• Article Tools
• Print
• RSS

'Scandal and Outrage' in Latin America?

by Alejandro Bermudez 

Just coincidentally, of course, the different Latin American branches of “Catholics for Choice,” known as “Católicas por el derecho a decidir,” recently protested together in front of the apostolic nunciatures in several South American countries.

The local press also covered stories about sex abuse allegations involving priests in Chile and Brazil.

Thus, a well known international news agency, which has been leading the “discoveries” that supposedly implicate Pope Benedict in the “cover up” of sex abuse cases, ran a story that opened this way:  “Outrage over the church's handling of sexual abuse allegations against priests is spreading across Latin America, where the large majority of more than 500 million people are Roman Catholics.”

What are the signs of such “outrage” over the “scandal?” If measured by the protests coordinated by Catholics for Choice with local Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transsexual (GLBT) groups, not too many.

Only 30 people showed up at the apostolic nunciature in Bolivia on April 21, while some 80 protesters – also mainly GLBT – gathered last Saturday in Lima. However, they were more than matched by the more than 300 Catholic counter-protesters who lined the sidewalk to protect the nunciature.

The Catholic counter-protest was organized mostly via Facebook. Past GLBT protests in Argentina and Colombia have ended up with the desecration of cathedrals and church buildings.

Is Latin America free from clerical sexual abuse? Of course not. And there is no national episcopate that would say so.

On the contrary, bishops in Chile, Mexico and Brazil, just to mention a few, have renewed or tightened policies to deal with sex abuse cases.

They have also acknowledged – in Mexico, Chile and Argentina – that the way the problem was dealt with in the past, especially during the ‘60s and ‘70s, was too heavily influenced by mental health professionals who claimed that pedophilia and ephebophilia were curable.

Very recently, after watching in disbelief coverage of the American sex abuse scandal, a Mexican bishop told me, “In the diocesan files rests a letter addressed by a psychiatrist to one of my predecessors not only declaring a pedophile priest to be completely cured, but harshly demanding in the name of justice his pastoral reinstatement.”

“Thank God my predecessor sent him back to his country, but that is the kind of advice the bishops would get a couple of decades ago,” he said in frustration. “And now we (bishops) are all guilty and accountable for past actions, while the inventor of lobotomy is still on the list of the Nobel Prize winners.”

The press has indeed been jumping over almost any case in the region, trying to present them all as “mounting evidence” of a pervasive problem irresponsibly managed by the Church.

One story reported: “Chile’s bishops on Tuesday asked for forgiveness for past cases of abuse. On Thursday, a prosecutor announced a criminal investigation of a popular retired priest, Fernando Karadima, accused of sexually abusing five young men in his parish residence.”

The case of Father Karadima, mentor to more than 30 priests and at least five bishops, has many nuances that are not being reported. Among them are several credible claims that the accusations have been fabricated, as well as the fact that one accuser has begun changing the details of his story.

Overall, greater context is needed to understand the issue at hand. Child sex abuse is rampant in Latin America, but almost 70% takes place in the family environment. Jails are filled with rapist stepparents. One of the most popular Catholic figures in Chile and Argentina, Blessed Laurita Vicuña, died at the age of 12 partly because of sexual aggression by her mother’s partner.

In countries like Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti, sex tourism is the source of large-scale, vastly unaccounted sexual abuse of minors. Public schools in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, especially in the rural areas, account for 12 to 17% of child sexual abuse.

Clerical sex abuse is probably equally or more underreported than other cases, but regional experts agree that it barely accounts for 1% of all cases.

Finally, the shame of these few priests cannot diminish the irreplaceable role of priests and religious in Latin America’s most remote areas. They bring the kind of spiritual and human assistance absolutely no other institution, including governments, are able to provide.

(For example, in the early 1990s, when Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori locked horns with the bishops because of his compulsory birth control policy, he quickly had to stop grandstanding against the Church when he discovered that the only way to build schools in the most remote places of the Andes and the Amazon jungle was to give the job to the only people there: Catholic missionaries.)

It seems the international press is not ready to move on to a different subject, and clerical sex abuse will still remain in the headlines for quite a while.

But if you read about “mounting outrage against the Church in Latin America,” where almost half of the world’s Catholics live, I would strongly suggest you take it with a grain of salt.

---

(The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Headline Bistro or the Knights of Columbus.)