Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez Sábado, 29 de Julio del 2023
According to information published by The AP on Thursday night, the bishops believe that the accusations lack legal support.
They are "press reports without formal complaints or legal cases," the unnamed source from the Mexican bishops' conference told The Associated Press.
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
On the night of this Thursday, July 27, a source from the Conference of Mexican Catholic Bishops, not identified by The Associated Press dismissed the accusations made by the civil organizations Spes Viva of Mexico and the global, US-based, Bishop Accountability.
He said the claims were “based on news reports without formal complaints or legal cases."
The brief response from the Roman Catholic bishops of Mexico came after the two civil organizations published a report at noon Thursday that included 15 bishops and the former superior of a women's order based in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Los Angeles Press published an article with the details of the report as presented by the two civil organizations.
Despite what was said by the unidentified spokesperson for the bishops, it must be noted that all the cases involving Marcial Maciel have been denounced before canonical instances and, in some cases, before civil instances, except those in which the victims chose to enter private agreements with the Legion of Christ, the religious order founded by Maciel at the end of the thirties of the last century.
Similarly, the Mexican bishops themselves laicized the priest involved in at least five cases of sexual abuse perpetrated in the archdiocese of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, capital of the state of Chiapas, located in southern Mexico.
The now former priest Salvador Valadez Fuentes was "reduced to the lay state", as the jargon of the Catholic Church says, back in 2022. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome ratified the sentence against this former priest in February 2022.
As a result of this case, the names of the former bishop of Tuxtla Gutiérrez and current emeritus archbishop of Acapulco, Felipe Aguirre Franco, and the current head of Tuxtla Gutiérrez archdiocese, Fabio Martínez Castilla, are on the list issued by Spes Viva and Bishops Accountability.
Religious sister Silvia López Pérez, founder of the so-called Disciples of Jesus the Good Shepherd, a female congregation founded in the then diocese of Tuxtla Gutiérrez at the end of the 20th century, is currently under a Church law or canonical procedure.
Sister Silvia López is considered an accomplice of Valadez in the abuse of at least five nuns who were her subordinates in that order, in addition to accusations against her of verbal abuse, among others.
Although the list for the case involving these nuns in Southern Mexico, does not name them, the now archbishop emeritus of Oaxaca, José Luis Chávez Botello, and the current archbishop of Monterrey, Nuevo León, and current chair of the Mexican Bishops' Conference, Rogelio Cabrera López, are also former archbishops of Tuxtla Gutiérrez.
Chávez Botello appears on the list for his role in the cover-up of former priest Gerardo Silvestre Hernández, who received confirmation of his penal sentence to sixteen and a half years in prison on February 24, 2017.
That day, the then-presiding magistrate of the Superior Court of Justice of Oaxaca, Alfredo Lagunas Rivera, confirmed the sentence that punishes former priest Silvestre Hernández for corruption of more than one-hundred minors from the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, so on top of being a case that has been widely documented in the media, there are also judicial and canonical records of that case.
Similarly, contrary to what the anonymous spokesperson for the Mexican bishop told the AP, there is a record on both penal and church courts in the case of the now former priest of San Luis Potosi, Eduardo Córdova Baustista.
Córdova is a fugitive from that Mexican state's justice. The civil authorities have issued the corresponding alerts to Interpol and the authorities of other countries to arrest him on sight and extradite him to Mexico immediately.
Nine years ago, in June 2014, the media reported that Córdova had committed the crimes that two archbishops emeritus of San Luis Potosí, a city in Northern Mexico, Luis Morales Reyes and Jesús Carlos Cabrera Romero, first minimized and then tried to cover up Córdova's abuses for which the authorities try to prosecute him up until today.
What is more, on May 26, 2014, one of the ecclesiastical courts in Mexico decided to strip Córdova of his priesthood status and, since Córdova is a fugitive, he did not appeal the decision of the Mexican Church court in Rome, so he has not been a priest for at least nine years.
Consequently, there is a record in church courts of the accusations against him, despite what the anonymous source told The Associated Press on Friday.