Mismanagement and systematic cover-up of abuse cases by Archbishop Fernandez. He should resign before taking up his post.
Report. Champions of abuse: eleven priests denounced but
protected by the Archdiocese of La Plata.
Emblematic cases that shake the Curia of the capital of Buenos Aires. From the Provolo five to the suicidal Lorenzo. From Giménez, who escaped for "prescription" of the crime, to Sidders, who awaits his trial "imprisoned" in a field of his sister. The excommunicated Yanuzzi and the high ranking Marchioni. Groups of people that speak of a widespread scourge but denied by Jorge "Francisco" Bergoglio's followers.
Get to know the
emblematic cases that shake the Archbishopric of La Plata. Eleven priests denounced for abuse.
On Wednesday 28th,
the Argentine Episcopal Conference, the highest political body of the Catholic
Church in the country, published an end of year greeting. In it, the Bishops say they hope for 2023
"that we can renew attitudes and dispositions for democratic co-existence,
leaving aside everything that increases divisions" and "postpones the
discussion of urgent issues". The
text is signed by Monsignors Oscar Ojea, Marcelo Colombo, Carlos Azpiroz Costa
and Alberto Bochatey.
The last of the
signatories is Auxiliary Bishop of the Archbishopric of La Plata. A disciple of
the retired Héctor Aguer and current servant of the Bergoglian Víctor
"Tucho" Fernández, Bochatey is a historical cover-up of abuser
priests. Suffice it to mention that in
2017 he helped Eliseo Primati, one of the accused priests of the Provolo
Institute, to flee to Italy before he was prosecuted. Or the support given to the priest Eduardo
Lorenzo until the very day of his suicide (he killed himself to avoid going to
prison for various abuses of minors), including a Mass in his honour.
In another act of
hypocrisy, this week the same Archbishopric of La Plata announced the
separation of the priests of the Miles Christi Institute from the Parish of San
Luis Gonzaga and the San Francis of Assísi school, both in Villa Elisa. Their arguments refer to the sexual abuses
committed by the Founder of that Congregation, the priest, Roberto Yanuzzi. Perhaps because he is an ultra-conservative
opponent of the "progressive" Francis, he is the only priest to have
been exonerated in the recent history of the Catholic Church in Argentina.
Neither with the genocidal Christian Von Wernich, sentenced to life
imprisonment, nor with the paedophile Julio Grassi did Jorge Bergoglio go that
far.
Pulso Noticias and
La Izquierda Diario have been investigating various allegations of
ecclesiastical sexual abuse in the region for more than three years. In this article, by way of a summary of the
work carried out, we give you a first compilation of the priests denounced for
sexual abuse, either only "behind closed doors" of the institution
itself or including criminal complaints before the judiciary.
In addition to the
case of Yanuzzi, through direct sources in each case, these media learned of
more than a dozen priest abusers. Some
of them were reported in the national press. All of them were covered up (at least as far
as they could) by all the Archbishops, the Auxiliary Bishops, by the rest of
the priests and by the laity with a very close material relationship with the
Archdiocese. Here is the list.
Lorenzo
Perhaps for being
one of the most recent and scandalous, the most remembered case is that of the
former chaplain of the Buenos Aires Penitentiary Service, Eduardo Lorenzo, who
ended up committing suicide on 16 December 2019 at the headquarters of Caritas
La Plata, in the centre of the City of La Plata. Lorenzo was denounced in 2008 by one of the
abused minors before the Ecclesiastical Courts, under the charge of the priest
Javier Fronza. The hierarchs turned deaf ears to the constant complaints of the
victim's godfather, until he decided to take the matter to the criminal justice
system. However, the judiciary shelved
the case within a few months, faithful to the ties of favours to support the
Catholic institution.
It took ten years
for the case to be reopened. It was when
the victim called on the lawyer Juan Pablo Gallego, known for having
successfully imprisoned Grassi, to represent her. Since the prosecutor Ana Medina agreed to
reopen the case, a Pandora's box was opened around the priest from Gonnet, who
had been chaplain of the Buenos Aires Penitentiary Service for twenty years.
Five victims were
brought before the courts in 2019, and various sources recognise that the
number of children and adolescents who suffered the same thing amounts to
several dozen. Finally, after several
statements, expert reports and raids on the parish house and church, the
prosecutor of UFI 1 issued the arrest warrant for the priest. A few hours later, Lorenzo was found dead in
the headquarters of Caritas La Plata, where the Archbishopric had provided him
with a "suite" after having to remove him from the chaplaincies,
schools and parishes due to the large complaint made by the survivors along
with other organisations from the feminist movement, human rights and the left.
The Lorenzo case is
one of the clear examples of how the hierarchy of the Catholic Church acts in
the face of these types of denunciations, with its slogans of "maintaining
prudence" and "avoiding scandal" prevailing. The complaint was initiated under Héctor
Aguer's administration, it was quickly shelved and then, when it was reopened,
Archbishop Fernández expressed his support for the priest. On 24 March of that year he shared a Mass in
the same church where the abuses were committed.
Archbishop
Fernandez and his henchmen also tried to delegitimise the denunciations of the
survivors and their families, and to this day they have never again made any
statement about the case, let alone contacted the complainants to apologise, as
the multiple abuses committed by the deceased have been proven in the criminal
justice system. As if that were not
enough, a Mass was held to honour his sanctity, in the same place, in Gonnet.
Giménez
No one in their
right mind could believe that church abuse is a "recent" phenomenon. What is certain is that decades ago there was
no movement of survivors who do not rest in their struggle against this
scourge. As we look back over the years,
the list goes on, both during the Archiepiscopate of Héctor Aguer, Carlos Galán
and Antonio Quarracino (who succeeded Antonio Plaza, the archbishop who
participated in the civil-military-ecclesiastical dictatorship).
Héctor Giménez, the
priest denounced for sexual abuse who currently resides in the Marín old people’s
home.
The best known case
from those years is that of the priest Héctor Giménez, criminally denounced in
2013 for aggravated sexual abuse by the survivor Julieta Añazco. She denounced that she was abused during the
summer camps organised by the Mother of Divine Grace and Sacred Heart of Jesus
Churches in City Bell, in the 80's. And
she attests to having known several other victims, who never dared to denounce
for fear of reprisals from the Archdiocese.
However, it seems
that Giménez is no longer a danger to the rest of the children. The criminal justice system ruled that the
case was closed due to the "statute of limitations". The ecclesiastical justice, which even tried
to buy the silence of the complainant, took him to live in the Hogar de
Ancianos Marín, located at 60 between 14 and 15 in La Plata, where he currently
lives, goes out to do his shopping and nothing prevents him from being in
contact with children. Alert in the
neighbourhood.
Another well-known
priest in the city was reported to these media by at least four men, but so far
he has been spared. That is why he walks
freely and has reached high positions in the Curia of La Plata. The accusations have not yet reached a
judicial instance, but they wanted their stories to be known for fear that the
crimes would be declared time-barred, since they happened in the 1990s. They were teenagers, three of them said they
were abused by the priest of Cristo Rey, Rúben Marchioni, former head of the
Social Pastoral Centre of La Plata. It
happened when they were altar boys in that parish in the Villa Elvira
neighbourhood. Another of them suffered
it in the Parish of Saints Peter and Paul in Berisso.
One Sunday in early
2020, these reporters tried to talk to Marchioni at the end of his Mass. As he greeted the faithful, he began to get
nervous about the presence of journalists and locked himself and part of his
flock inside the parish, avoiding questions. "I'm not going to talk about it because
that is the order given to us by the Archbishop", said Marchioni shortly
after Lorenzo's suicide.
Rúben Marchioni was
for several years head of the Social Pastoral Centre of La Plata, who
"negotiates" with officials and union leaders to reach political and
trade union agreements. Coincidentally, or causally, when the accusations
against the priest were published, he was removed from his position of power. Was it because he feared that the accusations
against an ecclesiastical leader of his stature would increase? Does Tucho Fernández really want to remove
abusers from the Church? If he had such
a motive, he would have moved forward with the investigations and removed them
from the parish, which is in charge of the primary and secondary school
attended by children and adolescents from the neighbourhood, who are totally
exposed.
The sentences of 42
and 45 years in prison received in November 2019 by Nicola Corradi and Horacio
Corbacho, respectively, were the culmination of a long process. Both priests were accused of raping and
torturing more than a dozen deaf and mute children at the Antonio Provolo
Institute in Lujan de Cuyo, Mendoza. These
allegations, in turn, were replicated in La Plata, where another criminal case
was opened for abuses and humiliations committed by Corradi, Corbacho and other
priests years earlier at the Provolo's headquarters in La Plata.
Granuzzo, Corbacho,
Corradi and Primati of the Provolo
During the Archiepiscopates
of Quarracino, Galán and Aguer the abuses in Provolo were kept in perfect
secrecy. That is not to say that the
monsignors did not know of their existence. It is just that, as we know,
"prudence" and "avoidance of scandal" are essential. In addition to Corradi and Corbacho, the gang
of Italian abusers (transferred from Europe to escape other accusations) is
completed by Giuseppe Spinelli, Giovanni Granuzzo and Eliseo Primati. The first died, although the Church never provided
information about where and when. The
other two were eventually "repatriated" by the Archdiocese to Italy,
more precisely to Verona, where the headquarters of the congregation is
located. Primati is the subject of an
extradition request to be tried in La Plata.
The role of the
Catholic hierarchy in the case, both Francis and the Archdioceses of Mendoza
and La Plata, was most pathetic. From
the initial denialism to the attempt to distance themselves as much as possible
from "the Italians". But
always questioning, slandering and attacking those who survived their abuses
and their families. Faced with the fait
accompli, with the harsh condemnations on the table, came silence and the
gradual dismemberment of the little that remained of the Congregation. Apologies and reparations to the victims? Not a chance.
Di Virgilio
At the beginning of
2022, the neighbourhood of Hernández was shocked by the accusation that came to
light through the media: the priest Maximiliano Di Virgilio abused a girl from
the Santa Ana school in November 2021.
Before everything
came to light due to the denunciation of members of the educational community,
Di Virgilio had agreed with the Archdiocese to an "intervention" in
the school and the parish through the change of legal representatives (until
then it was him). And when it could no
longer be avoided, Tucho Fernández, faced with the public scandal, ordered him
to change his field and not to be near children. Textbook.
Fortunately for the
Archdiocese, none of the families of Santa Ana decided to file a criminal
complaint against Di Virgilio, which serves the Curia to justify its
practically non-existent sanction (even preventive) against the accused. As they usually do, Di Virgilio was transferred
to another parish.
Sidders
Raúl Anatoly
Sidders, the former chaplain of the San Vicente de Paul School and former
chaplain of the Gendarmerie squadron in Puerto Iguazú, Misiones, is accused of
the crimes of "seriously outrageous sexual abuse due to its duration over
time" to the detriment of a student who, as an adult, denounced him. The trial will not take place until July 2025
and, until then, he will enjoy the privilege of house arrest. He spent very little time in effective
pre-trial detention and was able to hinder the investigation and even abscond.
The priest Raúl
Sidders, also known as "frasquisto", was sentenced to house arrest.
"Frasquito",
as he was known in the corridors of the San Vicente de Paul school (according
to former students), was criminally denounced and was arrested in December
2020. But six months later, the Judge of
Bail Court No. 6 of La Plata, Agustín Crispo, decided to relax Sidders'
pre-trial detention, granting him house arrest. The prosecutor Álvaro Garganta, from UFI 11,
was functional to the ruling as he accompanied the request of Sidders' defence.
Raúl Sidders was in
charge of the educational institution for almost 20 years (from 2002 to 2020);
he also hosted the television programme "Ave María Purísima" on the
local channel Somos La Plata, which was denounced as misogynist. He was also chaplain of the Punta Indio Naval
Air Base until he was transferred to the Military Archbishopric in the
Gendarmerie of Misiones. He was one of
the privileged ones of the Archbishop Emeritus, Héctor Aguer, who made a place
for him to live next to him in the Curia. The denounced events took place between 2004
and 2008.
In total there are
110?
In an interview
with La Izquierda Diario, the former priest Adrián Vitali, author of the book
El secreto pontificio. La ley del silencio, told how he arrived at the
calculation that in Argentina "there are more than 650 abuser priests
hidden by the Church", based on data from the Argentine Episcopal
Conference on "official" records of reported cases, combined with
information released by the priest Tom Doyle from Boston, United States (who
had access to data hidden by the Vatican).
Doyle passed this
information to the Boston Globe newspaper (whose investigation was faithfully
portrayed in the award-winning film Spotlight). There the priest claimed that, according to
this sensitive data kept in Rome, only 10% of real cases worldwide have come to
light. "We know that the matrix of
abuse in the Church is the same all over the world, so a projection of these
numbers to Argentina gives us about 650 abusive priests. But I dare say there are many more. And this
is going to come out as the victims denounce the crimes", says Argentinean
Adrián Vitali.
If we project these
numbers to the Archdiocese of La Plata, percentage plus percentage minus,
taking into account the eleven priests mentioned above, should we be talking
about more than a hundred sexual abusers who have made their cassocks and the
complicity of their superiors a safe conduct to subjugate probably hundreds or
even thousands of children? The number
may seem exaggerated. But it is not, judging by the cover-up and criminal
behaviour of the successive archbishops of La Plata in the face of the
denunciations that did come to light. How
many are there? A good question for Tucho
Fernández to answer, without hypocrisy. Doubtful
that he will do so, of course.
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