Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez Lunes, 25 de Agosto del 2025
Aguiar Retes represents a different understanding of what the Church is all about when compared to Rivera Carrera on most issues, but clergy sexual abuse.
New and old cases keep emerging and, as influential as he is in Rome, Aguiar Retes seems to be unwilling to use his clout to address clergy sexual abuse.
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
Over the last two weeks, this series has gone over the case of Izcalli as a paradigm of how clergy sexual abuse happens, almost without consequence, in Mexico, as an unbridled tumor, undermining trust within the Catholic Church’s communities.
A key figure in what has happened at that diocese is Cardinal Carlos Aguiar Retes, as he played a major role in Pope Francis’s decision to create the diocese back in 2014, when Aguiar Retes was the archbishop of Tlalnepantla and, as such had a say on the future of a territory that was part then of the diocese of Cuautitlán.
That diocese, with Izcalli and other five more are now the so-called suffragan dioceses of Tlalnepantla, where the archbishop retains oversight powers, strenghtened after Francis's 2019 reforms.
While Aguiar Retes is, by any account, a welcome improvement from his predecessor in Mexico City, Cardinal Norberto Rivera Carrera, his leadership style has left free to roam the many demons haunting some of the most sacred buildings of the Mexican capital archdiocese.
Aguiar Retes has not been accused of abuse or harassment, but his tenure at Texcoco, coupled with the influence he exerts over other dioceses in Mexico, as that of Izcalli or Tepic, his hometown, leaves questions open regarding his will to actually extirpate the tumor of clergy sexual abuse in those and other dioceses where he has influence.
As this piece was written, Rome issued yet another piece of evidence of Aguiar Retes’s clout there: on Thursday 21, Pope Leo XIV appointed Carlos Enrique Samaniego López, Aguiar Retes’s auxiliary in Mexico City, as the new bishop of Texcoco. The diocese where Aguiar Retes built the powerful networks that ultimately helped him become, as he is now, Cardinal.
Samaniego López takes over from Juan Manuel Mancilla López, who became auxiliary bishop of Texcoco in 2001 while Aguiar was busy as general secretary of the Counsel of the Latin American Bishops (CELAM, after its Spanish-language acronym) in Colombia, among other assignments.
Mancilla López remained there for four years, until Benedict XVI sent him to the diocese of Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, in Northern Mexico. When Pope Ratzinger promoted Aguiar Retes to archbishop of Tlalnepantla, Mancilla López came back to Texcoco, where he ended this week a 16-year tenure.
From Tlalnepantla, Aguiar Retes consolidated his networks within and outside the Catholic Church and Mexico. He was more than ready when Pope Francis appointed him to Mexico City. Both had met and worked together in previous years, so there was a better relationship between them than the one between the Pontiff and Norberto Rivera Carrera.
A milestone in their shared experience as leaders of the Catholic Church happened when Aguiar Retes and Jorge Mario Bergoglio worked together in 2007 during the development of the Fifth General Assembly of CELAM (content in Spanish), that issued a document commonly known as Aparecida, as it was approved at the eponymous Basilica in Brazil.
That happened with Aguiar Retes as the first Vice President of CELAM and Bergoglio, the Cardinal and archbishop of Buenos Aires, Argentina, dominated many of the debates around the approval of the document.
It should not come as a surprise that Aguiar Retes and Francis had more in common than the Argentine Pontiff and Norberto Rivera Carrera. The differences are not only of style, although it is impossible to forget how Rivera Carrera used to attack Mexican journalists raising questions back in the 1990s about Marcial Maciel attacking teenagers.
There is no instance of Aguiar Retes going to the kind of language that was frequent when media had the rare chance to raise a question to Rivera Carrera, while there are plenty of examples and anecdotes about Aguiar Retes’s civil and respectful demeanor.
The differences go beyond manners, as proven by Aguiar Retes’s will to appoint females to lead key offices in the archdiocese and reflect a gap in how Aguiar Retes and Rivera Carrera, and the coalitions behind them, understand the role of the Church.
Fresh air, of sorts
While Rivera Carrera joined at least once the many “Dubias” (doubts in Latin) the far-right sent to criticize indirectly Pope Francis’s timid attempts at reform of his Church, it is hard to imagine a scenario where Aguiar Retes would do something similar.
While Rivera Carrera suppressed the efforts already in place back in the 1990s by his predecessor at the archdiocese, late Cardinal Ernesto Corripio Ahumada, to create new, smaller, more manageable and human-scale like dioceses, Aguiar Retes, with Pope Francis’s support, immediately completed that task, setting up the new dioceses of Azcapotzalco, Iztapalapa, and Xochimilco in the eponymous mayoralties.
Aguiar also changed long-standing practices regarding access to key positions in the archdiocese’s structure. The changes have been hard to swallow for the local clergy. There was a rebellion of sorts when Aguiar Retes demanded more money from the parishes. Never before seen news emerged in civil media and Spanish-speaking Catholic far-right media criticizing Aguiar Retes as a money-grubber.
More so when he forced down new criteria to operate the parishes, especially when dealing with living arrangements of the priests, as he was requesting from them to live in small communities of relatively close parishes, as to help each other and avoid the risks of living alone in a large metropolis as Mexico City.
On paper, the idea looks good, as it theoretically allows for building communities of the local clergy in the archdiocese and prevent the “pastor-as-feudal-lord” approach that still exists in many Mexican dioceses. However, the new style was not always easy to execute, and in some cases was not even realistic.
More so as the execution was less than stellar. Senior priests, close to retirement age, in the country’s capital felt betrayed by the way Aguiar Retes’s underlings approached them, dismissing their concerns and even threatening with some kind of canonical punishment if they were unwilling to comply with what looked at the time, for some of them, as some sort of power-grab.
Double legacy
And yet, it would be ludicrous to dismiss at least two aspects of Norberto Rivera Carrera’s legacy at the archdiocese. On the one hand, the issue of violence becoming suspiciously normal in Mexico City’s churches.
On the other, there is the relationship between Pope Francis and Rivera Carrera. Instead of sending there a mere bishop or an archbishop to take over from the departing cleric, Aguiar Retes got the red hat as Cardinal in 2016, after Francis had been in Mexico City.
Unlike other papal trips during his tenure in Mexico City when Rivera Carrera was willing to sell the image of then John Paul II to be placed in all kinds of merchandise, from snacks to bottles with drinking water, Francis’s visit to Mexico witnessed confrontations between the Pontiff and Rivera Carrera’s wing in the Mexican Conference of Bishops, more so after Francis criticized the “clerics of the State” when he signed the Guest Book of the Seminary of the diocese of Ecatepec approach that the Mexican hierarchy.
On that book, Francis wrote on February 14, 2016:
May all who in this house prepare themselves for the priesthood think always about Our Lord, Jesus Christ, and his Holy Mother. May both help them become shepherds of the people of God and not "clerics of the State." Francis.
Rivera Carrera and other bishops and priests in his orbit went public chastising or dismissing the Pope’s remarks as out of touch. If in early January, Rivera Carrera was making the proforma statements about the joy of welcoming the Pontiff (content in Spanish), already during the Pope’s trip to Mexico, the Mexican Cardinal was denying a conflict with the reigning Pontiff (content in Spanish), which oddly enough proved there were conflicts.
It should not surprise that, when Francis appointed Aguiar Retes to Mexico City, he arrived already a Cardinal, and still the apostolic administrator of Tlalnepantla, as an additional sign of the trust the Argentine Pontiff had in his appointee to Mexico City. There was no way for Rivera Carrera to pull rank on Aguiar Retes.
Murders everywhere
Even if violence has been prevalent in Mexico at least since the late 1990s when a first wave of violence swept the county, Churches had been spaces of relative peace. Said peace was shattered when back in 2010, a crime shocked the country.
A so-called canon, a senior priest in the Catholic Church, serving at the Chapter of the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe was beaten to his death in his own house. Jesús Guízar Villanueva was not any priest. Not only because of his status as canon of the Basilica. He was both the nephew of Rafael Guizar Valencia, the former bishop of Jalapa and a Mexican saint, proclaimed as such by Benedict XVI in 2006, and at the same time, the nephew of infamous predator Marcial Maciel.
He went public, calling out Rivera Carera and then rector of the Basilica, Diego Monroy Ponce mismanagement of the monies there, a long-standing source of conflict in the Mexican Catholic church, and of gossip about the kind of wealth behind it.
More so as, in an ill-advised move, Rivera Carrera tried to secure for the archdiocese the copyright of the religious icon, an image that has been reproduced millions of times in all kinds of media, and that ultimately would be impossible to lock under copyright as, even if one accepts the Church’s teachings on the icon, it is of Divine origin and it first appeared, as a miracle, back in 1531. Who would be able to enforce copyright guarantees over such an icon?
The fact, however, was that there was an attempt to do it, and that brought conflict for Rivera Carrera in his already fraught relationship with other Mexican bishops, as this story in Spanish from 2003 tells.
It must be noted too that unlike Aguiar Retes, who was elected chair of the Mexican Conference of Bishops twice, Rivera Carrera was never able to secure such a national or international position in an open vote with his peers, despite his rank as Cardinal.
Guízar Villanueva was also an uncommon priest in Mexico because the most heartfelt condolences about his murder were published not by the local Catholic media, but by academic journals, as he was an accomplished Latinist on his own right, as proven by this notice of his death, no details about how it happened, at the academic journal Nova Tellus, published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, available here, only in Spanish.
One of the few remaining reminders of his death in Catholic media comes from a website stuck in the first decade of this century devoted to the Holy Shroud, available in Spanish here.
More significantly, Guízar Villanueva’s 2010 murder remains unsolved, and there are witness’ accounts of him and Diego Monroy Ponce publicly quarrelling over the management of the Basilica.
A story published by then weekly Mexican medium Proceso (content in Spanish), quoted a report Guízar Villanueva sent to Benedict XVI with details of Monroy Ponce’s mishandling of the monies at the Basilica. It also has accounts offered by two brothers of the murdered priest of instances of conflict between Guízar Villanueva and Monroy Ponce.
Even if one were willing to forget about Guízar Villanueva’s violent murder, Monroy Ponce would deserve a book on his own. He was a source of controversy even back in the 1990s, when he was named a predator by the family of a former altar boy who lived in a parish close to the Basilica. Those accusations, made before public awareness or forums existed, were never officially substantiated
Even Norberto Rivera Carrera, already an expert on dismissing any and all criticism of Marcial Maciel, found hard to ignore the many questions around Guízar Villanueva’s murder and Monroy Ponce’s potential role on it. By the end of 2010, he accepted his resignation as rector of the Basilica.
Years later, when the local government acknowledged gay marriage with the same rights as those of heterosexual marriages, despite being already in some kind of retirement, Monroy and other priests close to Rivera Carrera launched in 2016 a campaign of sorts to discredit the measure.
In response, LGTBQ organizations in Mexico City angered at his verbose rejection of gay marriage in the country’s capital published his and the names of other bishops and priests as closeted gays, unwilling to acknowledge their own behavior and unable to respect other people’s choices. Some of the names in the list are still available over the Internet Archive, in Spanish, here.
In May 2017, months before Pope Francis’s decision to send Aguiar Retes as the new archbishop of Mexico City, the 16th century Cathedral in downtown Mexico City witnessed the assassination of priest José Miguel Machorro, while he was presiding Mass at one of the secondary altars.
If the brutal assassination was not enough cause of concern, there was later the issue of how the archdiocese dismissed who emerged as the common law partner and the two sons of the priest.
Already during Aguiar Retes’s tenure, another crime shocked the Mexican capital, in June 2019, news emerged of the assassination of seminarian Leonardo Avendaño Chávez by Catholic priest Francisco Javier Bautista Ávalos, who is in prison purging a sentence of 27 years. So, it would be hard to believe that there was no need for change at the archdiocese.
One also must also acknowledge that whatever goodwill Aguiar Retes has put forward to advance, there has been resistance from the darkest corners of the Mexican far-right, unwilling to acknowledge the need for any kind of reform or improvement.
The wrath of conservative intolerance
Last year, he faced the alleged orthodoxy of Eduardo Verástegui and his followers, when he joined remotely a round table at the Universidad Panamericana, the Opus Deir Catholic college in Mexico City.
Verástegui’s wrath was about the fact that the Cardinal and one of his auxiliaries, were willing to sit and exchange ideas with a Mexican lawmaker who allegedly has ties with the Mexican Free Masons, as the story linked after this paragraph tells.
English Edition
Verástegui, Trump, and the wrath of Catholic intolerance
Unlike half of the Mexican Conference of Catholic Bishops, way too desperate to find excuses to dismiss Pope Francis’s request to set up at least a commission to prevent clergy sexual abuse, as the story linked after this paragraph proves, Aguiar set up such a commission, and clerics do not hold a majority of its members.
He has tried to appoint twice females as heads of key offices of his Archdiocese’s curia. Most recently, he appointed a female as the new chancellor, and even if she is not the first woman to hold such position in Mexico, as back in the 1990s bishop Samuel Ruiz García had already made a similar appointment at San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Aguiar’s is still a pioneer of sorts in that regard.
Before that, when he first got to Mexico City, he appointed a female to lead the communications. His bet backfired. The appointee, a then numerary of the Opus Dei, was immediately attacked by the Mexican far-right for not being a priest and, ultimately for being a female.
But would be absurd to dismiss the fact that being a numerary of the Opus Dei she was already in the kind of limbo members of that organization are. They play to be laypersons, when frequently they behave as members of a religious order, even if as soon as one draws the comparison, they will claim the opposite.
Also, as much as one would like to praise Aguiar Retes’s efforts when appointing females in key positions of his curia, his latest appointment at the Pontifical University of Mexico, of which he is Grand Chancellor, draw negative reactions all over the Spanish-speaking world.
The former president of the University, Alberto Anguiano García, left a trail of unusual statements to Mexican and foreign Spanish-speaking media, civil and Catholic, very willing to amplify the implicit accusations against Aguiar Retes’s overreach at the University.
This story from a Mexican medium (content in Spanish), highlights Anguiano García’s complaints about being the victim of some kind of labor-related harassment by those close to Aguiar Retes.
On the Catholic media front, at least in Spanish, Spaniard medium Vida Nueva Digital (content in Spanish), joined the coverage of the rather unusual ousting of Anguiano.
More so, as his replacement, Pedro Benítez Mestre, came from the priests of the archdiocese of Tlalnepantla, and his appointment was accepted two days later by Rome, as the previous story on this series, linked after this paragraph, tells.
So, although it is impossible to dismiss Aguiar Retes’s efforts at addressing the many mistakes made by Norberto Rivera Carrera, clergy sexual abuse included, it is impossible to bet high on the current archbishop as an accomplished reformer of his Church, as there is already a conflicting record of mishandling of ordinations, reports of abuse and a lack of verifiable will to address the root causes of clergy sexual abuse.
There are two cases falling under Aguiar Retes tenure. In one case a priest ordained by him despite his record at a religious order, and a priest ordained as such by one of Aguiar Retes’s auxiliary bishops.
Also, there is one “old” new case, going back to Rivera Carrera’s tenure, but that now it is up to Aguiar Retes to address. The cases have been published before by this series at Los Angeles Press, although the first one only in Spanish.
Geographic solution, again
That is the case of Sergio González Guerrero, a priest in Mexico City, presents a clear picture of how abuse cases are handled by the Church's hierarchy. He was arrested in January 2024 for the alleged sexual abuse of a minor in Tlalpan, a mayoralty in Mexico City.
He was released less than 24 hours later due to “mistakes” in the investigation file, a common loophole in the Mexican justice system.
His case reveals patterns of institutional failures. On the one hand, González Guerrero had a history of problematic behavior. Most notably, he was expelled from a religious order, the so-called Josephites or Josefinos de Murialdo, as they are known in the Spanish-speaking world, between 2017 and 2018.
Sadly, as it is the case in most Latin American countries, there is no central archive where dioceses and religious orders could report who is expelled from a seminary or, as they are called by the religious orders, houses of formation, so one scholastic (as the religious orders call them) or seminarian with problems in one order or diocese is able to get a second, third or any number of chances in other diocese or order willing to bet on him.
The archdiocese of Mexico City, already under Cardinal Aguiar Retes’s aegis accepted and ordained him despite these clear red flags. Even if the archdiocese of Mexico has a relatively functional website where one can track down “fake priests”, individuals who are not actual Catholic priests, the website does not allow to track where a priest such as González Guerrero’s has been appointed in any capacity.
As a consequence, despite the many advantages one sees in Aguiar Retes’s tenure as compared to Rivera Carrera’s, both Cardinals keep the faithful whether in the dark or gaslighted, as there is no information about who has a chance at being ordained or at being appointed to any given parish in the archdiocese.
In that regard, Aguiar Retes’s falls for many of the same systemic failures allowing the crime perpetrated by González Guerrero in Tlalpan confirming a pattern of the Church being more interested in protecting its own and its reputation over some notion of public or common good
More so, the stories published then show how González Guerrero was transferred from a parish in Iztacalco, to a new one in Gustavo A. Madero.
This transfer is more problematic as it placed him within walking distance of a parish managed by the Josephites, the very order that had previously “soft-expelled” him, with no actual consequence for his career, as he was able to get accepted by the Mexico City seminary and eventually being ordained by Cardinal Aguiar Retes himself.
It is hard to understand what lies behind such move. If González Guerrero was having trouble in Iztacalco, and one could assume he was given his sudden departure, why sending him to Gustavo A. Madero where he would be withing walking distance of the order that “punished” him?
And it is impossible to miss the similarities between the cases Sergio González Guerrero from the archdiocese of Mexico and Morseo Miramón Santiago from the diocese of Izcalli.
It should be clear by now that neither of them should never have been ordained, as both had prior issues in their formation. González Guerrero was soft expelled from the Josephites religious order, while Miramón Santiago disappeared from the seminary of the Good Shepherd in the archdiocese of Acapulco.
Both cases mirror each other, and the absence of transparent records makes it difficult to trace the full history of these priests, forcing investigators to use indirect methods to piece together their movements. Both make almost impossible to take for granted the idea that there is a real commitment with a “zero-tolerance” policy when dealing with clergy sexual abuse in the Mexican dioceses.
A “charitable” predator
A second case already under Aguiar Retes’s tenure in Mexico City is that of Jacinto Jiménez Tepetlixpa.
He is a young priest accused of sexual abuse. His case is part of a trend of new abuse cases involving recently ordained priests in Latin America, despite Benedict XVI's reforms to the education they receive at their seminaries.
English Edition
The crime of Father Araújo
This trend involves both same-sex and heterosexual abuse, as the story from Brazil linked before this paragraph proves.
The alleged abuse took place at a foundation where Jiménez Tepetlixpa, despite his youth and inexperience outside of the Trinitarian Order served as the general director, and the victim was not a minor.
His order is one of the oldest in the Catholic world, but it is a relatively recent arrival to Mexico, as its operates here under the authority of its Italian province. He was ordained as a deacon in Italy in 2020 and as a priest in Mexico City in July 2021 by auxiliary bishop Luis Manuel Pérez Raygoza.
He came to Mexico City after developing his career as priest in the archdiocese of Monterrey, the capital city of the state of Nuevo León in Northern Mexico, the new “hotbed” for recruiting the members of the Mexican Catholic episcopate.
Shortly after Jiménez Tepetlixpa’s ordination, his order appointed him to a key position as the chairman of the board and general director of a foundation that provides food and shelter to homeless people. The story linked after this paragraph offers a more detailed account of that case.
It is impossible to figure out the rationale behind such move by the Trinitarian Order, one that is common in the Catholic non-for-profits, where being a priest is still perceived as a source of knowledge and authority.
There are unanswered questions about the protocols behind such decisions, and what is the role, if any of the Archdiocese of Mexico City in trying to prevent abuse in those cases.
His case is awfully similar to that of Abbé Pierre in France and many other priests who have a very active public life advocating for real issues that puts them in contact with persons who, even if not minors, are still at risk of being abused.
English Edition
Hero, priest, and sexual predator: the story of Abbé Pierre
And the “old” new case
Back in June a survivor approached us to figure out how to come forward with a story of his case. Although originally, he wanted to remain behind an assumed identity and we are very willing to respect that decision, after his story became public, he decided to use over social and legacy media his real identity.
In the original piece, available after this paragraph he was identified only as Hernán. and it discusses a “new old case” of clergy sexual abuse in Mexico, focusing on the story of a survivor attacked while he was a minor by a priest named Miguel Flores Martínez.
English Edition
“Old” new cases of clergy sexual abuse emerge in Mexico City
This case is brought to light again due to the recent appointment of Pedro Aguado Cuesta as a bishop of the dioceses of Huesca and Jaca, in Spain, as he was the superior of the Pious Schools order at the time the abuse allegations were made.
The abuse occurred over three years during the early 2000s, when Norberto Rivera Carrera was the archbishop in Mexico City. Despite members of the Pious Schools order being aware of the abuse, no disciplinary actions were taken against the priest.
The article details how Aguado Cuesta, upon learning of the abuse, offered financial support to the survivor’s family and promised to restrict the abuser’s access to minors. However, there is abundant evidence that Flores Martínez continued to work with children at schools and in other settings.
The article highlights the systemic failures within the Church, arguing that other high-ranking officials, including Carlos Briseño Arch, the current bishop of Veracruz, and Florencio Armando Colín Cruz current bishop of Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, were also aware of the situation and were friends with the abuser, as they were auxiliary bishops in Mexico City.
Briseño Arch, a member of the Augustinian Recollect order, from 2006 through 2018, and Colín Cruz a diocesan priest from 2008 through 2018. And, as a side note, Briseño Arch already witnessed early this month the arrest of one of his priests in the diocese of Veracruz as the story linked after this paragraph tells.
The appointment of Aguado Cuesta as bishop in Spain, his country of origin, despite his failure to hold the abuser fully accountable, is yet another clear example of the Church’s ongoing lack of transparency and a culture of impunity, as the Church’s internal processes is insufficient, forcing victims such as Javier Fernando Alcántara Cruz, Hernán’s real name, to seek justice through civil channels.
More so, as last Thursday August 21, Alcántara Cruz published over his social media the most recent message he got from the superiors of the Pious Schools stating their inability to share the full file of the canonical process, as the message at what used to be Twitter after this paragraph proves.
Reform or scarlet bond?
While Cardinal Aguiar Retes is, by any account, a welcome improvement from his predecessor, his leadership style has left untouched the many demons haunting some of the most sacred buildings of the Mexican capital's archdiocese.
Aguiar Retes has not been accused of abuse or harassment, but his tenure at Texcoco, coupled with the influence he exerts over other dioceses in Mexico, leaves open questions as to how far he is willing to go to address key issues.
Rome’s trust in his influence is clear, as Pope Leo XIV appointed his now former auxiliary, Carlos Enrique Samaniego López, as the new bishop of Texcoco—the very diocese where Aguiar Retes built the networks that helped him become Cardinal.
A key challenge for Aguiar is his struggle to dismantle the tangled web of systemic failures tolerated and even promoted by his predecessor. This web is a dense, sticky, and disorganized mess of intertwined issues that are difficult to separate or understand. It manifests in the way priests with problematic histories are able to move between dioceses and orders without consequence.
Both Sergio González Guerrero, ordained by Aguiar Retes despite being “soft-expelled” from his religious order, and Morseo Miramón Santiago, who disappeared from the seminary of Acapulco only to be ordained the diocese of Izcalli, are clear examples of this.
These cases are not isolated incidents but rather a perfect illustration of what Robert Sipe called the "scarlet bond", a thick network of complicit relationships that makes almost impossible to provide victims with a true measure of justice.
English Edition
Catholic bishops forced to resign, looks can be deceiving
A key aspect can be seen in the case of Jacinto Jiménez Tepetlixpa’s case, a young, newly ordained priest, was appointed to a position of great power as chairman of a board and director of a charity.
This decision places a young, untested, individual with no other expertise than his years as a clergyman in a position where he has a chance to abuse people in need.
The way Jiménez Tepetlixpa became or is the chairman of a charity and how both Sergio González Guerrero in Mexico City and Morseo Miramón Santiago in Izcalli became priests prove that the Church's internal protocols and decision-making processes remain a significant problem.
People of God
And yes, there are cases that are the legacy of Norberto Rivera Carrera’s 22-year-long tenure in Mexico City, as Hernán’s or Javier Fernando Alcántara Cruz’s case proves, but despite the new leadership at the archdiocese of Mexico City, there is no indication of an actual solution to his case. Only the known abuse of the “pontifical secret” argument to deny transparency and access to information.
All these cases show that a culture of impunity, of protecting the institution and the leaders of the institution above all else, continues to affect survivors in the present. It does so as they are forced to reconcile the abuse they were subject to with their religious beliefs or with the actual loss of such beliefs, which almost always comes as a painful process.
English Edition
Izcalli, Three‘s a Charm?
The authors of the report that originally prompted this series on Izcalli, whose first installment is linked before this paragraph, trusting and practicing Catholics, as proven by their decision to follow the arcane canonical, internal process.
When the Catholic bishops in Mexico and elswhere talk about "the People of God," they could only be talking about them, and as such they both Cardinal Aguiar Retes’s and nuncio to Mexico Joseph Spiteri’s support on this matter.
They were already aware that even if formally Cardinal Aguiar Retes is not now the superior of Francisco González Ramos, the bishop of Izcalli, as a Cardinal and former archbishop of Tlalnepantla, he exerts large quotas of clout or influence, informal power having no specific mention on written law, over the dioceses depending on his former archdiocese, that of Tlalnepantla, so they sought the archdiocese of Mexico City’s help.
Their request was accepted, and the response was formal and respectful, but beyond the usual courtesies and niceties when dealing with Aguiar Retes and his teams, the lack of meaningful response remains the norm.
Aguiar Retes’s team at the archdiocese of Mexico City acknowledged receiving all the documents sent to them, little over a year ago, on July 29, 2024, saying they will tell Izcalli about the documents received.
They answered three days after the first contact with them. That was already a faster response than the one they got from the Nunciature to Mexico. There, a much shorter response denying the ability to intervene, despite the number of cases at Izcalli documented over the report proving a pattern of inaction by González Ramos, was sent on September 24 of that year, 13 days after the original contact.
Sadly, in both cases, they claim to be able to do little or nothing. It is clear the “canonical ball” is on the diocese of Izcalli’s court, but both Aguiar Retes and nuncio to Mexico Joseph Spiteri, have ways to make their voices heard at Izcalli, and elsewhere in Mexico.
Spitteri himself, should be well aware of the fact how since his arrival to Mexico in July 2022, there has been little or no progress on setting up new diocesan commissions to at least prevent clergy sexual abuse in Mexico.
Ultimately, the true test of Cardinal Aguiar Retes’s tenure will be whether he can finally untangle this web, as to offer some hope beyond the mere stylistic improvement over his predecessor that he achieved the very first day he set foot in the Mexico City Cathedral.
