P. José Antúnez de Mayolo, S.D.B.

On May 7, 2017, the program Punto Final featured interviews of two men who said that Padre Antúnez de Mayolo sexually abused them as children. Musician Américo Legua Díaz was nine years old in 1980, performing altar boy duties at Sagrado Corazón de Jesús parish in Magdalena del Mar, Lima, when Antúnez de Mayolo allegedly began sexually violating him. The incidents occurred over two or three years, until Legua was 11 or 12, and ranged from inappropriate touches to anal rape. In 2015, Legua formally reported his abuse to the Salesian congregation, then headed by Provincial Santo Dal Ben. In February 2017, the Salesians informed him that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had reviewed the case and decided to dismiss it. No explanation was given.

The Punto Final segment also featured the testimony of “Luis,” who said he was age 15, attending the Salesian school in Arequipa, when Padre Antúnez de Mayolo asked to meet with him privately to discuss the boy’s alleged homosexual leanings. Antúnez de Mayolo allegedly told the boy to take off his pants and the priest fondled his genitals. Luis said that he did not report to the Salesians but that he knew other victims who had.

In a public response to the Punto Final program, the Salesians stated that the Vatican had closed Legua’s case “due to a lack of sufficient evidence.” They said they were unaware of any additional victims and suggested that those testimonies could be presented to the Salesians’ Commission for the Protection of Minors.

According to Martin Scheuch in a post on his blog, Las Lineas Torcidas, reports there is no record that any of the victims or witnesses filed a complaint against Antúnez de Mayolo with the civil courts. Scheuch also reveals that the case against the priest had been re-opened after Américo Legua wrote a letter to Pope Francis in April 2017. Nonetheless, church officials dismissed the case without ever asking Legua to testify:

“And while in the case of Américo Legua there was a canonical process, since his complaint was sent by the Salesians to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the latter decided in 2016 to close it due to a ‘lack of credibility.’ The case was reopened after the Peruvian musician wrote a letter to Pope Francis, dated April 4, 2017. Even so, in December 2017, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith decided to definitively close the complaint against Father Antúnez de Mayolo, due to ‘an absolute absence of evidence to support the claims contained in the complaint.’ At no time was the victim contacted or summoned to testify, nor was he ever officially notified of how the process was going, what its outcome was, much less what the arguments were for its dismissal.”

Antúnez de Mayolo appears to have remained a Salesian in good standing until his death at age 95 on April 9, 2022. An obituary that appeared in a Salesian publication made no mention of the allegations against him. It praised him as a “man of God” with “a serene disposition and the big heart of a shepherd.”