letter appears, with an English-language translation after this paragraph, as a PDF file.
Other similarities are evident when one goes over Berríos del Solar’s bio and recalls his role as the poster boy of the Catholic Church engagement with the needs of the most marginalized in Chile. Where Bondi uses the alleged magnificence of Trump’s economy, former Jesuit Berríos brags about his take on the “option of the poor.”
Neither Bondi nor Berríos would ever acknowledge, however, how they use both notions as an excuse to dismiss the concerns and legitimate allegations from the survivors of abuse at the hands of Epstein and Berríos themselves.
This is more troubling for Berríos’s survivors, since the only reason why their predator is free is because the crimes as such have prescribed. Not because there is any doubt about him attacking underage females under his care while he was a priest in the nineties and Aughts, as the story linked after this paragraph told a few months ago.
Pharisee-like trap
What happens with Berríos is more troubling as there are other cases where the civil authorities in Latin American countries decide to follow the more traditional and safer route of acknowledging the statute of limitations and their consequences.
In the story linked above, there are references to similar cases in Argentine courts, where the statute of limitations is the sole reason why predator priests are still free to roam Catholic parishes, despite the risk posed to a decreasing flock, as the story linked after this paragraph with data from the Pew Research Center told a few weeks ago.
Even if the main issue is still the sexual abuse of many victims, adult or underage, males and females alike, a major issue is also that of the institutional paralysis one finds all over Latin American when dealing with these issues.
The paralysis affects both the civil authorities and the Catholic hierarchy in each country. If in California and New York in the United States the local authorities figured out ways to bypass the statute of limitations and the unwillingness of the Federal authorities to intervene. Instead of dismissing the victims’ pain or attacking the religious institutions as such, the state governments in Sacramento and Albany were willing to find a solution
Something similar has been done by the French and German Catholic bishops. Instead of taking for granted the safety trap offered by the statute of limitations or similar laws, in France they have created a mechanism to deal with the issue, while in Germany each diocese is building something similar.
There is no single hint of a similar solution anywhere from Mexico to Argentina or Chile. Quite the opposite.
A credible revival
In France one is even able to find credible news about a small but notable resurgence of Catholicism in the aftermath of the publication of the Sauvé Report, as reported by La Croix (content in French) and other Catholic media there. Such “miracle” is possible only because the French bishops have been willing to acknowledge their mistakes.
The ten-thousand adult French persons actively becoming Catholics, is believable because there has been an open debate of the issue, the bishops were willing to commission the Sauvé Report, and even if sometimes they seem to be willing to avoid the consequences, they have acknowledged their mistakes. Moreover, they are either willing to sell diocesan property or to force the religious orders operating in their dioceses to sell their own Real Estate to provide a measure of justice to the victims.
Also, unlike what used to be the usual “conspiracy of silence,” nowadays French bishop are willing, with Rome’s approval, to repudiate their colleagues, such as Jean-Paul Gabriel Émile Gusching, the now emeritus bishop of Verdun, who after being forced out of office, tried to cling to the old Catholic ways of permanent denial of any wrongdoing, as the story linked after this paragraph told back in 2025, when comparing two similar cases, his from France and another from Peru.
One only needs to pay attention to what has happened over the last year to the victims of the Catholic school of Our Lady of Bétharram in Southern France to see how, even if issues remain in French Catholicism, as in the case of the Emmanuel Community (see the story linked below) or more recently with the so-called Alliance of United Hearts (content in French), a group that has been since the last decade the target of accusations of sectarian practices and attitudes, there is some actual evidence of attempts at addressing the issues.
These sectarian practices are risky because, in many cases, even if the founders or leaders of any given movement or order are not intent on promoting sexual abuse as such, the kind of attitudes usually associated with sectarian practices are the perfect breeding ground for abuse, sexual or otherwise.
The reason is relatively simple to understand if one is willing to acknowledge the complexity of religious practice: many new movements or orders put a premium on an idea of obedience usually rendered as “perfect” or absolute, even if ultimately is blind obedience that facilitates the “capture” of unsuspecting potential victims.
In doing so, these new movements facilitate the use of some level of violence even if only symbolic to achieve such perfection. Violence not always involves rape or beating a person’s face to a pulp. Frequently it is disguised as abandonment to God’s will, as a way to legitimize it.
And granted, the French bishops’ willingness to exert their influence to address the needs of the French victims does not solve all issues. In a perfect world, the French bishops would use the same influence as to force orders based in France but whose victims are not French nationals to address their needs wherever they live. That is not happening, at least not yet
Latin American stillness
The fact remains, however. While in France “something happens”, even if limited, it is impossible to find similar signs of something happening in any Latin American country. Regardless of the Church-State relation, from the allegedly “lay” Mexican design, to the very confessional status of the Catholic Church in the Dominican Republic, Panama or Peru, nothing happens on this side of the Atlantic and south of the Río Grande.
Far from putting an end to the misery of the victims, their relatives and friend, and to avoid the risk of any more media-driven scandals, Catholic bishops in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and other regions are more than willing to follow the most Pharisee-like understanding of civil and Church law, as to avoid acknowledging the abuses and any responsibility for what priests such as Berríos del Solar did.
Going back to the France vs. Peru comparison, while the French bishops and the nunciature to France were willing to acknowledge bishop Gusching’s wrongdoing, clearly stating what forced him out of office nothing remotely similar happens in Lima. It is not as if the Peruvian people were waiting for the information. But them, as many Catholics all over Latin America, do expect something similar to what the French bishops and the Pope’s representative to that European country did: a comeuppance, an acknowledgment of their mistakes.
Whether one goes in Lima to the building in Salaverry Avenue, where the nunciature to Peru sits, or if one goes to the Estados Unidos Avenue, the see of the Conference of Peruvian bishops, barely separated by less than 900 yards or 820 meters from each other, nobody is willing to acknowledge what Ciro Quispe López, the now emeritus prelate of Juli did in his former diocese.
Instead on betting on transparency and honesty, the Peruvian bishops bet their diminishing social capital on the losing proposition that their flock is dumb enough to not pay attention to the reasons behind Quispe López’s quiet “resignation”.
In his case the sole “advantage” for the Catholic hierarchy is that the victims, more than ten, were all adult females, so, the chances of the kind of scandal associated with same-sex intercourse and more so of the abuse of underage victims are, so far, close to zero, but that does not solve the larger issue of the opacity with which these issues are dismissed, hidden under a metaphorical rug.
In all probability, the monsignors at the building in the Estados Unidos Avenue, one of the nicest areas of Lima, will never acknowledge how their silence on Quispe López’s dismissal is yet another variation of the legalistic, Pharisee-like take on the issue of clergy sexual abuse.
This time around, they will not be forced to deal with victims who were minors. In those cases, they have to deal with a pretense only possible when the Catholic hierarchy is willing and able to enter into troubling agreements with the local political elites, corrupt enough to accept such transactions, despite the negative effects for the Catholic Church and the polity.
That is what transpires in many lines and full paragraphs of the Chilean survivor’s letter: the realization that the Church where they grew, betrays them. And again, in Berríos del Solar del case it is impossible to blame the 1960s sexual revolution or modernity or the “gay lobby”. Berríos del Solar, as Marko Rupnik, and many other predator priests, attacked females.
Not that pedophilia or ephebophilia, the abuse of teen-like males, are not real. There are documented cases, but the issue is not if the victim was a boy attending a male only Catholic school or a devout adult female helping out in her parish. The fact is that, whether adult or minor, there are victims of sexual abuse and the Church, in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America does its best to avoid its responsibility on the issue.
Hall of shame
And despite the recurring “theme” one finds in many social media groups associated to parishes, dioceses, religious orders, and their adjacent movements it is not only the odd case. Only in Chile it is possible to count, among the most infamous predators the likes of Fernando Karadima, Cristián Precht Bañados, Renato Poblete, John O’Reilly, and Francisco José Cox Huneeus.
In that respect, it is not hard to understand why Chile has turned into the very epitome of what happens when both the Catholic Church and the polity dismiss their duties towards their faithful and citizens.
Even if it is impossible to find the proverbial “smoking gun” proving beyond reasonable doubt that sexual abuse and the emptying of the Chilean Catholic Church’s pews are connected, that has been a working hypothesis of several installments of this series going over the specifics of clergy sexual abuse in Latin America and the Catholic Church at large.
It is not out of whim, rancor, or as the byproduct of some obscure interest. It is the consequence of paying as much attention as possible to what has happened in Chile and in many other Latin American countries over the last 30 years or so within the context of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.
If one pays more attention to the Chilean case, one only needs to pay attention to some of the now famous predators there, a “Hall-of-shame” kind of “team,” to figure that out. Karadima was guilty, only him was still willing to believe the lie of his innocence or, at least of being acquitted because one of his fellow predators priests was willing to absolve him from his sins.
Main problem is that Chilean justice found an easy way out of his case by invoking the prescription of his many crimes, while Benedict XVI was obsessed with the idea of turning Karadima into one more pink-scare, one way to insist that the main driver of the clergy sexual abuse crisis worldwide was not the theological contradictions shaping the Catholic priesthood or the absolute absence of accountability for the predator priests and the superiors and bishops and who made their careers possible.
But Benedict XVI’s ludicrous indictment of LGTBQ people meant nothing when details of what O’Reilly was doing to underage girls in the Legion of Christ’s schools for the Chilean nouveaux riches in the suburbs of the nation’s capital, Santiago.
The Chilean justice was willing to go through the liturgy of a trial, only to issue a slap-in-the-wrist kind of a sentence: four years and one day (content in Spanish at the BBC’s Spanish-language service or here the actual full sentence). The Chilean Congress went as far as to stripping him off of the Chilean citizenship and then sending him back to his native Ireland.
With Precht Bañados the issue was not only knowing about the many cases that ultimately forced Rome to defrock him. There was the added drama of witnessing the fall of a character who used to be regarded a champion of the defense of Human Rights during the César Augusto Pinochet military regime.
And with Cox Huneeus even if there was little or no actual acknowledgement of the scale of what he did as archbishop and close relative to another major figure of the Chilean episcopate, one can be sure that John Paul II would have had to know about real major crimes to be willing to perform some sort of “silent defrocking,” as to force his resignation in 1997 and send him to Germany where, many years after, he would be, finally, defrocked as bishop.
Poblete was able to hide his many abuses and lucky enough to die, in 2010 (content in Spanish), before his own myth came crumbling, turning his scholarship on theology and social sciences into a bad joke of which it is hard to imagine there will be a future recovery.
What back in the 1970s and 1980s used to be the words of a major Latin American scholar who happened to be a Jesuit priest, are now a painful reminder of how able Catholic clergymen are to compartmentalize their lives.
Only as far as Poblete is concerned, there are at least 22 documented cases of females he abused at different points in his career. The story linked before this paragraph provides a more detailed account of his case, although it is only available in Spanish. An automatic translation to English is available here.
A summary of the report on Poblete’s profile as a sexual predator is available in Spanish in the box after this paragraph.
In that regard, Berríos del Solar has been the living summary of the many contradictions shaping Chilean and Latin American Catholicism. For as long as he was able to, he played the part of potential successor to Poblete’s and to Alberto Hurtado’s legacies. Hurtado has been the subject of extended references in previous installments in this series, as the one linked after this paragraph.
What emerges of this partial recount of some of the major characters in the tragedy that is the Chilean (and Latin American) Catholicism at his time one thing is clear: just as it happens with Jeffrey Epstein’s victims in the United States these days, Felipe Berríos’s victims are revictimized on a daily basis.
It happens because both Epstein and Berríos and all the aforementioned predator Catholic clergy have been able to play their roles with plenty of advantages, with access to media willing to amplify their voices, their approaches to what they did, while the victims are for the most part denied access to similar platforms while, at the same time, have to litigate their cases from the uncomfortable position of being relatively anonymous.
The very asymmetry that made potential and actual victims, keep them in such position many years after because there are structures, both in the churches, Catholic or otherwise, and in the polity that perpetuate themselves to keep the victims as such.
The Chilean data
It should not surprise anyone the scale of what the data on religious identity and practice reports about Chile. In recent weeks, Los Angeles Press has provided evidence, as much as there is at the Latin American level of how the old Catholic monolith in the region has cracked open, with little or no expectation of a major recovery of trust in the institution and ultimately of attendance and membership.
The stories linked before and after this paragraph have provided most of the information available from the Latinobarómetro (see a few paragraphs above) and the Pew Research Center series (see below).
The informed guess about the underlying reason to the massive exodus both series describe in their numbers is that even if it is impossible to prove that the clergy sexual abuses is the main contributor to the kind of observed behavior in both series, it is possible to assert that the persistence of the abuse crisis does not help to thoroughly fix the perception of how the Catholic Church deals with the issue and how it aims at influencing other realms of public action.
More specific evidence from Chile shows a mixed reality where, even if there is some recovery of trust in the institution as such, it moves at turtle’s pace. It has gone from nine percent in 2021 to 22 percent in 2025, as the graph from the series developed by the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile after this paragraph shows.
Other pollsters in Chile offer a more generous reading of trust in the Catholic Church, CADEM-Plaza Pública, among the most notable has the Catholic Church going over the last decade from a low of 26 in 2015 to a high of 40 percent trust in 2024. Is that enough? Perhaps enough to avoid a more pugnacious attitude towards the institution, but not enough to refill the churches or to trust the Church on other issues, as the Pew Research Center data considered a couple of weeks ago proves.
It should be noticed that even if there is a somehow natural disposition to see that change as extremely positive, a recovery of sorts, the current numbers in both polls are still a far cry from what polling in the late 20th century, then the Catholic Church was perceived as having played a positive role in Chile’s return to democracy, used to report.
Whether one goes with the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile’s or with CADEM’s numbers on trust in the Catholic Church, the fact remains that, as proven by Pew Research Center’s data, attendance to Catholic services is at historical lows and chances are the very transmission of the knowledge and practices associated with the Catholic faith is also there.
As dismal as the approval rates Chilean adults give to the Courts of Justice, the Nation’s Attorney and to the National Congress, one has to wonder how much of the high disapproval rates of those civil institutions are also byproducts of their inability to work, together with the Catholic Church or among themselves, to figure out creative solutions like those crafted by the states’ legislatures in California and New York to offer a tangible solution to victims of sexual abuse, clergy or otherwise.
In that regard it is worth noting that, in the United States, the solution was not a “one-size-fits-all” policy for the whole country. The key decisions to make it possible were made in Sacramento and Albany—the state capitals of California and New York—as a subnational solution. Although in Chile the design of the unitary and central State would make it harder to follow that lead, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil have institutional designs heavily inspired by the U.S. federal model.
This confirms the idea that the lack of solutions is indeed a problem of the Catholic Church, which evades its responsibility as much as it can, but it is also a result of the unwillingness of the political elites in each country to follow the example of the governors and state lawmakers of California and New York.
In any case, the most devastating self-inflicted injury is that data on how the younger generations of Chileans are less than willing to identify themselves as Catholics, as the graph below, from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile series proves.
Catholic parallel lives
Putting the Chilean numbers aside, one must keep in mind that Berríos del Solar is not alone. On top of his membership to the Chilean Hall of Shame he has a mirror, a distant reflection, in noted predator Slovenian priest and also former Jesuit Marko Rupnik.
In Rupnik’s case it is known by now that before the trial that ultimately acknowledged some wrongdoing but fell short of actually defrocking him, back in 1993, Franc Šuštar, then the headmaster of the Catholic Seminary and as such a priest with some authority in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, and since 2015 an auxiliary bishop there, ousted Rupnik from the Community of Loyola in Mengeš, a town located less than ten miles or 15 kilometers north of Ljubljana.
The aforementioned community was originally founded by a very young Rupnik with the help of Ivanka Hosta, a Slovenian nun. Different sources claim he began abusing females precisely there. Hence the “punishment” by Šuštar, forcing Rupnik to go to Rome. Sadly, even if it is known by now that something happened at the time in that community there, details are scarce. Some evidence emerged over a 2023 interview French newspaper La Croix had with Daniele Libanori.
Libanori is a Jesuit, a former auxiliary bishop of Rome and current official of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. There he deals mostly with cases in religious orders. As such he has probed Rupnik’s time at the Loyola Community in the 1990s. In the interview, available only in Portuguese here, he provides some details about what happened at the time, but it is clear that whatever provisions existed at the time were not followed when Šuštar forced out Rupnik from that community.
Libanori appears at least in the interview to be willing to acknowledge that something awful happened there. He goes for an “Abel’s blood” metaphor when explaining why the Church was tracking what had happened in Loyola 30 years before, in the 1990s but, as it is usually the case, details are scarce.
Born in 1954, Rupnik entered religious life as a Jesuit in 1973, so by the time he and Hosta were at Loyola in 1993, he was already 39 and had been already a priest for eight years at that point after his 1985 ordination.
Oddly enough, that same year of 1993, Rupnik joined the Centro Aletti in Rome, an institution still willing to acknowledge him, up until today, as part of their faculty, as can be seen here (content in Italian).
Besides the fact that both Rupnik and Berríos have credible accusations of clergy sexual abuse against them, so credible that the Society of Jesus expelled both of them from the order as such, both also have powerful “godfathers” inside and outside of the Jesuit order, and the Catholic Church.
In Berríos’s case that is more than clear when one goes over the letter of the three survivors of his attacks and finds how easy it is for him to find willing Chilean media outlets, interested in rendering him as victim of a conspiracy of sorts.
Similarities
The most striking similarity between Berríos and Rupnik is not their sexual practices, the systematic abuse of females under their pastoral care, but the fact that their former order, the Society of Jesus was able to find reasons to expel them from it, while the anonymous judges in the Roman Curia who have judged them have been unable to defrock them, to actually strip them of their condition as priests.
Their expulsion was a rather timid attempt at acknowledging the true extent and effects of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, something the Jesuits have been emphasizing over the last decade or so through different media, as this story about an art installation proves. The fact that the story is signed by the Slovenian Jesuits and dated in 2023 is, however, a rather distressing fact when one takes into consideration how Rupnik emerged from their own ranks.
More so as in the very same website, that of the European provinces of the Society of Jesus, one can still find a 2018 story signed by the Jesuit province of Spain praising Rupnik’s art as some kind of special and unique development bringing the faithful closer to God.
The ultimate hit and miss experience, the Jesuit European website has yet another take on the issue of clergy sexual abuse by letting the world know their commitment to a Memorial Day for the victims of this scourge, a story signed by the French province of the Jesuits, available here from 2025.
Granted, at least in theory, the Roman Curia is in the process of reviewing its previous take on Rupnik so, at least on paper, there is still the chance of Rupnik being forced out of the cleric state.
Back on October 13, 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith formally named the five independent judges who will oversee the new trial. At the time, the entity headed by Argentine Cardinal Víctor Manuel Tucho Fernández, stressed the presence of females who are not Roman Curia officials in the five independent judges’ panel.
However, since that announcement, there has been a total “blackout” on procedural progress. As far as it has been possible to gather information, the trial is currently in the “instruction” phase, where the independent tribunal is reviewing the organized material and preparing to summon witnesses.
The other significant difference is that unlike Berríos, who remains what technically is known as a “vagrant priest,” that is to say a priest with no formal association to either an order or a diocese, Rupnik was immediately after his expulsion incardinated (associated) to the diocese of Koper (Slovenia).
Despite that formal association with the diocese in his native country, he continues to live in the Convent of Montefiolo (near Rome) and, as reported in late 2025, continues to travel for his artistic work under the “presumption of innocence” granted by his Slovenian bishop. Several Italian and Brazilian journalists have published pictures of Rupnik working with the masons crews fitting his mosaics at the Basilica of Our Lady of Aparecida.
In Berríos’s case it is unclear if any Chilean bishop or the superior or any order there would be willing to accept him but, following the DARVO template, he plays as much as possible the part of the victim and, perhaps more significantly, he renders himself as much as possible as a priest and “true Jesuit” in the bottom of his soul.
Post Data
In an unexpected move, the aforementioned Cardinal Fernández published historic documents dealing with the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The publication itself is an act of transparency, but it is a transparency with the handbrake on.
By publishing on February 9, 2026 the documents “for study purposes,” the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith avoids the frequent criticism raised by journalists, academics, survivors, and their advocates about the opacity with which the Holy See has been dealing with these documents.
Doing so is an explicit admission of the ineffectiveness of a model based on silence that, as such, fostered complicit and sectarian behavior under the guise of the “defense of the Church.” It is great as to perform an autopsy of why things have gone wrong at the Catholic Church but does little or nothing of value for the survivors dealing with the aftermath of abuse against their bodies and their souls.
A couple of days after Tucho Fernández published the old papers, on February 12, 2026, the diocese of Brooklyn, New York, announced a fund of hundreds of millions of dollars to settle 1,100 lawsuits under the New York Child Victims Act.
While in the United States, at least before Trump, the polity and the Catholic Church found ways to address the statute of limitations, in the worlds of Berríos and Rupnik, the “Pharisee-like” get-out-of-jail card is still the preferred “solution.”
It is good that Fernández is willing to uncover the black box of the legal architecture that allowed silence. It openly admits that there were tools fostering silence and denial, but it offers nothing else of value as it does not come with concrete measures to offer the reparation that this very architecture prevented.
Power to waive
They also prove how casuistic has been the management of the indiscipline, even when dealing with “the most damaging crime,” as the very Dicastery used to classify the sexual abuse of minors. In the 2002 Rescript, as one of many possible examples, there is the evidence of how John Paul II granted the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith the power to waive the statute of limitations “on a case-by-case basis,” ultimately admitting that the clock is an arbitrary administrative tool, not a divine or natural law.
The unavoidable question is why John Paul II decided to keep the statute of limitations as such. And it is hard to imagine any other response that it was out of the benefits derived from having such a powerful device. A nuclear button Joseph Ratzinger could use or not at will to protect serial predators such as Marcial Maciel, dear to the Polish Pope.
For the specific case of Berrios (and Rupnik) the newly available documents prove that bypassing the statute of limitations was not a machination of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, but a tool both John Paul II and Benedict XVI kept under wraps. Deciding not to use it was (and remains) a political decision, not a real limitation.
Would not be good if these documents, now available only in Latin or Italian had official translations to English, Spanish, and other major modern languages?
Would not be good for Cardinal Fernández to publish the 1922 document, nowadays only available in Latin over Bishop Accountability?
Would not be now a good time to promote a major reform of the canonical procedure as to prevent the pain the Chilean victims of Berríos del Solar depict in their letter? What prevents Rome to pursue a reform to allow a more open and transparent communication with victims?
Would not be good for Cardinal Fernández to write up a rescript suggesting Pope Leo XIV the need to obliterate the statute of limitations from Canon Law?
Without such reforms, eliminating the pervasive secret nature of the process and the obliteration of the statute of limitations, the Catholic Church pushes forward but only to provide, as with the newly available documents, more elements for the autopsy of faulty, toxic system.
With such reforms, the Catholic Church as a whole would prove it is willing to walk the walk on the clergy sexual abuse crisis. Without a true commitment to reform, the very credibility of the Catholic Church remains severely affected.
A few hours before Cardinal Fernández’s decision to publish the documents, details emerged of how Steve Bannon machinated much of his defense of Jeffrey Epstein, an effort to whitewash the predator’s public persona, while sustaining a relentless attack on Pope Francis. The attack was bankrolled by European elites angered at the Argentine pope’s closeness to causes such as the environment, the protection of migrants’, First Nations’ and workers’ rights around the world.
The revelations confirmed that the attacks on Francis coming from media such as EWTN and its associates in the United States, The Catholic Herald in the United Kingdom, and Infovaticana in the Spanish-speaking world was anything but organic. Francis himself called EWTN’s take on him “the Devil’s work.”
However, for many survivors of Catholic clergy sexual abuse, the news became a nightmare of its own as it puts them between the proverbial “rock and a hard place.” They are forced to acknowledge a complex reality where the Catholic Church, even if committed to causes such as the protection of migrants, exhibits similar behavior with the predators in Jeffrey Epstein’s networks.
On one side, survivors face an institution hiding behind technicalities and “Pharisee-like” tricks such as the canonical statute of limitations, which is a theological nightmare of its own as there is no statute of limitations on sin. On the other, they have been witnesses of actors such as Bannon attacking Francis for his support to noble causes, while simultaneously acting as Epstein’s “corner man”.
More so, as the source of many of the attacks on Francis come from a former member of the Legion of Christ: Thomas Williams, Elizabeth Lev’s husband. She is Mary Ann Glendon’s daughter. Glendon served as the U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See (2008-9) under George W. Bush.
Williams and Lev fathered a child in the Aughts while Williams was a priest, the Legion’s top moral theologian and an official spokesman, especially in the English-speaking world. He was Mel Gibson’s advisor for his Passion of the Christ (2004) movie.
After Williams’s secret relationship with Lev emerged, he was forced out of the priesthood and became Breitbart’s Rome bureau correspondent, with frequent on-screen commentaries in Fox News where he was intent on attacking Francis, following what we know now were Bannon’s and Epstein’s designs to force Francis out of office through scandals. He now offers commentary for the far-right cable channel NewsMax.