Lost in Mexico City: clergy abuse, Orthodox style

His case, as many others in the Eastern Orthodox Church prove the lasting effects of abuse on victims and the broad systemic nature of the phenomenon.

Despite cases such as Metsopoulos’s, Patriarch Bartholomew, the leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church, recently received the prestigious Templeton Prize.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

Today’s story is of the financial abuse and sexual harassment of an uncommon victim. So uncommon, that it could have been the backbone of a novel written by notable literary English-speaking expats in Mexico City back in the 20th century, someone like William S. Burroughs, attracted by the relative freedom of the country, but confronted with the effects of what lies behind said freedom.

John Metsopoulos, a former State representative from Connecticut, provides the raw material for such a novella. When he arrived in 2017, he had already decided to quit, in his 50s, a relatively successful career in local politics. A five times State representative, he won seven out of eight contests where he appeared in a ballot.

His case came to Los Angeles Press after publishing the story on Pope Leo XIV’s interview with Crux two weeks ago, linked below, which confirmed the global nature of the crisis of clergy sexual abuse and elicited two distinct reactions from our global readership.

The documents sent by Doctor Hermina Nedelescu revealed the profound, universal cost of abuse in religious settings, a truly global crisis affecting all denominations: among survivors of clergy sexual violence in the Eastern Orthodox sphere, 95 percent develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and all of them suffer from suicidal ideation.

The other reaction came from an Argentine reader, sharing information about the Institute of the Incarnate Word, an order created by Carlos Miguel Buela, the so-called Argentine Marcial Maciel, that has been already the subject of previous installments. As more information becomes available, an installment of this series will provide the details.

John Metsopoulos came to Mexico City in 2017 at the behest of now deceased Orthodox bishop Athenagoras Aneste. An obituary is available here and a notice of his death, published on July 7, 2025, is available at Hellenic News here.

He used to be the Greek Metropolitan of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, appointed Aneste first as bishop of Panama in 1997, overseeing a territory similar to what is now known, for short, as the Metropolis of Mexico (see the map below).

Map. Orthodox Metropolis of Mexico of the Greek Orhodox Church.

When Aneste asked Metsopoulos to leave his relatively safe life in affluent Connecticut, he was not asking for an altar boy or an office assistant. He was recruiting a relatively well off, experienced politician, to help him expand the operations of the Eastern Orthodox Church in the territory under Aneste’s purview.

Calculated abuse

Calculated abuse of spiritual trust was the foundation for the request and the overall relationship between both adult males: Aneste, who Metsopoulos viewed as a friend, father, mentor, and spiritual leader, used his authority to isolate, exploit, and control him.

The exploitation included multiple sexual advances, relentless psychological abuse, Aneste went as far as to publicly shame in front of groups, and financial ruin Metsopoulos. The bishop did so by persuading the former representative to liquidate his assets in the United States to fund the ministry. Once Aneste took control of Metsopoulos’s life savings, he refused to pay him, effectively imprisoning him in Mexico City and preventing him from leaving.

The abuse culminated when the Metropolitan “threw him out on the streets of Mexico City,” by Metsopoulos’s account, without resources. Ultimately, Aneste left the former State Representative stranded and, in Metsopoulos’s words, “barely able to survive,” ending up in Nicaragua, in the fringes of the Orthodox religious district.

Up until February of 2024, there were calls to support Metsopoulos’s return to Connecticut from Nicaragua through a Go Fund Me campaign, as this message posted in Facebook proves.

John Metsoupoulos’s financial exploitation of is only a symptom of a deeper fragility devout faithful of any denomination face when dealing with the ambition of the leaders of their own churches.

To fully understand the nature of the abuse and why the Metropolitan sought to bring a former politician like Metsopoulos to Mexico City, one must look, among other issues at similar cases in other denominations, but also at the Eastern Orthodox Church dubious claims regarding its own membership in Mexico and other countries in Latin America.

As far as the similarities, Metsopoulos’s story is as compelling as those of the widows Marcial Maciel used to charm, seduce, and financially exploit in Mexico and the United States to expand his order and finance his lavish lifestyle. In that regard Aneste abusing a member of his flock, is a perfect example of the clergymen power to destroy even mature, well-adapted, high-status adults.

Diaspora stories

First news of Metsopoulos’s abuse emerged back in 2022, when he was living in precarious conditions in Nicaragua, as reported in this story at the Survivor's Network of those Abused by Priests, SNAP, website.

By 2024, when news of this case emerged, Bartholomew transferred Aneste to a “historical” diocese, similar to the ones auxiliary bishops and nuncios in the Catholic Church get as titles, a matter of protocol, but without an actual diocese attached to the appointment. In his case was that of Vize.

Although there is an actual township bearing that name in contemporary Turkey, Christian Orthodoxy is reduced to a minority and there is no functioning Orthodox metropolis there.

Unlike the United States and Canada where relatively large communities of Eastern Orthodox faithful are able to sustain vibrant local diasporas as the Little Athens in Astoria, New York, where they function as a rather powerful political bloc in local Queens and New York politics, in Latin America their communities are far smaller, and their political influence far more limited. Their influence in Astoria is such that, on Saturday The National Herald, a Greek newspaper with an English-language edition, published a story about an ongoing conflict at the St. Demetrios parish there.

This political and financial environment in the Greek diaspora communities in the United States, stands in stark contrast to the reality in Latin America. In Mexico, one needs some expertise and knowledge of the national statistics to figure out that there is no single category for the Eastern Orthodox Church in the Mexican census.

They are lumped in the “Other religions or religious movements” category, where a total of 9, 094 Mexicans or residents of Mexico decided to identify themselves as Christian Orthodox back in 2020, as can be seen in the Religion data in the Mexican equivalent to the Census Office webpage (contents in Spanish).

Just for comparison-sake, the Luz del Mundo (Light of the World) Church, has its own category in the Mexican census and one finds there a total of 190 thousand members of that organization nationwide.

The Hellenic News story on Aneste’s passing, per the sources consulted by that medium, has the Metropolis of Mexico claiming a 450 thousand flock, with 58 native-born clergy in an entity including, besides Mexico, Belize, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba. El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela, as the map before shows.

Even if one allocated the entire category of “Other religions or religious movements” in Mexico to the Eastern Orthodox Church, with its nine thousand individuals, there is a 440 thousand void to be filled with Orthodox flocks from the other 13 countries in the region to meet the data published by Hellenic News.

To do so, the Orthodox Metropolis of Mexico would require flocks of somewhere between 32 and 34 thousand in each of the other 13 countries in the territory, figures that seem hard to achieve for the Eastern Orthodox Church, whose growth depends on the migration from its European and Middle Eastern countries of origin, and the natural growth of its local populations, with no missionary programs such as those of the Church of the Latter Day-Saints, the so-called Mormons.

It is unavoidable not to wonder if Metsopoulos’s abuse is not the byproduct of an attempt to keep the appearance of a larger flock in Latin America to get donations from the U.S. Eastern Orthodox communities such as the one in Chicago where Aneste was born back in 1941.

However, the total population of Orthodox faithful in Mexico, the country for which there is more information on religious affiliation in the region shaping the Eastern Orthodox Church Metropolis of Mexico, is not all affiliated with that entity.

A reflection of the extremely fractious world that is Orthodoxy at large, in Mexico there is the Orthodox Metropolis of Mexico. This is the one headed by Aneste from 1996 through 2024. That organization has been closely related to the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.

Then there is a separate entity, close to the Russian Orthodox Church, also identified as diocese of Mexico. As its Greek counterpart, this second Orthodox diocese of Mexico is closely related to a branch of Orthodoxy in the United States, the so-called Orthodox Church in America. That branch of Christian Orthodoxy is closer to the Patriarchate of Moscow than to that of Constantinople.

The difference is not minor, more so after the war in Ukraine. Kyrill, the head of the Patriarchate of Moscow’s refuses to acknowledge the autonomy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, while Bartholomew endorses the Ukrainian Orthodox take on the issue, as it does with other Eastern European Orthodox communities.

It would be impossible to go over the details of the differences, but for the purposes of the Mexican census, there is no further distinction between those identifying themselves as Orthodox.

But there lies an additional risk. Given how small and tight such communities are, and the extreme influence a bishop such as Aneste can exert over its members, there is no actual need for the usual games of political power one sees in clergy sexual abuse in the context of larger religious organizations. The prestige associated to the very figure of the bishop is enough to allow for abusive behavior.

Deliberate silence

The documents received center on Patriarch Bartholomew’s prolonged inaction and deliberate silence over the effects of clergy sexual abuse in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The information offers detailed data on three cases, and a growing but already robust body of knowledge about the effects of abuse built with information from other cases in that denomination.

All of the three cases shared by Dr. Nedelescu are strikingly similar to what one finds in the Catholic, Anglican, Southern Baptist, Mormon, and Luz del Mundo churches all over the world, some of whom have been the subject of installments of this series over the last two years.

If one pushes the comparison, the similarities exist with patterns observed in Buddhist communities in Thailand, synagogues in Israel, the United States, and Canada, and in Muslim communities all over the world.

They also prove abuse is not an isolated traumatic event. It leaves a painful mark on those who suffer it, their relatives, and the communities where it happens.

Nedelescu’s findings attesting the extremely high rates of PTSD and suicidal ideation are the consequence of a carefully conducted effort to document the effects on abuse on victims as to help them become survivors.

Nedelescu is a staff scientist at The Weiss Laboratory of The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. She is engaged in new aspects of the science-theology dialogue dealing, among other issues, with the consequences of clergy sexual abuse crisis in the religious tradition she knows better through her Romanian relatives and roots.

An account of her experience can be found over a round table whose full transcript is available here, where she provides haunting details of the unwillingness of the Greek Orthodox Church of America, one of the churches under the Eastern Orthodox Church umbrella, to cooperate in addressing the consequences of clergy sexual abuse in their own flock.

In that respect, her work with victims of the Eastern Orthodox Church is part of a broad research project aimed at documenting the effects of abuse and figuring out an exit from the pain and trauma survivors must overcome.

Nedelescu’s take on Metsopoulos’s case is relevant as she clearly identifies a complex structure of administrative, religious and even ethnic authority allowing for the existence of enablers such as Patriarch Bartholomew, as “an individual who has the power to prevent harm but chooses not to act,” following a definition originally developed by legal scholar Amos N. Guiora.

On top of that, as it is often the case in other religious bodies, Patriarch Bartholomew and the hierarchy under him fail to accept responsibility for clergy sexual abuse, including pedophilia, despite repeated appeals from victims, their relatives, and advocates to actually acknowledge the severity of the issue. As Dr. Nedelescu proves, there has never been an actual response on the many cases brought to his attention.

Extent of the damage

And, as it is also the case in other religious organizations, despite the hierarchy's awareness of the extent of the damage already done and the risk posed by clergy with sexual abuse allegations they remain currently in active ministry, aided by the broad global structure of the Eastern Orthodox Church and its associated diaspora communities in countries all over the world under the Patriarch's spiritual leadership.

By documenting cases such as Metsopoulos’s Nedelescu proves how the many personal and institutional failures shape an ongoing not a historical issue, where sexualized violence has long-lasting and devastating consequences.

Another aspect of Nedelescu’s take on Patriarch Bartholomew as an enabler includes a robust critique of the Eastern Orthodox Church’s top leader’s attempt to move the debate from issues such as clergy sexual abuse into his concern for environmental pollution.

In that respect Nedelescu and her colleagues tried to warn the entities behind the prestigious Templeton Prize to not confer such a distinction on Patriarch Bartholomew; the most recent, on September 24 of this year.

The Templeton Prize is a prestigious award allocating a lump sum larger than that of the Nobel prize, close to 1.4 million USD, to their recipients each year. Sir John Templeton promoted and created the prize back in 1972 to honor “individuals who have made exceptional contributions to affirming life's spiritual dimension, often by exploring the intersections of science and religion to advance the understanding of human purpose and our place in the universe.

Among previous recipients one finds the names of Mother Theresa of Calcutta, Anglican bishop in South Africa Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama, besides scientists such as recently deceased Jeanne Goodall, philosophers such as Alvin Platinga, and statesmen as Jordanian King Abdullah II. A full list is available at the Prize’s website.

Enabling systems

In that respect, for the Eastern Orthodox Church’s survivors, their relatives and advocates it was hard to reconcile the idea of the Templeton Prize praising Patriarch Bartholomew contribution to “spiritual progress,” one of the prize’s stated aims, when there is evidence that him and his Church are unwilling to address the sexual abuse of their own faithful.

More so as the survivor advocates condemned it as an implicit validation of a system enabling abuse to keep happening without actual consequences for the active predators and for those who have, under their own churches’ rules, authority over them.

To understand the global scope of the case, Patriarch Bartholomew is head of his Church. As it happens with Pope Leo XIV in Rome, he is the primus inter pares (first among equals) of a large multinational religious structure.

Although it is hard to provide accurate numbers, the Eastern Orthodox Church is the second largest Christian denomination behind the Catholic Church, and well above the Anglican Communion, as the table below shows.

Contentious sexuality

Bartholomew’s official title is Patriarch of Constantinople, a historical designation that the church maintains even though the city is now officially known as Istanbul.

Deep in the past of Christian theology and traditions, their understanding of sexuality was contentious and the source of conflict.

Back in the 5th century, one finds the early stages of a bitter confrontation giving birth to what we see now as the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches. Their split, the 1054 so-called Great Schism, had its roots in the 5th century bitter theological and political disputes.

It was then, in the 5th century, when the Church of Rome developed a strain of theological thinking aiming at excluding from the priesthood married males, a notion that its then sister Church of Constantinople rejected.

This remains a key difference today between the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox. While the former allows for married deacons and presbyters, most of the Catholic clergy must be, at least in paper, single or celibate.

The issue is not minor as a strain of the debate on the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church emphasizes the negative effects of the compulsory celibacy rule. They are real. There is evidence of very negative attitudes of Catholic priests towards female at large accentuated when they have formal or informal female sexual partners and their offspring.

Prime examples of that very abusive, predatory attitudes towards females and their own offspring as byproduct of their relationships with females as in Renato Poblete’s abuse of sexual partners he forced to have abortions in Chile.

The survivors of abuse of the Chilean Jesuit tell the ever-present story of Catholic priests forcing their victims to abort his offspring, as the more recent story from Brazil linked after this paragraph confirms.

Even if the role of compulsory celibacy in theological and ecclesiological debates is attractive, it becomes irrelevant when one takes into consideration that clergy abuse, sexual or otherwise, is also prevalent in religious bodies such as the Eastern Orthodox Church, having different rules on celibacy than Catholicism. Hence the need for a more comprehensive take on the root causes of abuse.

What is worse, Dr. Nedelescu's research proves that the prevalence rate of sexual abuse is higher in the Eastern Orthodox communities as compared to the general population. That leads her to see clergy-sexual violence in the Eastern Orthodox Church as an epidemic, “a public health concern with a serious burden on our mental health care system, and a human rights violation."

The hypocrisy of it all

For the victims of the Eastern Orthodox Church, their relatives and advocates the source of angst and anger centers on what they perceive as the profound hypocrisy of honoring Bartholomew for his contribution to “spiritual progress,” as the Templeton Prize states, while the honoree ignores human suffering.

One should not surprise at how Bartholomew’s own words come back to chastise him, as with the quote on the relation with “natural environment” as a reflection of “the way we treat human beings.”

On a letter to Timothy Darlrymple, the president and CEO of the John Templeton Foundation dated on August 30, 2025, they state it “the other way; the way that we treat human beings is a reflection of our care for the natural environment. We cannot isolate the environment and ignore human beings.”

Katherine Archer, the Executive Director of Proposon Healing, a non-for profit stating their interest in “responding to clergy-perpetrated sexual abuse in the Orthodox Church” signs the letter to the organizer of the Templeton Prize.

Proposon (literally mask in Greek) has been building over several years the largest dataset of sexually abusive clergy in the Eastern Orthodox Church under Patriarch Bartholomew’s leadership.

Over several documents, Nedelescu stresses the long-lasting effects of abuse and more significantly of the decision of vest the Templeton Prize as a perfect example of re-traumatization of the victims.

Nedelescu calls it a “grave scandal” deeply re-traumatizing victims and their relatives “who saw the award as an implicit validation of the system” that keeps harming them while denying any kind of reparation.

In that regard they strongly suggested the Templeton Foundation to donate an amount “equal to or near the Templeton Prize” to organizations supporting Eastern Orthodox Church survivors, as a form of reparation for the damage caused by honoring Bartholomew.

Among the organizations proposed are SNAP, which has a specific unit dealing with cases from Orthodox communities of faith, Coptic Survivor, and the aforementioned Prosopon Healing.

It should be noted that Patriarch Bartholomew's most recent visit to the United States included a private meeting with Donald Trump at the White House. More significantly, the official itinerary of the Pastoral Visit highlighted the vesting of the Templeton Prize on the religious leader, as the PDF in the box after this paragraph proves. Moreover, half the pages of the booklet stress that the main reason for the visit to the United States was to receive the prize.

The story of John Metsopoulos, a former politician ruined and discarded in a foreign land by Metropolitan Aneste, is a profound and direct indictment of institutional failure by the Eastern Orthodox Church to deal with its own crisis of clergy sexual abuse.

Systemic issue

It proves that clergy abuse, sexual or otherwise, is not a Catholic or a Latin American problem; it is a transnational, systemic issue allowing to turn the spiritual authority of communities into weapons destroying minors, and adult females and males, such as Metsopoulos.

This weaponization of faith has been possible because religious leaders such as Patriarch Bartholomew enable that kind of behavior, fitting the precise definition used by the aforementioned Guiora: a leader who has the power to prevent harm but actively chooses not to act.

Bartholomew is not alone. With him are the institutions behind the Templeton Prize, and award vested on figures such as Desmond Tutu as to honor the awardee, but also to broadcast their own attempt at showing ways to further dialogue and mutual understanding.

Such goal is unattainable when the institution promoting it uses its platform to honor a leader for his contribution to “spiritual progress” while ignoring the 95 percent PTSD rate among survivors of clergy sexual abuse in the religious organization led by their honoree.

No wonder, critics of both Bartholomew and the Templeton prize stress the moral hypocrisy of conferring the prize on him. The institutional credibility of the Patriarchate, or a foundation validating it, becomes a second weapon against the victims, forcing survivors to fight not just their trauma, but the ability of those enabling abuse to become media darlings.

Finally, John Metsopoulos’s case also highlights the implicit risk of the way religious organizations frame clergy sexual abuse. In other words, how they explain why it happens.

In Rome, the main body in charge of preventing clergy sexual abuse is Tutela Minorum, literally, “for the care of minors,” officially the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. In some cases, every now and then, there is an acknowledgment of the need to protect what the Catholic Church and other religious entities now call “vulnerable adults.”

But who would have placed an accomplished Connecticut former politician in any of those categories? Who would have placed in such category the wealthy Mexican widows Marcial Maciel exploited in the name of God, country, and the fight against Communism?

And even if Metsopoulos is a case from the Orthodox Church, there are other adults confronting the effects of abuse in religious settings, from those who join Dianetics or Scientology to the Catholic nuns suffering abuse at the expense of priests and the superiors in their own orders.

In Uganda, a nun was expelled from her congregation after she came out to expose the abuse other nuns, all of them adults, were subject to by priests associated to her order, a story all too similar to the one from Mexico linked after this paragraph.

Back on September 15, 2025, Barbara Haslbeck, a professor at the University of Regensburg, Germany, announced the publication of a book centered on the sexual abuse of adult nuns or sisters in religious orders in the German-speaking world.

Her book, available only in German, is the product of a research project she has been developing over several years now, aptly titled “Violence against women in the Catholic Church,” funded by the German Fidel Götz Foundation.

Metsopoulos’s case also shows the limits of certain debates in the Catholic Church, and the need to go further into the underpinnings of key theological concepts. If Catholics can learn something is that there is an actual need to move beyond the unproductive, sterile debate over compulsory celibacy as related to the clergy sexual abuse crisis..

More so, as there are other areas of improvement, such as transparency and accountability, and the need to acknowledge there is a need to better understand that any person is at risk of becoming a victim of abuse, not only underage males attacked by priests who prefer to assault victims of their own sex.

As far as the Christian churches is concerned, there is also a need for better theology, one exorcizing Catholicism and other denominations adhering to the notion of “ontological change,” the idea that priests are inherently superior to the laity, which allows them to do as they please, including the systematic abuse of their flocks.

Post Data

Over the last week, in Krakow, Poland, the aforementioned Tutela Minorum held its first general assembly under the aegis of its new president, French archbishop Thibault Verny.

Following what seems to be the overall attitude in Rome these days, Verny issued a carefully worded message to the assembly with no major announcement on the future of what even at the peak of Pope Francis’s drive for a measure of reform of the Catholic Church was already a rather timid attempt at changing the tone and the attitude.

Tone and attitude remain but, given the overall reluctance to actually enforce measures to make credible the zero-tolerance policies, and the way Pope Leo XIV brought back the debate on abuse to the 1990s by raising unsubstantiated questions about the legitimacy of clergy sexual abuse reports, it is actually hard to believe that some major change will come in the near future.

By mid-October, Tutela Minorum will publish the report its new president gave back in early-September to Pope Leo XIV. That will be the second yearly report on prevention.

In the coming weeks, this series will go into more detail on what the report renders as the achievements in 2024. The first report, having Mexico as one of the featured countries, was the focus of the story linked after this paragraph.

The fact that Rome decided to go to Poland to held Tutela Minorum’s assembly could imply an acknowledgement of the severity of the crisis there. However, given the unwillingness of the Polish bishops to follow the route of their French and German colleagues with comprehensive reports on the extent of abuse in their country, it is hard to figure out the true meaning and, even more so, the potential implications of holding the meeting there.