Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez Sábado, 15 de Julio del 2023
The annotated list of the one hundred Catholic bishops forced to resign during the forty-year long crisis of clergy sexual abuse.
Not all the Catholic bishops forced to resign did it because of sexual abuse, and not the Catholic bishops involved in sexual abuse have been forced to resign.
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Catholic Bishops who have "completed the seventy-fifth year of age are requested to present their resignation from office to the Supreme Pontiff", says canon 401 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law.
It is not always the case, but when a bishop renders his resignation to Rome before reaching that age, it is possible to assume that he is doing so because of some kind of trouble in his diocese.
This is something Catholics all over the world have learned, sometimes the hard way, as a by-product of the 40 years of clergy sexual abuse crisis in their church.
As a saying frequently heard in Mexican and Latin American jails goes "ni son todos los que están, ni están todos los que son", which loosely translated equals to "not all who are held here deserve it and not all who deserve it are left out".
The database I published in the previous installment of this series and that I comment today is the by-product of being aware of that reality.
It is because I know how hard is for the Church to be accountable and transparent that this database of bishops forced into resignation is required.
I see the resignations of the bishops as a proxy of the intensity of the crisis in any given diocese or country. The number of bishops in each country are by no means a direct reflection of the intensity of the crisis, but the number of bishops forced to go that way allows us observers to figure out, to try to understand the extent and the intensity of the crisis.
It would be better to have a clear record of all the bishops, priests, and even nuns forced out of office because of their role in the sexual abuse crisis but, in the absence of such data, we social scientists need to figure out a way to measure, to understand, what is happening. This is the way I have been doing it for the last ten years or so.
Freedom of the press
The list I present here is not the function of the intensity of the crisis per se in each country, but the byproduct of a series of factors including the freedom of the press and the ability of the victims to organize to defend their rights and interests in each country.
That is why countries like Spain, Portugal, or Italy have less bishops forced to resign than the United States (freedom of the press) or Chile (the ability of the victims to organize). I believe the same can be said for any country affected by the crisis.
It is not, as the Roman Curia tried to argue, up until the early years of the 21st century, that the crisis existed only or mostly in the English-speaking world, because of the secularization process and the "evils of Protestantism".
The crisis happened the way it happened, because in the United States diligent journalists like Jason Berry were able to publish stories, in the 1980s, that would have never seen the light in Mexico, Argentina, Spain or Chile.
And it was not only because of the controls the media were subject to in countries under a military dictatorship as in the case of Argentina or Chile.
In Spain, Mexico, Colombia, and other Spanish-speaking countries with large Catholic populations a code of silence was imposed by the owners of the media who had deep familial, business, or political relations with the Catholic hierarchy in their countries and a global scale.
Perhaps because the elites in said countries are also practitioners and victims of sexual abuse deep within their own families, as author Gloria González-López describes in her book, Family secrets. Stories of incest and sexual violence in Mexico, published in 2015.
In some cases, as it was in Mexico, the privately-owned media would never publish about clergy sexual abuse without tempting the victims of sexual abuse performed by their owners, leaders, and "stars" to tell their own stories about sexual abuse in newsrooms, TV, and radio studios, taping sessions, concerts, and other media-related activities.
Last week I released here a file with two spreadsheets, one in Spanish and one in English.
Here I am using the information on that file to offer more details on the bishops I assume have been forced to resign because of their role in the crisis.
In cases such as that of Theodore McCarrick there is no question as to whether he was forced out of office because of his role in the crisis.
No official record
Some others, as with the so-called "Karadima bishops" in Chile, were forced out of office, but there is no official record of why that happened.
If one sees the available information, as published by www.catholic-hierarchy.org, (CH, from now on) there is no record or marker of how they came to be forced out of office.
There are even more cases of bishops that one can assume that played a key role in the sexual abuse crisis but whose files are "squeaky-clean", with no record or marker of their role in the crisis.
One is Gerard Louis Frey, the bishop who moved around Gilbert Gauthe from one parish to the other in the Lafayette diocese in Louisiana, until the crisis there exploded.
Another example is the recently deceased former bishop of Cancún, Mexico, Jorge Bernal Vargas.
That tourist town is one of the sees of the relatively new diocese of Cancún-Chetumal, created as a prelature back in the 1970s and entrusted to the Legionaries of Christ.
The rural communities in the diocese were used as some sort of punishment destination for the priests of said religious order who were willing to criticize or to challenge Maciel, his associates, and successors as leaders of the Legion of Christ.
Bernal was a key character in Maciel's abuses and the mechanisms he used to keep control of the accusations against him, but there is no official marker of said role.
Even in the case of Australian Cardinal George Pell, we know that he was, at least for a while, considered guilty by the authorities of his country.
Many of the Australian victims of abuse still consider him guilty, but there is no official record of his role since he was acquitted after the appeal of the original verdict.
In any case, I use the data contained at each of the bishops' personal webpages at CH because the data there is extracted from the official sources, which are not available in electronic format.
The webmaster of said portal is extremely careful with the information and I have been able to compare it the official sources, so I assume it is easier to use that database instead of referencing the Holy See's official paper, called Acta Apostolica Sedis or some other official sources as the Resignations and Nominations section of the Daily Bulletin issued by the Vatican's Sala Stampa.
Argentina
The eleven cases of bishops from Argentina forced into resignation of their dioceses would be enough to write several volumes of analysis.
Since that is not possible, I would like to notice that one of the eleven bishops born in Argentina does not appear in this section of the database, because he was a bishop in neighboring Paraguay, at the Ciudad del Este diocese.
Commonweal magazine published an extraordinary series on what happened at that diocese that forced Pope Francis to defrock bishop Rogelio Livieres Plano (B050 in my database), a member of Opus Dei, so I will not go into the details.
A case from Argentina worth mentioning is that of bishop Jerónimo Podestá. He was never accused of sexual abuse.
He resigned his diocese because he decided to marry who was at the time his secretary at the curia of the diocese of Avellaneda. So, he appears at Catholic Hierarchy as having "resigned" his diocese, but there is no information regarding whether he was ever laicized by Popes Paul VI, John Paul I, or John Paul II.
His and other similar cases provide an insight into how messy is the Church as far as providing information about the bishops who, for one reason or the other, are not complying with the rules set for them and are forced to resign.
Zárate-Campana has two bishops on this list. First, Rafael Eleuterio Rey (B083) and then Óscar Domingo Sarlinga (B087).
They were at the helm of said diocese from the early 1990s through the mid-2010s. Sarlinga was Rey's successor there.
Both are said to have resigned the diocese of their own will, but in Salinga's case on top of the misappropriation of Church funds and his abusive attitude towards the clergy and laypersons in Zárate-Campana, there are questions regarding their relationship with then president Néstor Kirchner, who favored Sarlinga to attack then archbishop of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio.
Even if there is no way to offer a more detailed explanation of their resignations, one cannot dismiss the way the consecutive resignations happened over a relatively short period of time and the silence of the Church regarding said resignations.
It is worth noticing that both Rey and Sarlinga were somehow related to the case of José Napoleón Sasso, a former priest and known paedophile operating out of that diocese, so it is impossible to dismiss a potential link of both resignations with the clergy sexual abuse scandal, since we know Sasso was receiving help from at least two other priests in that diocese.
Australia
The Australian group of bishops forced to resign provides the best example of how deceiving can be the policies followed by the Catholic Church when forcing out of office a bishop.
William Martin Morris (B064) was forced to resign after he openly supported the priestly ordination of females.
His page over at CH clearly states he was removed from office by Pope Benedict XVI. It is not clear why, but one only needs to go over Google or some other search engine to figure out why. That is not the case with most of the bishops included in this database.
Moreover, that is not the case with late Cardinal George Pell, who is not included in this database, because he never was forced to resign any of the many offices he held, despite the accusations against him and the original verdict of guilty issued in Australia.
Australia is heavily underrepresented in this list, despite the many findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, but more research into specific cases is required.
Canada
It all started in Canada, as far as the commissions dealing with clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Archbishop Alphonsus Liguori Penney was willing to go deep into the issue, so he created the Winter Commission, and he asked a former vice governor of New Foundland and Labrador, Gordon Arnaud Winter, an Anglican, to head the commission.
In the end, Bishop Penney was forced to resign his office in 1990. As in the case of Australia, my perception is that Canada is underrepresented in this list.
Bishop Lahey is an extreme case. He went down as a predator, but we know little or nothing about whether he was covering up for other predator clerics, in his diocese or elsewhere.
Chile
Chile offers an extreme case, not so much because it is possible to assume that things were there worse than in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, or Chile.
What makes the Chilean case special is the solidarity that the victims there were able to weave, to build. That explains the luminous saga of the laypersons in Osorno, in the Southern extreme of Chile, 800 kilometers or 500 miles South of Santiago, the capital city.
They were able to force out bishop Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid, despite Pope Francis original desire to appoint him there.
Besides Barros Madrid, there were other three of the so-called "Karadima bishops", but on top of them one needs to take into consideration bishop Francisco José Cox Huneeus.
He is a known predator. Sadly, the Church was only willing to accept it more than 20 years after he was forced to resign and sent into some sort of idyllic retirement in Germany.
The real extent of the abuses perpetrated by him were only accepted after the effects of the Karadima scandal were decimating the Catholic Church in Chile.
He was laicized two years before his death, protected by his old age, the expiration of the statute of limitations then enforced in Chile, and the fact that he belongs to the elite of the Chilean ruling class.
He was the cousin of the now archbishop emeritus of Santiago de Chile, Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa, who was a member of the same congregation as Cox Huneeus, the German Institute of Schönstatt Fathers.
Both share multiple relations with former bishops and former presidents, ministers of government, and representatives and senators in the Chilean Congress.
They were the very embodiment of a superior form of Richard Sipe's scarlet bond, one which, on top of the reciprocal complicity between members of the Catholic clergy, one needs to add the effects of their membership to the very top of the Chilean ruling class.
France
In France we know how deep the sexual abuse crisis runs since the French bishops, despite their mistakes, were willing to pay for the Sauvé Report, which has been translated to English and is available here.
My perception is that enlisted bishops in this section provide a fair representation of the extent of the crisis there.
As I have stated in previous installments of this series it is important to keep in mind how French Catholic bishops were willing to play along with the idea of the clergy sexual abuse crisis being the byproduct of some sort of hostile takeover of the Church by gangs of homosexuals. The fact is that the very priest who championed that approach, Tony Anatrella, said he was trying to cure homosexuality by having homosexual intercourse with his "patients".
Germany
It is my perception that the German section of this list heavily underrepresents the true extent of the crisis in that country.
It is worth noticing that from Austria there is only one bishop forced into resignation, the Benedictine monk and former Archbishop of Vienna, Hans Hermann Groër (B035).
The reasons why I assume the four bishops forced out of office from the German-speaking world are not representative of the true scope of the crisis in those two countries is related to Doris Reisinger-Wagner's description of the Ratzinger System.
I do not think that said system is particularly different from the mechanisms used by the Church to cover up the true extent of the crisis.
However, I do agree with her that the role of Joseph Ratzinger, first as head of the then Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later as Pope Benedict XVI, allowed him to deal with sexual abuse in German dioceses with much more leeway than what happened in other countries.
The Cold War context also helped him in doing so. In any case, I suggest those interested in the German and Austrian cases to read Professor Reisinger-Wagner's book Only the truth saves. Abuse in the Catholic Church and the Ratzinger System, to get a better understanding of what happened in the German-speaking world.
India
India provides another example of a country underrepresented in this list. One of the three cases, that of Franco Mulakkal (Aippunny), "former" bishop of Jullundur, provides a prime example of how far clergy sexual abuse can go, and the kind of reactions that the abuse perpetrated by bishops engender in the Church.
If Osorno in Chile provides a primer example of the lay persons will to resist the imposition of abusive bishops, Franco Mulakkal's case offers something similar but for the nuns who become the target of abusive and predatory bishops.
His is the only case I know of a bishop prompting mobilizations of nuns tired of being the sexual objects of their bishop.
The situation with Bishop Antony, the "former" leader of Mysore is not close to that bishop Mulakkal, but it also raises all kinds of questions as to how far would Rome push the opacity card when dealing with this issue.
There is no indication as to when Rome will do something in Mysore. The Pope appointed an apostolic administrator since the early days of this year, Archbishop emeritus Bernard Blasius Moras, but that is all we know about the situation there.
Ireland
Ireland is a well-documented case in the English-speaking world, so I will not go into much details.
There is plenty of information available on the five cases included in this list, but still it is my perception that, as a country, it is underrepresented in this list.
Italy
Also heavily underrepresented in this list is Italy. There is no way to assume that only three bishops have been involved with this issue, but there is no sign about a possible change in the way the national conference of bishops, the Italian government, and the Holy See itself deal with this issue.
The underrepresentation of Italy in this list is more evident when one takes into consideration the fact that Bishop La Piana was not accused of sexual abuse.
He was defrocked because he was part of some sort of "stable" homosexual couple with a medical doctor who appointed him his heir when he died.
That was how their relation became public and it was then that he was forced out of office.
Mexico
It is my perception, after more than ten years of keeping track of the extent of the sexual abuse crisis in my country that this list of bishops is not representative of the true extent of the crisis.
I will not go into details at this point, but in I will expand on the specifics of the Mexican case in other installments of this series.
How underrepresented is Mexico in this list can be better understood when one takes into consideration the already mentioned case of the former bishop of Cancún, Jorge Bernal Vargas, who, as his successor, Pedro Pablo Elizondo Cárdenas, was a member of the Legion of Christ, the "order" created by Marcial Maciel.
Both played key roles in keeping the secrets of the abuse perpetrated by Marcial Maciel and other known predators in that congregation that used the diocese of Cancún-Chetumal as either a prize (Cancún) or punishment (the rural areas of the diocese) for the members of the Legion of Christ.
Peru
As in the case of Mexico, the Peruvian bishops in this list are not representative of the true scope of the crisis there.
I included an explanation of what makes the Peruvian case special when compared to other countries in Latin America and elsewhere in the previous installment of this series, so I will not repeat myself.
The situation in Peru is far worse than the resignations of these six bishops could indicate.
The crisis has affected, so far, the top cleric in the country, now Archbishop emeritus of Lima and Cardinal Juan Luis Cipriani Thorne, a member of Opus Dei, who during the first 20 years of this century was willing to fight all the issues in the so-called "cultural wars", while dismissing the victims of sexual abuse. On top of that, he has been accused of being involved in the sexual abuse of boys.
Given the very punitive rules governing the media in Peru, the accusations regarding Cipriani's own role in the crisis, have been published only in the form of auto-biographical stories by Jaime Bayly, who writes about a fictional "Cardinal Cienfuegos" preying on Peruvian children,
Poland
As with Germany, my perception is that Poland is underrepresented in this list. John Paul II's long pontificate and the kind of influence he was able to exert over the post-communist leaders of Poland allowed him to figure out ways to dismiss the true extent of the crisis.
Back in May 2023, Polish newspaper Republic (Rzeczpospolita) published a study of their own on the extent of the clergy sexual abuse crisis during the years of communist rule there.
The numbers show similar averages of victims per predator to those of other studies.
I expect them to keep publishing more data regarding the crisis in the 1990s and beyond.
United States of America
All the cases in this list have been the subject of series analyzing the extent of the bishops' involvement in the sexual abuse crisis. Makes no sense to try to replicate the information already available.
I will only add that, although some would like to believe that US bishops are overrepresented in this list, and there is reason to think so, my perception is that given the traditions of US journalism, the list is a more perfect reflection of what has happened in the United States.
Next week, I will provide an estimate of how many bishops would be in this list when using the number of defrocked bishops in the United States as a key to measure the expected number of cases if conditions as far as freedom of the press is concerned were similar in other countries.
I will do so to provide a better explanation of the extent of the crisis in the Catholic Church.