Blame the victim: the sexual abuse of a Mexican nun

In the United Kingdom, Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, resigns his position as leader of the Anglican Communion, after a report on John Smyth’s sexual abuse.

In Argentina, the survivors, call victims to avoid the Church process and to file penal reports, while a professor calls to make schools safe spaces to talk about sexual abuse as to prevent it.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

Myriam, the survivor of clergy sexual attack when she was a teenager at the Office of Vocations of the then diocese of Tuxtla Gutiérrez went through the difficulties of adolescence with the additional hurdles of the attacks on her, and illnesses that would leave her partially blind.

Despite these hurdles she figured out that her future was a missionary, so she joined, after finishing High School, a different religious order. There she was able to grow as a person. She came in contact with other cultures, even if only in the context of Latin America, but she was also the victim of clergy sexual attack, again.

The new attacks on her highlight the fact that religious females, from different orders regardless of whether they are “active” or “contemplative” are at risk of clergy sexual attack because of the duties they are expected to perform.

The issue of equality in the Church is not relevant only because of the theological debate regarding the very possibility of ordaining females for the priesthood. John Paul II “closed” that debate in the late 1990s when he issued a ruling, the equivalent of a decree in the structure of the Roman Catholic Church.

Pope Francis has been willing to keep a similar but different debate, that of the possible ordination of females as deacons, because there is evidence of females serving as such in other ancient Christian churches, and because the is real pressure from Roman Catholic females in the English- and German-speaking worlds to do so.

It is relevant because of the practical, concrete effects that inequality in the Roman Catholic Church has. Even if there is much talk about the equality coming from the baptism, the fact is that there is an expectation of females playing secondary, subservient roles in the Roman Catholic Church.

Even if in some English- and German-speaking dioceses it is possible to find religious or even lay females in charge key services, that is almost unthinkable in the Spanish-speaking Roman Catholic world.

In that regard what comes out of Myriam’s canonical probe file is an already known story of abuse promoted by the subordinate roles Roman Catholic females are expected to perform in the complex structure of authority of the Church.

Even if Myriam is not willing to go as far as to claim it, when going over the file it is impossible to not wonder if she became a repeated victim of sexual assault and rape because there were some communications from Francisco Javier Albores Teco, the first cleric who raped her at the Office of Vocations of the diocese in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, with the male clerics associated with the order where Myriam was accepted as nun.

At page 9 of the file, Myriam tells the story of how Albores Teco went as far as to send Myriam’s parents an unsigned letter discrediting her for becoming a nun. Claiming both that she was “hers” and that she was unworthy of becoming a nun.

So, it is possible to assume that her predator was aware of her decision to join the Missionary Servants of the Word order and that he had access to information as to when was she scheduled to become a nun.

What is worse. Soon after her final vows, Myriam became the target of harassment and ultimately at least three additional sexual attacks by priests associated with the male branch of the Missionary Servants of the Word.

This piece will not delve into the details of the assaults, suffice to say at this point that for some unknown reason, Myriam became a frequent target of attacks. It is unavoidable to raise questions at to why, out of other potential victims in the houses where she was on assignment, it was her who became the target.

However, in Myriam’s file there is evidence of her talking with or about other victims. Sadly, since they are unwilling to come forward, it is impossible for us to provide any details as to how common was the practice of attacking novices or nuns at this order.

Preying on the weak

One possibility is that her limited sight, an issue she has been dealing with since she was a teenager, made her “easy prey.” It would not be the first time that a cleric was willing to use a physical or even a cognitive disability to attack another person, as the case of the Provolo Institute in Argentina proves in the Spanish-speaking world or as the Saint John’s School for the Deaf in Wisconsin does so in the English-speaking world.

However, it is also necessary to raise questions about three other potential factors in the attacks. One, that for reasons that is impossible to consider at this point, she saw herself as “dirty” and “unworthy” of being a nun, a missionary, as she already was. Myriam herself talks about how she saw herself in such fashion on page 8 of the file.

Because of that, she was willing to bring the issue of the abuse against her as a sin she had to report to her confessor so he would impart the sacramental absolution. It is very hard to figure out if, at some point, any of the priests who confessed her could have talk about the issue with other priests, but the file makes it clear that one of the priests who attacked and raped her, Demetrio Vargas Gómez, a member of the male branch of the Missionaries Servants of the Word who was also known as “Father Raúl” was, at some point, her confessor, and as the chaplain of the house where she lived, her superior.

Although he was “willing to absolve” her (there was no actual need to forgive Myriam of what was as rape), as far as it is possible to tell from the file, he used the knowledge he acquired about her sense of guilt to attack her later.

Also, even if the sanctity and privacy of confession is central to Roman Catholic beliefs, there is evidence of predators using this kind of knowledge, so there is a chance of “Father Raúl” or other priest transmitting details about her perception of what happened when Albores Teco raped her when she was a teenager.

Then, there is the issue of the potential relations that Francisco Javier Albores Teco could have developed with priests serving the nuns of the Missionary Servants of the Word. Again, there is precedent of that type of communication among predatory priests in other known cases.

Finally, there is the issue of the attitude of Myriam’s superiors, both male and female within the Missionary Servants of the Word. As far as the females with some authority, Myriam sought her then superiors and she found little or no support when talking about the abuse she was suffering.

What is worse, as it is also usually the case, at least another nun, identified in the canonical file only as “Sister Carmen” tells Myriam by the end of page 9: “perhaps you were insinuating to the father.”

On page 10, Myriam describes how at least two other senior nuns in her order dismissed her reports. First, Myriam describes how the General Vicar of the order, sister Esmeralda Santivañez López, accepted Myriam’s request to not going to Venezuela with another priest who attacked her, and who she only identifies as “Father José” or “Father Chepe,” a common familiar name of males called José in Mexico.

Instead of sending Myriam to Venezuela, the superior sent Myriam with a different group to the Dominican Republic.

See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil?

However, Myriam was telling sister Esmeralda the reason she was unwilling to travel with “Father José,” and she did nothing with that information about the sexual attack on her.

In the file, Myriam only identifies this other aggressor as “Father José” or “Father Chepe,” a former member of the male branch of the Missionary Servants of the Word. She even goes as far as to say that this priest is now incardinated at the diocese of “Cuautitlán Izcalli de Romero Rubio.”

At the time of the abuse, the neighboring municipalities in the State of Mexico of Cuautitlán or Cuautitlán de Romero Rubio and Cuautitlán Izcalli used to belong to the same diocese, the older diocese of Cuautitlán, created in 1979, whose see is located at the municipality of Cuautitlán de Romero Rubio.

Back in 2014, Pope Francis created the diocese of Izcalli, whose see is located in the municipality of Cuautitlán Izcalli. The two dioceses are contiguous to each other, as the map before this paragraph shows, and were, for more than 30 years part of a single religious unit.

Main problem is not whether or not the two dioceses share a similar name or if Myriam is able to tell the difference between the dioceses, but the fact that unlike what one can do in the vast majority of the dioceses in the United States and in Canada, in Mexico and most Latin American countries it is impossible to find meaningful information about the assignments of most priests in their dioceses’ websites.

Only in the diocese of Saltillo, in the Mexican state of Coahuila, it is possible to find updated information about when a bishop sends a priest to what parish or some other activity.

Both dioceses of Cuautitlán and Izcalli have websites registered under their names. Cuautitlán actually has two, one as an org.mx and one more as a com.mx. Even if the one with the domain org.mx seems to be the official one, none of them offer information about the current or previous assignments of priests there.

As far the diocese of Izcalli there is no improvement from what this series reported back in January, when telling the story of Morseo Miramón Santiago, a priest accused at least by the mother of a boy of abusing her son. If you read Spanish, the stories on that case appear before and after this paragraph.

Although the diocese of Izcalli owns a .net domain, advertised as such at their Facebook and X profiles, when trying to access its contents an "HTTP ERROR 400" message appears.

The Facebook profiles of both dioceses are frequently updated but, unlike the diocese of Saltillo, which uses its profile to actually provide information on the assignments, the dioceses of Cuautitlán and Izcalli only use the profiles to promote their activities and celebrate themselves, with little or no willingness to actually provide information.

The report published about the Mexican dioceses willing to comply with Pope Francis's request to set up a commission to prevent clergy sexual abuse offers more details about how Saltillo makes a difference on this issue.

Something similar happens with both the female and male branches of the Missionary Servants of the Word. Even if they have a functional website with some information in Spanish, it is impossible to perform any search to figure out what priests or nuns were assigned at what time in any of their territories of mission.

What matters at this point, however, is how both the nuns and the priests dismissed what Myriam was telling them about the abuse happening in the places under the jurisdiction of the Missionary Servants of the Word.

Besides providing an account of how Myriam told the General Vicar of the order, Sister Esmeralda Santivañez López, the file provides details of how Myriam reported that and other incident to a nun who was her superior at the time, Sister Fidelfa, who dismissed both reports implying odd but harmless things were happening to Myriam.

Something similar emerges in a letter sent by Myriam to Moisés Vivar Martínez, superior of the order, with jurisdiction over the male and female branches, from July 2020.

In the gut-wrenching letter, Myriam goes into the details of how other members of the order blame her for the defrocking of Demetrio Vargas, one of the priests who raped her.

The accuser was none other than the founder of the order, Luigi Butera, who sometimes uses the Spanish variation of his first name, as Luis Butera, who recently celebrated his 92nd birthday, as the posting from the Facebook profile of the order after this paragraph tells (available here too).

I am not aware of any case in which the accusation of one single victim had enough power to force Rome to defrock a priest, so if Butera claims that it was Myriam’s complaint about Demetrio Vargas I can only see that as a way to try to prevent her from following up with the denunciation of other episodes of abuse in that order.

Next week I will go into the details of a letter from 2020 sent by Myriam to Archbishop Franco Coppola, former Nuncio to Mexico, before his departure to his current position as Nuncio to Belgium and Luxemburg. What is necessary to stress at this point is how Butera and many other priests in positions of power within the Roman Catholic Church’s structures play the blame game as to protect predator priests.

Guilt trip

It is not always open attacks on the victims, or the complex operation of fixers, issuing threats to the victims, or hiring expensive lawyers, who know people in the right places to kill a probe or to “suggest” witnesses that it is in the best interest of them or their families to miss appointments if asked to provide an account of what they know.

Frequently, it is either the dismissal of the complains raised in somehow informal settings as with the female leaders of Myriam’s order or, when things have gone “too far”, the use of what in other contexts could be called the “guilt trip”; an artifact to blame the victim of clergy sexual abuse for the loss of what seems to be the Catholic Church’s only and most valuable resource: its priests.

The letter appears as an image after this paragraph, with the key sentences of it highlighted and translated into English.

Notice how on the third sentence of Myriam's handwritten letter to the superior of her order whe talks about "antecedentes", that is say previous accusations. It is not clear if said accusations were formal or not or if they were at the Church or before the authorities. That same sentence stresses the fact that he has left before, although, again it is not clear if he was suspended or if he was sent to some kind of therapy as to address his issues.

Goodbye, Mister Welby

This week saw the end of Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury the top leader of the Anglican Church. I do not claim an expertise on that Church as I could claim it when dealing with the Roman Catholic Church, but the similarities between both Churches are just too many to dismiss Welby’s decision to leave his position, similar in some respects to the Pope in the Catholic Church although Welby answers to Charles III, head of the United Kingdom.

In his case it was not the abuse perpetrated by a priest, but by John Smyth a layperson affiliated at different points in his life with the Anglican Church in Britain, Zambia, and South Africa, besides some minor activities in Canada, his country of origin, and the United States.

Welby’s resignation came a few days after his Church issued a detailed report on Smyth’s case. It was, no question about it, a decision that shook to its core his Church, as the front pages of leading British newspapers in the image further down after this paragraph proves.

The report had that effect because it shows, on the one hand, the ability of Smyth to find ways to participate in activities where he had chances to attack young males. Also, because it proves how top leaders of the Church of England were aware and even if they discouraged Smyth from attending activities in the United Kingdom, he let him run free in Zambia and South Africa without letting the leaders of their Church in those two former colonies know about Smyth’s abuses.

The full report is a bit less five hundred pages, and it is available at the Anglican Church website in two parts. One, the main report, by Keith Makin, who appears as “independent reviewer,” but who has made a name in the United Kingdom dealing effectively with this kind of issues. The second part includes 29 different documents related to the report.

The Church of England describes Keith Makin, “a former director of social services with more than 30 years of experience in the social care field”, who has led “several serious case reviews and has chaired several local safeguarding partnerships”.

And the report is truly thorough it offers a glimpse into the way Smyth was able to gain access and influence in the structures of the Church of England and, when there were too many questions about him and his “apostolate,” how he moved to Zambia and South Africa to continue there his abusive practices.

Despite the report’s details or, perhaps because of the report’s detailed account of what happened at the Anglican Church, it seems hard to believe that Archbishop Welby’s resignation is enough to address the issue.

On the one hand, as soon as his resignation was public, there were voices in all British media asking questions about what will happen with the probe and why there was the rush to offer his resignation. If what we know about abuse, sexual or otherwise, in religious settings proves something is that predators do not act on their own.

Smyth was a powerful figure in legal circles in Britain by the end of the 20th century, he was even able to go back to Britain to litigate issues after he decided to move to Africa, so it is unavoidable to ask what Welby is trying to achieve with his sudden decision to resign his position.

More so, because a few hours before his resignation he was saying that he was going to remain as Archbishop of Canterbury. Sadly, Britain—as almost any country over the face of the Earth—has had difficulties in offering some actual, real relief to victims of abuse and, as thorough as the Makin Report is, it is nothing but a private report of the Church of England.

In any case, as limited as it is, it is an example of transparency. Many victims in Mexico, Chile, or Argentina, of Marcial Maciel, Fernando Karadima, or Carlos Miguel Buela, would like to have a similar document to at least prove that they were not telling lies when they talked about the abuse they were suffering.

That is something that is painfully clear in Myriam’s file of her fight to achieve a measure of justice from her church in Mexico.

And from Argentina

That is something that is also very clear in what the survivors of clergy sexual abuse tell the bishops of Argentina after the election of a new board for the Argentine Conference of Bishops, the so-called, after its Spanish-speaking acronym, CEA.

The Argentine survivors enlist at least thirty-seven priests and former priests as involved in clergy sexual abuse accusations over the last four years.

They also criticize Pope Francis “zero tolerance” plea as lacking the necessary consequences to be believable.

It should not be hard to understand why they call to avoid the Church’s, so called canonical, process. By the end of their statement after the election of the CEA’s new board the survivors state:

“This Network calls urgently to not file reports at the Church as they as asking to do so in obedience to Francis, but to file reports about the Church at the penal justice.”

After going over Myriam’s and other victims’ files in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, it should not be hard to understand why the Argentine network of survivors makes this urgent calling, relevant in their country and elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world.

The Network’s statement, in Spanish, appears in the box before this paragraph, and it is also available at their social media accounts.

Finally, also from Argentina, a survivor of sexual abuse at academic contexts issued this week one of the most articulated statements about this kind of experiences that I have ever seen.

Sol Fantin is not revealing her story for the first time, as she already did some years ago. She is addressing the ongoing attempts in Argentina to limit the kind of books that instructors can use for academic purposes at the equivalent of High School there.

She is a professor of Spanish literature in Argentina, so her plea is about the necessary freedom to use books, and about the ability of the school to offer a safe space to prevent abuse from happening, which requires the use of books that some could consider not proper for teenagers.

You can watch the video in Spanish and seek subtitles in English through the YouTube control panel.

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