Pope likely to face protests in Chile over handling of pedophile priest
Letter shows Francis sought to contain damage by having bishops take sabbaticals
SANTIAGO, Chile — The Vatican was so concerned about the fallout from Chile’s most notorious pedophile priest that it planned to ask three Chilean bishops accused of knowing about his decades-long crimes to resign and take a year’s sabbatical — a revelation that comes just days before Pope Francis makes his first visit to Chile as the head of the church.
A confidential 2015 letter from Francis, obtained by the Associated Press, details the behind-the-scenes manoeuvring by the Vatican and Chile’s bishops to deal with the prelates connected to disgraced Rev. Fernando Karadima.
And it reveals the bishops’ concern about Francis naming a Karadima protegé, Bishop Juan Barros, to the helm of the diocese of Osorno — an appointment that roiled the diocese, with hundreds of priests and lay Catholics staging protests against him.
Those protests are expected to greet Francis during his visit to Chile, which begins Monday.
Chile’s Catholic Church was thrown into crisis in 2010 when former parishioners publicly accused Karadima of sexually abusing them when they were minors, starting in the 1980s — accusations they had made years earlier to Chilean church leaders but that were ignored.
The scandal grew as Chilean prosecutors and Vatican investigators took testimony from the victims, who accused Barros and other Karadima protegés of having witnessed the abuse and doing nothing about it.
In his Jan. 31, 2015, letter, written in response to Chilean church leaders’ complaints about the Barros appointment, Francis revealed for the first time that he knew that the issue was controversial and that his ambassador in Chile had tried to find a way to contain the damage well before the case made headlines.
“Thank you for having openly demonstrated the concern that you have about the appointment of Monsignor Juan Barros,” Francis wrote in the letter, addressed to the executive committee of the Chilean bishops’ conference. “I understand what you’re telling me and I’m aware that the situation of the church in Chile is difficult due to the trials you’ve had to undergo.”
Francis told the committee that his ambassador, Monsignor Ivo Scapolo, had asked Barros to resign in 2014 as bishop to Chile’s armed forces, a high-profile post, and had “encouraged him to take a sabbatical year before assuming any other pastoral responsibility as a bishop.”
Barros was told a similar exit strategy had been planned for two other Karadima-trained bishops, but was asked not to share the information, the Pope wrote. He said the plan went awry when Barros named the two others in his letter stepping down as military bishop — a development that posed “a serious problem,” and “blocked any eventual path, in the sense of offering a year of sabbatical,” to remove the three from the eye of the storm roiling the Chilean church.
In the end, Francis went through with the appointment of Barros as bishop of Osorno, about 900 kilometres south of Santiago.
Barros had been a protegé of Karadima, a charismatic preacher who ministered to Chile’s elite in a posh suburb of Santiago, where his El Bosque parish community produced dozens of priestly vocations and five bishops, Barros among them. Chile’s church leadership for years had ignored complaints about Karadima’s sexual abuse of minors and took action only after victims went public with their claims in 2010.
Karadima was sanctioned in 2011 by the Vatican, which removed him from all pastoral duties and sentenced him to a lifetime of penance and prayer for his crimes. Chilean prosecutors investigated Karadima as well but dropped the charges because the statute of limitations had expired.
The judge handling the case stressed that it didn’t collapse for lack of proof.
Francis’s appointment of Barros has been a stain on his oftrepeated “zero tolerance” for abuse, with members of his own sexual abuse advisory commission criticizing it.