Protestant Accountability, an auspicious development

Will Naasón Joaquín García’s inclusion at Protestant Accountability prompt Mexican authorities to launch criminal investigations regarding abuse at Luz del Mundo settings?

Protestant Accountability could help to better understand and prevent clergy sexual abuse while forcing authorities to offer survivors a measure of justice.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

Over the last 40 years, most of the attention when it comes to sexual abuse in religious contexts has been concentrated in what happens or not in the Catholic Church. The reasons for such emphasis are not, as the most intolerant wings of that church frequently argue because there is an anti-Catholic plot of sorts.

Often, what brings more attention to Rome is the byproduct of the very structure of that Church, the fact that unlike the Orthodox, Oriental, Anglican, Lutheran, and the many offshoots of what was Calvinism during the early years of the so-called Protestant Reformation, when talking about the Catholic Church it is relatively easy to focus the attention on a single, global leader, the Pontiff and the Roman curia, the structure closer to him to manage the over 3,000 dioceses and less than 6,000 bishops that exist all over the world.

Nothing like that happens in the Christian Non-Catholic world, and similar patterns exist when dealing with non-Christian religious organizations that, overall, lack the relatively unified structure of authority that the Catholic Church has had at least since the 11th century of the current era.

That is why it is so important to highlight the effort of the teams behind BishopAccountability.org, a major source of information for what has been since the 1980s the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church to facilitate, with the participation of non-Catholics, the emergence of what is now known as ProtestantAccountability.org, which debuts with a base index of 2,700 accused non-Catholic religious leaders, most of them with some active presence in the United States.

Granted, the very title of the website will spark controversy as it includes churches or, more broadly, religious organizations that do not identify themselves as Protestant. Putting that issue aside, the fact is that last week ProtestantAccountability.org went live with a structure and design similar to that of BishopAccountability.org in the Catholic field, as a database aggregating whatever information is available about sexual abuse in non-Catholic and non-Orthodox Christian churches.

As far as the Orthodox and Oriental other than Catholic churches, it is possible to access the public database sustained by Prosopon. Their database follows the work done by Orthodox faithful at Prokov.org, a now defunct website.

Hermina Nedelescu and Katherine Archer took the original Prokov database, enriching it with additional information, allowing to identify “for each alleged or charged abuser, (…) the overseeing bishop whom the abuser ultimately reports to”, as Nedelescu told Religion News Service back in 2025. It was through Prosopon’s work that it was possible to cast light on John Metsopoulos’s ordeal in Mexico City, little less than a year ago, as the story linked after proves.

Transparency will set you free

As it happened originally with BishopAccountability.org, the current database at ProtestantAccountability.org is heavily biased towards cases and realities somehow related to the English-speaking world. It is easy to expect that, given the broad exchanges that exist between religious organizations in the English-speaking world and their sister or daughter organizations in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds in Latin America, Spain and Portugal, the current bias will become a thing of the past as the database as such facilitates and enhances the impacts of information and data flows.

Even if BishopAccountability.org still provides a far more detailed account of what happens in the English-speaking world, the frequent exchanges between Catholic dioceses in the United States and Canada with their Latin American counterparts have made it possible to track down predator and abusive priests moved around in one way or the other.

On their top Menu, there is a tab labeled International, and when one goes there it is possible to access relatively detailed information about cases in Argentina, Chile and Haiti from Latin America, as well as information from Ireland and the Philippines, and a broader category simply called “International cases” alongside documentation on survivors’ efforts to engage the United Nations on the issue.

How long will it take for ProtestantAccountability.org to develop a database as dense and detailed as that of BishopAccountability.org is anybody’s guess. Despite the criticism many Latin American bishops launch, even if privately, against BishopAccountability.org as an entity sustained by active (and affluent) “enemies of the Catholic Church,” the fact is that they, as many other nonprofits, depend largely on donations of both monies and time from people willing to set up the databases and websites as such, able to scan and upload legal documents, news stories, and testimonies from victims and their relatives to document what has happened in the Catholic Church over the last 40 years or so.

As of today, the combined efforts of survivors, their friends and advocates and media, have allowed BishopAccountability.org to be the prime source when one tries to figure out the trajectories of predatory and abusive priests and deacons in the Catholic Church in the United States and elsewhere. Their feature Abuse Tracker is a key tool to try to make sense of the scale and breadth of the crisis, even when only pays attention only to the Catholic cases.

Tracking Catholic bishops’ professional trajectories is relatively easy through CatholicHierarchy.org and GCatholic.org, but not that much when it comes to priests, deacons and other members of Catholic leadership, more so if they are so-called “religious brothers,” that is to say friars or some other similar category, and even harder when it comes to the allegedly “lay” leaders of movements such as Opus Dei, Regnum Christi, the Sodalitium of Christian Life, and many other relatively new religious movements that, on purpose, occupy liminal categories in the Catholic Church to facilitate opacity, secrecy, impunity and/or unaccountability.

In countries like the United States, Canada, Germany or France, the Catholic Church learned the hard way that traditional strategies of opacity, gaslighting, and outright lies enhance the corrosive effect of scandal rather than contain it. Consequently, there is now access to their regularly scheduled appointments, as well as changes forced by deaths, illness or accusations, as the story linked after this paragraph, comparing cases in Germany and Mexico shows.

But, as this series has proven recently with cases from all over Latin America, transparency even with regularly scheduled appointments is a scarce good for Catholic dioceses, even more when there is an accusation against a priest or deacon. In those cases, one immediately sees the circling of the wagons.

In Mexico City, as one of many possible examples, it is easy to find out if a priest has the required licenses issued by the Archdiocese of Mexico City to preside over Masses and other Catholic rituals in its parishes, but it is almost impossible to find out where any given priest has been appointed, as one is able to do in similarly large archdioceses in the United States or Canada such as New York, Chicago or Montreal.

Figuring out who are the accused priests is necessary to help other victims come through. That is the approach that, nowadays, most of the French Catholic dioceses follow when a priest is named as a potential abuser. Sadly, in Latin America, both in Catholic and non-Catholic settings, the religious leaders still bet big on secrecy, using whatever means they have to prevent transparency, as the story linked before this paragraph proved back in July.

The need for transparency in clergy appointments has been acknowledged already by authorities. In Colombia, as the story linked after this paragraph shows, the Constitutional Court ruled in favor of Miguel Ángel Estupiñán and Juan Pablo Barrientos to force the Catholic dioceses in that country to publish their full databases of appointments.

After all, it is the only way to figure out what has happened with many potential predators in that country and elsewhere in Latin America and in other countries, but despite the ruling it is still unclear when that treasure trove of data will be available and how it will be made available.

Betting on opacity

Sadly, Latin American Catholic and other-than-Catholic religious leaders are more than willing to avoid transparency despite the known effects of opacity in clergy sexual abuse cases. Such effects extend beyond immediate physical and emotional trauma; sociologically, they severely degrade social capital—the foundational trust that holds communities together.

When religious institutions respond to allegations with opacity or outright attacks on whistleblowers and journalists—as Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera famously did in Mexico regarding Marcial Maciel in the 1990s—they attempt to protect institutional prestige at the direct expense of communal trust.

Even if, as proven by the stories published last year and early this one, linked before and after this paragraph, it is impossible to claim that the clergy sexual abuse crisis on its own is to blame for the shrinking flocks of faithful, Catholic and other-than-Catholic all over Latin America, it is clear that it does not help and it is also clear that it harms the credibility of and trust in religious leaders.

What emerges is the desert-like reality depicted in those two pieces, driven by a catastrophic loss of credibility. Two or three decades ago, many other-than-Catholic religious leaders saw Latin America as some kind of “promised land” a whole region with two very closely related main languages, offering a chance to grow.

And they grew, but nowadays the only type of religious practice growing from Tijuana, Mexico to Ushuaia, Argentina is the nones, that is those who perhaps believe in some idea of a superior being or spiritual life, but are unwilling to declare themselves Catholic, Pentecostal or Baptist.

How non-Catholic leaders navigate this dynamic—whether they replicate these defensive tactics or accept public transparency—will define whether they have learnt something from their Catholic colleagues. Will they try to mimic Rivera’s defense of Maciel? Will they acknowledge the need for transparency and accountability?

In the other-than-Catholic world, these issues are more relevant as the boundaries between clergy and non-clergy are harder to identify and as the number of leaders who answer to anybody but themselves is far larger than in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican churches.

That is one of the main challenges ProtestantAccountability.org will have to face in the immediate future, as many small churches operate as familiar or even personal businesses, with little or no oversight and deeply entrenched sectarian attitudes, giving their leaders more latitude when dealing with any given issue affecting the community.

Those attitudes are not exclusive to small denominations. They are present in larger, more stable churches, from Rome to Salt-Lake City, with the ever-present risk of attacks against those willing to come forward and criticize the leaders of the religious organization.

Perhaps that is why, even if one finds there the names of individuals already convicted by the U.S. system of justice, the ProtestantAccountability.org’s template includes a disclaimer to warn readers about the reasons behind the inclusion of any given individual or institution in the list.

When one opens the page devoted to Naasón Joaquín García, the leader of the Luz del Mundo Church or any of the six other leaders of that religious organization one has to go over the disclaimer:

• Protestant Accountability functions as an interactive computer service that distributes content created or provided by other users & content providers. This site relies on public news stories and publicly available information for its content. If any incorrect information is found, please contact us and we will gladly correct it. Nothing in this post should be construed as an accusation of guilt. Those accused of crimes are innocent until proven guilty.

In Naasón Joaquín García’s case, the state of California already found him guilty, he is in the process of getting a more severe punishment after a U.S. federal trial ends at some point next year, so there is no question he is guilty.

However, at least in terms of his own church, he is accountable to nobody but him. Given the structure of authority in that organization, he inherited from his father and his grandfather the leadership position, and despite him being already in jail in the United States, there is no sign of him being removed or defrocked from his position.

Even if, in a stroke of opportunism, the Mexican government decides to actually acknowledge what has dismissed for many decades, Naasón Joaquín, the Luz del Mundo Church’s prophet, could be also tried in Mexican courts, although that remains, up until now, a mere possibility, as the Attorney General’s Office in Mexico was already willing to drop, by the end of 2025, all the charges against him once.

Only a desperate attempt to save face by the current federal government resuscitated the chance of a probe on the many abuses perpetrated by Naasón Joaquín and his associates on the Mexican side of the fence.

The fact that Naasón Joaquín García and six of his associates, including his mother, are already included in ProtestantAccountability.org is only one of many examples of auspicious developments that could come as a consequence of the very existence of that website.

Even though Naasón Joaquín García’s prosecution in California received extensive media coverage across both the United States and Mexico, La Luz del Mundo communities on both sides of the border continue struggling to shield his status as a divine prophet, the son and grandson of similarly designated prophets.

During the California proceedings, Spanish-language social media saw desperate defense efforts by church members framing the prosecution not as a law enforcement action against severe crimes, but as a conspiracy led by an “evil Catholic” intent on destroying their church.

That targeted “evil Catholic” was then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is currently the Democratic candidate for Governor of California. The way the Luz del Mundo leaders tried to smear Becerra’s action is a textbook example of how insular religious group cohesion relies on manufacturing external enemies when institutional accountability arrives.

What is worse, despite the way the Luz del Mundo leaders do their best to pit their faithful against Catholics whenever possible, their defense of Naasón Joaquín García was a verbatim copy of what the Legion of Christ did in the first decade of this century, when their members used to threaten whoever was willing to share over the early Internet, blogs, Messenger, and email, news about Marcial Maciel’s predatory conduct.

Beautiful Province?

If one follows Mexican news, it is hard to expect a change from the leaders of the Luz del Mundo. Far from acknowledging any mistake from Naasón Joaquín García, his mother and the other five associates already included in ProtestantAccountability.org, they seem to be intent on more explicitly turning what is left of their religious capital into a local political party in their cradle, the so-called Beautiful Province neighborhood, a suburb of Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco in western Mexico.

It is still unclear if the election authority there will clear them, but it is impossible to miss how their former partners in national elections, the current national ruling Morena party, has already objected to their registration as a local political party, perhaps because Morena wants to render itself as a “Mexican humanist party” and the Luz del Mundo leaders are intent on labeling their organization as “Humanist Party.”

The issue is more relevant as Jalisco is one of a handful of Mexican states that have resisted voting for Morena, and the Luz del Mundo Church made a name for itself in local politics in the Guadalajara Metropolitan Area for being able to deliver full blocs of very loyal faithful willing to keep the backroom deals struck by their leaders with the old Revolutionary Institutional Party since the 1970s and more recently with Morena.

And in a fashion similar to that of any given Mexican Catholic diocese, the Luz del Mundo Church does little or nothing to inform the public about their regularly scheduled or special appointments to any given position within that religious organization’s structure in Mexico or elsewhere.

Shielded by the notion that they are the selected few confronting an adverse environment intent on destroying the purity of their faith, the Luz del Mundo leaders have been able to resist calls from Mexican survivors of attacks going back to the days when Naasón Joaquín’s father, Samuel Joaquín Flores, was the leader of that Church.

In that respect, a major challenge that is already there for ProtestantAccountability.org is whether or not they will be able to help the survivors of clergy sexual abuse on both sides of the border to figure out the professional trajectories of predatory leaders within the Luz del Mundo Church and, perhaps more significantly, to identify how the lay persons in that organization helped such predatory leaders to achieve their goals and to enforce silence, including the very relatives of their victims.

As it happens in Catholic contexts, the victims usually come from those closest to the Church, its structures and practices, as the chances to exert an unchecked authority over them are significantly higher than with people who are not members or who are unable to gauge how powerful is the predator within the religious organization.

That is the story coming out of the five so-called Jane Does in the formal criminal investigation in California. However, as significant as Naasón Joaquín García’s trial and state conviction have been, they are merely the proverbial “tip of the iceberg,” as the evidence already in the federal indictment begins to show. The full indictment appears as a PDF in the box before this paragraph.

If one follows what is available now, there are charges ranging from racketeering to sex trafficking and child exploitation. What is worse, there is also evidence of generational abuse involving dozens of identified minors and young women across California and Texas in the United States, and Jalisco in Mexico spanning decades.

Although they have been extremely cautious to avoid any damage to their own cases, the legal teams representing survivors (such as those filing civil claims under lookback windows in California) and advocacy groups like Survivors of Apostolic Abuse (SoA) estimate that the number of victims—spanning the leadership of Samuel Joaquín Flores and his son Naasón Joaquín García—ranges in the hundreds to potentially thousands.

As it happens in Catholic, Latter-Day Saints, and other religious settings, abuse at the Luz del Mundo Church is not about isolated incidents, the so-called “lone wolves;” it is about an institutionalized system of grooming.

Because young women were assigned to internal roles (such as the “Handmaidens” or Unconditional Group) directly serving Naasón Joaquín, survivors describe an environment where abuse was widespread, multi-generational, and heavily enforced by institutional secrecy and sect-like practices of blind loyalty to the Luz del Mundo, Naasón Joaquín, and those closest to him.

These sectarian practices, reminiscent of what still happens up until now in Opus Dei, the Legion of Christ or what is left of the Sodalitium of Christian Life, allow the leaders to target as vital enemies of the organization and God himself whoever is willing to criticize them or to blow the whistle on the abuse.

What is worse, on top of those features common to other survivors of abuse in religious settings, the Luz del Mundo victims recruited in Mexico were frequently lured with promises of having access to visas and residency permits to stay in the United States.

Naasón Joaquín García’s inclusion in ProtestantAccountability.org is not only one more entry in a database, it is also a chance for the victims of other leaders in that religious organization to be believed, to be heard, whether they live in the United States, Mexico or in any other Latin American country where that denomination has been active over the last 40 years or so.

As it happens in other churches affected by these practices, the idea that abuse is a myth promoted by the enemies of the church still plays a major role in trying to dissuade victims about the validity or the credibility of their claims.

Sadly, so far, the only information available in that database is the one coming from the criminal investigation in California, but soon there will be access to the federal criminal investigation and perhaps that will put some pressure on the Mexican authorities to do something to help survivors of abuse at that religious organization, as well as with those who have gone through similar experiences in Catholic or other settings.

One must keep in mind that, when comparing the outcomes of clergy sexual abuse accusations in Mexico and the United States, this series has found at least three examples that what matters is not how willing was Pope Francis or how willing Pope Leo XIV is today to address the specific concerns of Mexican or U.S. victims of that scourge in Catholic settings.

As the four stories comparing Texas to Chihuahua and California to the Mexican Baja Californias linked before and after this paragraph prove, the key is what specific measures the civil authorities of Texas and California have been willing to take to punish sexual predators as compared to the inaction one sees in Chihuahua, the Baja Californias and Mexico at large.

If one digs deeper, one finds that, in actuality, Pope Francis’s 2019 instruction for all the Catholic dioceses in the world to set up commissions to prevent clergy sexual abuse has been fulfilled by Catholic jurisdictions in California, Texas, and almost any U.S. state, while neither the Archdiocese of Tijuana, Baja California nor the diocese of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, have been willing to comply.

There is no reason to expect something different from the Luz del Mundo Church. In that regard, whatever pressure comes from the United States, whether with Naasón Joaquín García’s California and U.S. federal cases or in the form of his inclusion in ProtestantAccountability.org’s database forces the state and federal governments in Mexico to explain why nothing happens south of the Rio Grande.

Finally, it must be stressed that there are other denomination-specific databases already available through both BishopAccountability.org and ProtestantAccountability.org. One is specific for the Latter-day Saints Church and its many offshoots in Mexico, the United States and Canada.

There are two for the Jehovah’s Witnesses available here and also here. There is one for the many expressions of the Jewish faith here, one more for those identified as Buddhist, one more for Yoga practitioners at Siddha Yoga and one broadly identified as Cults.

Combined with the aforementioned Prosopon for the Orthodox and Oriental Churches, they offer palpable proof that abuse does happen in religious contexts, but they in no way prove it is unavoidable, although they also prove that religious practice mobilizes symbolic and material resources that facilitate abuse and that it is necessary to keep a watchful eye on religious leaders to prevent clergy sexual abuse.

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A summary of this piece is available as audio after this paragraph.

Note on production: The text of this summary was written and edited solely by the author. The delivery of the audio summary was achieved using a high-quality, text-to-speech engine Microsoft Word for Web. The AI was used for voice generation only, not content creation.