How abuse happens in the Mexican Catholic heartland

The absence of information about priests with standing accusations of abuse proves how the Catholic hierarchy still bets on opacity.

Jorge was a victim of abuse at 11. The Catholic diocese of Celaya provides no information about the pending canonical and penal accusations of the accused.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

This is a story of yet another instance of clergy sexual abuse in Mexico. As in many other cases, it comes from the very heartland of Catholic Mexico, a region where a handful of dioceses sport numbers similar to the ones that were once the pride of similar bastions of Catholicism in Europe, North America and other Latin American countries.

As in many cases emerging nowadays all over the Catholic world, this is not a new case as such. The victim, now an adult, decided to come forward, and to do so he chose to be identified only as Jorge. The alleged aggression began back in 2010, when the victim was an 11-year-old parishioner at Saint Sebastian, in the municipality of San José Iturbide, in the central state of Guanajuato and, more specifically from the diocese of Celaya.

That, and the other two dioceses in the state of Guanajuato (the Archdiocese of León and the diocese of Irapuato) belong to the heartland of Mexican Catholicism, the so-called Bajío (Lowlands). The diocese of Celaya has enough priests to preside over several Masses on Sunday at different locations, to marry whoever asks for the service and to bury, according to the rituals, their dead, one with an average number of Catholics per priest as low as five thousand.

When one compares that number with what happens in other Mexican or Central American dioceses, as Valle de Chalco, Mexico or Yoro, Honduras where each priest looks after 28 thousand or 20 thousand faithful, respectively, it is almost unavoidable to wonder why a Catholic priest would attack the most loyal members of his Church.

That is not a personal opinion. Graphs 1 through 3 offer the data on religious affiliation for Mexico as a country, for the state of Guanajuato, and the municipality of San José Iturbide, where the case prompting this story originally happened.

As can be seen in Graph 1, Mexico remains a “majority Catholic” nation, with little over 77 percent of its total population identified by the national census as Catholic. Graph 2 shows how Guanajuato as a state goes to little over 90 percent of its population declaring themselves as Catholics.

The data from the municipality of San José de Iturbide is, at least in terms of religious affiliation what Mexico used to be by the end of the 19th century or the first decade of the 20th century, with an overwhelming 93 percent of its inhabitants willing to declare themselves as Catholics in the 2020 census.

In that regard, today’s story confirms how in Mexico, Latin America and elsewhere in the Catholic world abuse, especially abuse targeting minors, more frequently happens in communities who are fiercely loyal to the Catholic Church.

If the census data was not enough, one only needs to pay attention to how the state legislature of Guanajuato sustained a standoff with the Mexican Federal government over the issue of abortion, now legal over all of Mexico, trying to find loopholes to avoid full compliance, but with some rebel states unwilling to abide by the federal rules, to understand how deeply loyal to Catholic teaching are their communities.

As in many cases, the male survivor has gone, for the most part on his own, through the stages of grief, and only recently he found the required strength to come forward and tell his story to process the pain and other consequences of being the victim of a figure of authority, who was a leader of a community that, according to census figures had at the time 1,863 inhabitants and as recently as 2020 had only 2,212 permanent residents.

According to the victim’s narrative, he was at the time an altar boy. As such, he was expected to be at the parish premises before the Mass to assist then-vicar Constantino Molina Hernández, who at the time was 43, according to Jorge’s recollection. It would be before Mass that the repeated instances of abuse happened over four years. The survivor recalls with a mixture of rage, pain and contempt, how Molina Hernández would go from predator to preacher with ease, as if nothing had happened at the parish’s private quarters.

At the time, Molina Hernández already appeared in the sole national register of sorts available in Mexico. Not one provided by the Catholic Church itself, as the Mexican Catholic Church has been moving backwards when it comes to basic aspects of accountability.

If back in the days of printed magazines and books there was a paper trail of any given diocese’s appointments whether over their diocesan monthly or bimonthly gazettes or yearly books, these days, it is almost impossible to find the equivalent information from Catholic dioceses. Granted, dioceses like Saltillo, in the northern state of Coahuila, keep relatively complex, functional and updated websites with information about appointments, and even if buried in the darkest corners of the Archdiocese of Mexico City’s website, it is possible to find information about appointments.

Transparency over Facebook?

Some dioceses limit their transparency practice to issuing an e-card over Facebook letting know of changes in parishes. Facebook being what it is, makes it almost impossible to find that information from years past, but if one is willing to challenge the monster of Facebook search, it is possible to find the information. None of that happens in Celaya. Some parishes have Facebook profiles of their own, and through them it is possible to gather some information.

As far as Celaya is concerned, the sole mechanism to try to figure out Constantino Molina Hernández’s current situation was to go over the listings irregularly released by the Mexican federal government, through the Secretary of the Interior, the so-called Secretaría de Gobernación.

Those lists offer as the sole identifiers the full name of the so-called “religious minister” (ministro de culto, in the Mexican legal jargon), and the entity to which such minister is affiliated in the Catholic Church or in the many other-than-Catholic religious organizations in the country.

Sadly, there is no official historic archive of these records. One must be willing to pick them up whenever available at the hit-and-miss websites of the Mexican federal government or in websites like Scribd where users trying to comply with the old rules of uploading a certain number of pages to be allowed to download a certain number of pages, would use these and other Directories that the Mexican government used to make available over its websites to comply with the rule.

To make matters worse, during 2026 it has been impossible to download the most recent edition of the Directory, so the last one available is already one year old and given the overall behavior of the Secretary’s subdomain in the federal Mexican government cyber-structure, there is little or no reason to be hopeful.

If one goes over the subdomain to try to access the information of the entity dealing with the crisis of disappeared persons in Mexico, one will find four “Privacy statements” about the National Search Commission (content in Spanish), but no actual page where one can get a glimpse of what that commission does regarding that issue.

If one has been gathering the old directories from other websites, the 2011 edition will show the “religious ministers” registered by the Catholic diocese of Celaya and on page 897 one will find Molina Hernández’s name. No other piece of information, only the acknowledgement that, at some point, probably in late 2010, the diocese of Celaya filed the paperwork to register 162 priests serving in the diocese.

That number already raises concerns, because if one goes to the data the diocese sent around that year to Rome, for the purposes of the information every diocese must submit to the so-called Annuario Pontificio, the Pontifical Yearbook, one finds that in 2006 the diocese reported a total of 237 priests of which, 168 were diocesan, that is to say directly associated or “incardinated” in the diocese, and the rest, 69, were members of a religious “order,” so there is a chance it was up to that religious order to comply with the Mexican government’s procedure.

The next year for which there is available information is 2013, one for which there is no available directory of “religious ministers” registered at the Mexican Interior Secretary. There the numbers are similar, with a total of 236 total priests, 167 diocesan and 69 affiliated to a religious “order.”

This is not exclusive of this diocese or of the Catholic Church at large in Mexico. If one goes over the ministers registered as such by the Mexican branch of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the set is harder to grasp, as it is only one national list encompassing from page 349 to page 438 of the full PDF for a total of 4,286 individuals registered as “religious ministers” for that religious organization.

Similar patterns exist for the much smaller Anglican Church of Mexico (77 registered ministers), the Methodist Church of Mexico (167 registered ministers) or the Latter-Day Saints, with 324 registered ministers, and the same can be said of the larger Mexican Catholic archdioceses, such as Mexico City or Guadalajara.

It should be noted in any case, that registration before the Mexican authorities is not necessarily the best way to know who is or not a “religious minister,” it is only one of the indirect ways by which it is possible to find the information the religious organizations with operations in Mexico, Catholic or otherwise, are unwilling to provide through their own means.

Despite its limitations, the Directory published by the Mexican Secretary of the Interior in 2019 offers proof of how Constantino Molina Hernández was appointed sometime in the second decade of this century as the pastor of Saint Sebastian, as his name appears as the only one priest ascribed to that parish on page 1106 of that year’s Directory, as shown by the screenshot from the PDF file after this paragraph. That year his name appeared also in page 1111 as part of the diocese.

Oddly enough, by 2023, the practice of reporting on the Directory the names of the “religious ministers” ascribed to each of the parishes in the diocese had been replaced by a “consolidated” list where all the clergy of that diocese appear, so it is impossible to know if already by 2023 something was happening with Molina Hernández.

The next year the situation is pretty much the same for both the Catholic dioceses and the other-than-Catholic religious organizations. In 2024, Molina Hernández was still listed as clergy in the diocese of Celaya. On that PDF he appears on page 1390 as one of 179 total registered “religious ministers.” The gap when compared with the official Catholic source for 2023, the Annuario Pontificio, remains, as Rome got notice of a total of 283 priests with 206 classified as diocesan and 77 as religious.

Cyber-archeology

Even if there is a relatively well designed and functional website for the diocese of Celaya at its URL (content in Spanish) the actual information there is minimal, barely limited to the biography of the previous bishops (currently there is no bishop), and a map where it is possible only to identify some of the municipalities of the state of Guanajuato that belong to the diocese, but no actual information as to the active priests or its parishes or schools. Noticeably, the parish of Saint Sebastian in the municipality of San José de Iturbide, does not appear in the map.

To figure out the absence it was necessary to go over the website available at www.oficinaparroquial.com, more specifically to the subdomain where the information on parishes of the diocese of Celaya is, available in Spanish here. It was necessary to do so, as the official website of the Mexican Conference of Bishops, usually available at www.cem.org.mx, where a map of the Mexican dioceses is available, has experienced intermittent outages during Friday, October 9, 2026.

On Saturday 10, the official website was available again as was its map. There, however, one finds a map similar to the one on the diocese’s website, where the municipality of San José Iturbide is listed under the diocese of Querétaro rather than Celaya. As of now, it is impossible to confirm it, but there is a chance that some territory of the municipality belongs to Celaya while some other to Querétaro.

Although www.oficinaparroquial.com is not an official website of the Catholic Church, it was at some point in the first decade of this century the best tool available in Mexico to try to figure out the geography of the Catholic Church in the country. Its pages are no longer updated, but it has kept the information from the late aughts available at its URL.

It was there where it was possible to figure out the riddle. While Saint Sebastian is listed as part of Celaya, other parishes in the municipality of San José Iturbide, such as the eponymous parish of Saint Joseph appears under the diocese of Querétaro listing (content in Spanish).

Even if in this case an outdated resource such as www.oficinaparroquial.com proved useful to solve the query, according to the administrators’ notice on its landing page, the last time it was updated was May 12, 2009. As useful as it was in this case, it already belongs in the category of cyber-archeology, as there are dioceses created after that date, as in the case of Izcalli, Iztapalapa, Azcapotzalco and Xochimilco, for which the only way to track their parishes would be to go to their mother dioceses, that of Cuautitlán in Izcalli’s case, and the Archdiocese of Mexico City for the other three.

In doing so, of course there is the risk of losing valuable information about appointments, changes in jurisdiction and many other details that used to published by the dioceses themselves, as proved back in 2025, when this series told the story of yet another historic case of abuse in another corner of the Mexican lowlands, linked below, by going over the old gazettes of the diocese of San Juan de Los Lagos, which allowed to track down its appointments and other changes over time.

Unlike what happens with other Mexican dioceses that rely heavily on Facebook profiles, where the curia controls directly the profile on that platform, the diocese of Celaya is represented by its so-called CODIPAC. That is an acronym frequently used by Mexican dioceses to identify the entity that U.S. Catholic dioceses would call its Communications Office.

Coming forward in an institutional void

The difference is not limited to their titles as, unlike what one sees in the U.S., the Mexican CODIPACs (Diocesan Committee for the Pastoral of Communication) lack any actual commitment to transparency and accountability and in many cases the required tools to even try to offer actual institutional information and data instead of obituaries and happy birthday e-cards.

If in the U.S. both large archdioceses such as New York City or small dioceses as Orange, California, have teams responsible for providing information to local, national and international media, most Mexican dioceses commission lay volunteers to set up through the CODIPAC a Facebook profile from where they post the e-cards and obituaries when required or, in some extreme cases, to publish a press release.

The most recent of such extreme cases came when Pope Leo XIV promoted Víctor Alejandro Aguilar Ledesma from Celaya to the neighboring and most prestigious diocese of Querétaro, in the same central Mexico region, the so-called Bajío, where Celaya is located.

In that regard it is almost impossible to expect from the profile the Celaya CODIPAC runs on Facebook some information as to why Constantino Molina Hernández’s name evaporated from the last available official Directory of “religious ministers” published back in 2025 by the Mexican Interior Ministry’s office dealing with religious organizations.

Was he dismissed from the ministry by Rome? Was it the consequence of other abuse allegations? Is he already the subject of an official probe by the Mexican authorities?

It is hard to tell as Molina Hernández is some sort of ghost in social media. There are some loose references in the memories of parishioners of the diocese of Celaya recalling him. The most recent time his name appears in social media was back in September 2025 when a local college offering easy-to-get Masters’ degrees awarded him a degree, as the post on Facebook before this paragraph proves. In case the posting is removed, hidden or deleted, a screenshot of the posting appears below.

Given the absence of any meaningful information from the diocesan website or the CODIPAC Facebook profile, the only clue as to what has happened with Molina Hernández is how he disappeared from the official 2024 Directory to the official 2025 Directory of religious ministers.

However, because there is no downloadable 2026 edition of the Secretary of the Interior’s Directory as was customary in previous years, tracing his current official status remains impossible. Why, if there are allegations of abuse against a priest or former priest, would the Catholic diocese who used to supervise him keep the faithful in the dark about potential risks?

The issue is more relevant as, on top of the survivor coming forward, there is a chance there are more victims of Molina Hernández, as after being only the vicar of the Saint Sebastian Parish, he was promoted to pastor there and remained as such for several years.

What is worse: The first instances of abuse at Saint Sebastian Parish happened during the tenure there of a priest who is still active in the diocese and who would be responsible, at least partially for what happened during the first of four years of abuse perpetrated by Molina Hernández.

Unlike Molina Hernández, whose digital footprint is reduced to memories of former parishioners and the notice of him earning a Master of Arts degree, the former pastor of Saint Sebastian, Alejandro Hernández Maya appears as the current pastor of Saint Jude, in the city of Celaya, as the Facebook posting linked after this paragraph proves.

In that regard, did whatever happened to Molina Hernández come with some measure of discipline for Hernández Maya? It is impossible to know as the very reason why Molina Hernández disappeared from the official Directory of “religious ministers” of the Mexican government offers no actual information for his removal from that list after 2024.

Alejandro Hernández Maya appears twice in the 2011 Directory list. Once as ascribed to the Saint Sebastian parish, and again in the list of “religious ministers” registered by the diocese of Celaya. The 2024 Directory has him only in the unfiltered list of “religious ministers” and, unlike what happened with Molina Hernández, Alejandro Hernández Maya does appear on page 1417 of the 2025 Directory, under the diocese of Celaya’s list.

To be clear, the main issue is not a failure of the lay people behind the diocese of Celaya CODIPAC. Chances are they are volunteers, doing whatever work they do as a service, with little or no material or institutional support. The main issue here is the absence of any meaningful information at the diocese’s website that not only lacks an actual map of the diocese, but also any statement as to why one of its priests has been removed from the “religious ministers” Directory of the Mexican federal government.

Not the first time

Sadly, this is not the first time a diocese in the state of Guanajuato grabs headlines for clergy sexual abuse cases. A few years ago, the neighboring diocese of Irapuato became a household name when an orphanage known as the City of Children (La Ciudad de los Niños), was hit by several accusations in the first decade of this century.

Even if, ultimately, the orphanages, with houses in half a dozen municipalities in the Mexican Lowlands are now “old news,” the wounds are still open, and if one looks at the reaction Jorge got from the now former bishop of Celaya, the Catholic Church in Mexico has learnt little or nothing from its own experience handling clergy sexual abuse cases.

Regardless of whether one goes over the records of Benedict XVI, Francis or the relatively new archive on the issue from Leo XIV, the Mexican bishops seem to be impervious to their calls to pay attention, to hear and address the victims’ grievances.

What is worse, going over Jorge’s brief account of his meeting with the now bishop of Querétaro, Víctor Alejandro Aguilar Ledesma, it seems to be a carbon copy of the one a victim in the Archdiocese of Monterrey had a few years ago with Rogelio Cabrera López, the head of that see, as the story linked after this paragraph told a few months ago.

Per Jorge’s account, recently he got in touch with Aguilar Ledesma who, far from acknowledging the severity of the issue, blamed an 11-year-old Jorge for having had a “love relationship” with then-vicar Constantino Molina Hernández.

Following the unofficial “standard operating procedure” the Catholic Church’s leadership used for most of the 20th century, as when Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera did when dealing with questions from the Mexican media in the 1990s about Marcial Maciel’s abuse, the now bishop of Querétaro accused Jorge of “attacking the Catholic Church” while, paradoxically enough, asking him to forgive the man who abused him at 11 and for four years, and “to leave the issue in God’s hands.”

To nobody’s surprise, bishop Aguilar Ledesma’s words did little or nothing to address the issue. Jorge and other victims in Guanajuato are coming forward and asking other victims to do the same, while also hinting at the possibility that he and other victims who have come forward face the furious reaction of Catholic faithful who actually believe that Jorge, and many other victims, are attacking the Catholic Church.

Over many years and in different countries, the crisis of clergy sexual abuse has been the cause of episodes of violence, evident in the attacks victims and their allies receive in social media, so it is hard to question why Jorge would issue a warning about the potential fallout from Bishop Aguilar Ledesma's accusation that he is “attacking the Catholic Church.”

It is impossible not to wonder why if both Pope Francis and more recently Pope Leo XIV keep calling their “brother bishops” to actually address the causes and effects of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, prelates as Aguilar Ledesma are still willing to bet on their ability to force victims to end their efforts to achieve a measure of justice after many years of neglect and silence, conflated by the contradictory attitude of a bishop who calls himself the victim of vengeful victims, while asking the victims to forget what happened to them.

According to Jorge, the Guanajuato state prosecutor’s office already has an open investigation into Constantino Molina Hernández. It is unclear if that is the reason why his name no longer appeared in the 2025 Directory of “religious ministers” of the Mexican federal government.

Sadly, it is necessary to add yet another couple of pieces to this story of abuse: the fact that two former bishops of the diocese are already dead. They are relevant because it is impossible now to get their side of the story.

One is José Benjamín Castillo Plascencia, the sitting bishop when the abuse at Saint Sebastian happened. He died back in April, and with him died a chance to figure out what was known to him about Constantino Molina Hernández, why he allowed him to become pastor of Saint Sebastian and whether there was a report from the former pastor of that parish.

The other is Lázaro Pérez Jiménez, a bishop who died in a Mexico City hotel back in 2009. He was the sitting bishop when Constantino Molina became a priest in Celaya. Were there reports from his superiors at the seminary? Even that is hard to figure out in the black hole of information that is the Mexican Catholic Church, because there is no way to track down where he studied or whether he was already known for abusive practices as a seminarian.

What should be clear, however, is that the absence of searchable databases on “religious ministers” discredits the many claims about the Mexican government’s ability to regulate religious organizations, and that the absence of any meaningful information from the Mexican dioceses, whether from their websites or in old-fashioned booklets, as they used to do back in the 1980s, makes it really hard to trust when the bishops claim they are committed to addressing the causes and consequences of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.

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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.