EL PAÍS launched an investigation into pedophilia in the Spanish Church in 2018 and has a database updated with all known cases. If you know of a 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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Every two months, a former Brazilian friar named Tarcísio Tadeu Spricigo must appear before the judge. He also has to tell you if he moves. They are requirements of the probation that he enjoys after three convictions for pedophilia that add up to 32 years in prison and he was imprisoned for a few years. Spricigo is the author of what police described as “pedophile manuals”, diaries discovered in 2002 in his rectory that caused a stir before being forgotten. Now a book Pedofilia na Igreja, an Unpublished Dossiê on Abuse Cases Involving Catholic Parents in Brazil, reconstructs in detail the abuses, the comings and goings to courts and prisons of this sexual predator and the other 107 priests formally investigated in Brazil for abuses in this century, including 60 who were convicted. The authors hope that other Brazilian journalists will pick up the gauntlet and launch new investigations to shed light on clergy sexual abuse.
This book, the result of three years of painstaking research in thousands of official documents, aims to begin to fill a huge void. Brazil, the country with the most Catholics in the world, with 25,000 priests and 11,000 parishes, seemed totally outside the investigations and revelations about clergy sexual abuse that have shaken the foundations of the institution in many countries; the most recent, Bolivia, where the diary of the Spanish pedophile priest Alfonso Pedrajas, published by EL PAÍS in April, immediately led to the opening of official investigations. A road traveled before by Boston, France, Chile, Spain, Portugal, where Pope Francis has just apologized to 13 victims…
Says the journalist Fábio Gusmão, co-author of Pedophilia in the Church together with his colleague Giampaolo Morgado Braga, who were commissioned to delve into the cases of pedophile priests. The editors were convinced that this piecemeal story in the media deserved more attention and so they sought out these two veteran newspaper journalists. or globe and Extrafrom Rio de Janeiro.
Some cases, such as that of the friar Tarcísio Tadeu and his manual, had been published by the press, but almost always superficially and with little or no follow-up. Thanks to the investigation by Gusmão and Morgado Braga, Brazil now knows that at least 60 priests have been convicted of sexual abuse of 148 victims in the last 20 years.
The restrictions imposed by the law and the pandemic further complicated the arduous task in a country with priests spread over a territory that doubles that of the European Union. “The main difficulty, together with the silence of the Church, is that, when [en los casos judiciales] you protect the victim, you end up benefiting the abuser”, Gusmão explained this week in an interview by video call from Rio. Many of the judicial processes that interested them were secret. “But we found a way with the reparations,” he says. They were the hook for which they began to pull the thread to unravel the skein of criminal cases under summary secrecy.
With many hours of investigation, cross-referencing of information between public databases —from courts, from the prosecutor’s office…— and sources including police officers or lawyers, pieces were discovered to assemble the puzzle. Data by data, they reconstructed the criminal trajectory of a sexual predator like Tarcísio Tadeu Spricigo, who in his manual described in detail how to approach his victims or what was the ideal profile for a child to avoid being accused:
– Age: 7, 8, 9, 10
-Sex: male
-Social conditions: poor
-Family conditions: preferably an only child, without a father, with a single mother. In any case with a sister.
-Where to look? In streets, schools, families
That is, he went hunting for the most defenseless of the vulnerable. Neither the expulsion from the Catholic Church nor the succession of prison sentences stopped him. He was sentenced three times in as many States, São Paulo, Goiás and Santa Catarina.
The reaction of the Catholic hierarchy in Brazil has also followed a pattern: “Isolate the priest to avoid legal responsibility and thus preserve his patrimony”, explains the author. Father Alfieri Eduardo Bolpani, who also kept a newspaper, was first transferred from the city by the hierarchy, who then hired one of the best lawyers in Brazil to reduce an initial sentence of almost a century. With his sentence reduced to 40 years, he is already on probation and Gusmão interviewed him. “He says that everything is the result of a plan orchestrated against him, the revenge of a boy, but you perceive in his speech a whole lying structure.”
men with power
Gusmão, a Catholic who has taken on this investigation as a mission, trusts that his recently published book will serve as an invitation for other Brazilian media, especially the regional ones, to take over and carry out their own investigations because, he stresses, most of the discovered cases occurred in cities with less than 100,000 inhabitants “where the figure of the priest is more relevant than the judge or the police commissioner because he is the representative of God on earth.”
The first edition of Pedophilia in the Church has already achieved some results. The authors have been contacted by victims, who in Brazil are not organized. A priest convicted of sexual abuse in the US and who was preaching in the interior of São Paulo, Elias Francisco Guimarães, has been removed from his functions. But there is another who was convicted in Brazil for possession of pornography who in November was still in his position while his diocese remains silent.
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