ONLY 45% OF CHILEAN CHRISTIANS CALL THEMSELVES CATHOLIC
SANTIAGO— A visit to Santiago’s upscale parish of El Bosque (The Forest) will explain why Chileans are losing faith in the Roman Catholic Church.
El Bosque, located in Santiago’s Providencia district, is the former parish of priest Fernando Karadima, whom Vatican probers in 2011 found guilty of abusing teenage boys over many years.
A Chilean judge in the same year determined the Vatican’s canonical sentence was valid but Karadima was not criminally prosecuted because the statute of limitations had expired.
Thinning ‘forest’
El Bosque, like many other Chilean parishes, no longer has the large crowds attending Mass that it did in the 1970s and 1980s.
“Karadima did a lot of damage to the Catholic Church,” said Ximena Jara Novoa, 65, a hairdresser who lives in a neighboring community but has worked in Providencia for 45 years.
A poll by Santiago-based thinktank Latinobarometro in January 2017 showed the number of Chileans calling themselves Catholics had fallen to 45 percent, from 74 percent in 1995.
Quite clear
In the same survey, Pope Francis, the first Latin American pontiff, was ranked by Chileans at 5.3 on a scale of zero to 10, compared to a 6.8 average in Latin America.
The pope surprised many Chileans last month by defending the appointment of Bishop Juan Barros, who considered Karadima his mentor and is accused of witnessing and covering up Karadima’s sexual abuse of minors.
Just before leaving Chile, the Pope told a Chilean reporter: “The day I see proof against Bishop Barros, then I will talk. There is not a single piece of evidence against him. It is all slander. Is that clear?”
Challenging the church
Residents of Providencia, once dotted with the mansions of the most powerful families in Santiago but now home to upscale high-rise apartments, said the abuse of children by Karadima was an open secret as far back as the 1970s.
“It was always rumored, everything was talked about. People knew,” Novoa said quietly.
But challenging the powerful Church in the once predominately Catholic society was not previously accepted. That is changing.
The Vatican special envoy sent by the Pope, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, is due to hear testimony from more than 20 sex abuse victims before he leaves Santiago.
On Thursday, a group of people who say they were sexually abused by members of the Marist Brothers congregation in Santiago asked Vatican officials to investigate their cases, too.