In 2018, EL PAÍS launched an investigation into paedophilia in the Spanish Church and has a database updated with all known cases. If you know of any case that has not seen the light of day, you can write to us at: [email protected]. If it is a case in Latin America, the address is: [email protected].
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Bolivia’s Attorney General’s Office has formally charged three senior officials of the Society of Jesus with covering up the abuse of minors by the Spanish archbishop of La Paz, Alejandro Mestre, who died in 1988 and who raped a minor twice in 1961. Among those accused is Bernardo Mercado, 43 years old and current provincial of the Society, the most senior position of the Jesuits in the Latin American country. The other two accused of cover-ups are the Bolivian Osvaldo Chirveches, 52 years old, and the octogenarian Spaniard Ignacio Suñol, who also served as provincial between 2014 and 2018 in the first case, and between 2019 and 2022 in the second. The Society of Jesus is the religious order to which Pope Francis belongs.
“According to the evidence collected by the Prosecutor’s Office, in November 2021, the then head of Healthy Environments of the provincial curia, Osvaldo Chirveches, would have taken note of the fact and referred the case to the provincial head of that administration, Ignacio Suñol, who instructed the opening of an investigation within the framework of canon law that governs the Catholic Church. The investigation was led by Chirveches, who decided to close the case and brought it to the attention of the current provincial, Bernardo Mercado, who after reviewing the background, closed the case,” the Public Ministry said on Thursday in a press release to inform of the measures.
Bolivian Attorney General Juan Lanchipa told the media that afternoon that he had also requested precautionary measures against the accused, such as a ban on leaving the country, house arrest, a ban on communicating with the victims by any means and an obligation to appear before “the authority designated by the judge,” among others. All the provincials of the Society of Jesus in Bolivia, from the 1970s to the present, are now accused of having covered up cases of paedophilia within their ranks.
The new charge is part of the extensive investigation that the Bolivian Prosecutor’s Office launched into cases of paedophilia in Jesuit schools after EL PAÍS revealed a year ago the diary of the Spanish missionary Alfonso Pedrajas, who died in 2009, in which he admitted having abused at least 85 children in Bolivia and described how his superiors covered up his crimes.
The publication caused an earthquake in the Latin American country and new cases, until then hidden by the Society, came to light. Among them, that of the Spanish archbishop Alejandro Mestre, accused of sexually assaulting a child when he was still a teacher at the San Calixto school in La Paz. In fact, forced by media pressure, the order then handed over part of the investigations it had conducted internally, such as that of Mestre. “The three high-ranking Jesuits [Mercado, Chirveches y Suñol]despite being aware of the existence of indications of the criminal act, did not refer the case to the relevant authorities of the Bolivian justice system, where the criminal investigation should be carried out, in an apparent intention to cover up the sexual assaults that Archbishop Alejandro Mestre had allegedly committed. On May 8, 2023, they filed the complaint, when another case of pedophilia came to light and the Public Prosecutor’s Office announced an ex officio investigation against Jesuits who were aggressors of minors,” the Prosecutor’s Office emphasizes in its statement.
The Bolivian Society of Jesus has declined to comment. “Provincial Bernardo Mercado has not been notified by the prosecution until now. In order to make any statement in this regard, the legal counsel of the Society needs to know the substance of the accusation referred to. In this regard, the background of the aforementioned case was publicly exposed last year,” a spokesman for the order told EL PAÍS.
Mestre, born in the Valencian town of Quart de Poblet in 1912, is the first Spaniard who, having reached the position of bishop, was accused of a crime of pederasty. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1928 and was ordained in 1943. Sources of the order in Spain report that there are no records of accusations of pederasty against him in Spain and they do not have the date on which he was sent to Bolivia, where he carried out his career. He was appointed auxiliary bishop of Sucre in 1976 and promoted to coadjutor archbishop of La Paz in 1982. His career led him to the position of general secretary of the Bolivian Episcopal Conference in the early 1980s, one of the most influential positions in the Church in the Latin American country.
The Vatican
Given the importance of the case, the Public Prosecutor’s Office formed a commission of prosecutors to investigate the events. At the same time, it requested documentation from the Vatican on possible complaints against priests for paedophilia in Bolivia, both Mestre and the other accused who had come to light. In this regard, the Attorney General has announced that the Secretariat of the Holy See has recently responded that “there are no documents regarding the persons subject to the request.” However, and according to the internal documentation of the Society that this newspaper revealed a month ago, the General Curia of the Jesuits was aware of several cases of paedophilia and how they were covered up in the past.
Furthermore, some of these internal reports to which EL PAÍS had access show that the Vatican has had access to the files of some investigations launched by the Bolivian Jesuits. An example is the case of the Catalan missionary Lucho Roma, who also wrote a diary in which he described how he abused more than a hundred indigenous girls in Charagua and Trinidad and Pampa, between 1983 and 2005, how he photographed them and recorded them on video. The Jesuits began an investigation at the beginning of 2019 after receiving a complaint and found all this material, but they did not report it to the civil authorities. Lucho Roma, who was still alive, admitted his crimes in writing, before a notary. The Society in Bolivia did not compensate the victims, despite the fact that at least 70 of them appeared identified by name and surname in the paedophile’s writings. Finally, the files were put away in a drawer after Lucho Roma’s death in August 2019. All this documentation was made public this June, in a report by this newspaper.
However, the Jesuits did send the messages to the curia in Rome. And once there, a member of the Society’s power elite, Claudio Paul, sent a series of emails to the provincial of Bolivia in 2020, then Ignacio Suñol, to inform him that the case had been registered in the Vatican, that he was ordered to make it public, compensate those affected and ensure that both the internal investigation and Lucho Roma’s diary, baptized as The Charagua Manuscriptswas hidden as “confidential” information in Rome.
For this reason, and in light of the news of the indictment of senior officials of the order, the Bolivian Community of Survivors, a national association of victims of ecclesiastical abuse, has asked the Attorney General this Friday to order the State’s departmental prosecutors to analyze the documentation published by the press in order to proceed to substantiate the charges against the Jesuits who covered up the crimes and to identify new names of those involved.
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