Nearly 25 years after the explosion of clerical abuse scandals in the
United States spurred a new “zero tolerance” attitude and almost six
years after Pope Francis’s global safeguarding summit and the issuance
of a swath of new norms, the question arises: Has any of it been
effective?
Members of the pope’s safeguarding commission in presenting their
first annual global report on safeguarding efforts around the world Oct.
29 were optimistic, arguing that in the 12 years since its
establishment, despite a deeply entrenched culture at times resistant to
change, progress was being made.
However, the case of Carlos (a false name), who alleges that he was
sexually abused by a priest and spiritual advisor in Toledo from the age
of 14-16, raises serious questions about just how effective these
measures have been, especially in the application to concrete cases.
These questions intensified after Pope Francis on Nov. 7 met with a
group of seminarians from the ecclesial province of Toledo, greeting
several clerics and hierarchs whom Carlos says helped cover up for his
abuser, and who testified against him during a civil trial.
After making a first complaint to the Archdiocese of Toledo in 2009
and visiting various Vatican offices to deliver damning documents and
evidence and to demand action not only against his abuser, but also
those who he says covered up, Carlos says no action has been taken.
Although Crux was unable to independently verify all of
Carlos’s claims, the odyssey he has embarked on over the past 15 years
illustrates the Kafkaesque dynamic that survivors often face when
attempting to provoke action on such cases.
Grooming and abuse
Speaking to Crux, Carlos said he entered the minor seminary
Santo Tomás de Villanueva in Toledo in 2004 at the age of 12 feeling an
ardent call to the priesthood. However, when he became the victim of
relentless bullying and harassment from other students, he turned to his
confessor and spiritual director, Father Pedro Francisco Rodríguez
Ramos, for support.
“He became my only person of trust,” Carlos said, saying Rodríguez
Ramos from that point began a slow grooming process that began with
small moments of physical contact, such as a caress on the cheek,
holding his hand, and squeezing it during Confession.
This escalated to kisses on the mouth that were justified as normal, then more explicit touching and, ultimately, rape.
At one point the emotional toll of the bullying and the confusion
Carlos felt over what was starting to happen with Rodríguez Ramos led
him to begin cutting himself before attempting suicide.
Carlos said he eventually abandoned the seminary, and it took years
before he confided what happened in confession, due to feelings of
intense guilt.
He said the priest urged him to seek psychological help, which
focused less on the abuse and more on the issue of homosexuality. Months
later, Carlos said he discovered the priest he confessed to, and the
therapist recommended to him, were close friends of his abuser.
He finally told his parents what happened in 2009, after which he and
his mother began a years-long process of attempting to sound the alarm
in both Toledo and Rome that he says has ultimately gone nowhere.
Sounding the local alarm
Carlos said the first person in the church to be told about his abuse
was a priest who is now an auxiliary bishop that his family had known
for years, and who apparently brought the matter to the then-archbishop
of Toledo, Braulio Rodríguez Plaza, in 2009, but provided no follow up
or guidance on potential next steps.
That priest now serves as an auxiliary bishop in a diocese near
Toledo and has been named by Carlos in a canonical complaint delivered
to the Vatican.
Carlos’s mother spoke with Rodríguez Plaza herself in March 2010,
with the bishop saying the allegations of abuse sounded strange, and
that, “we’ll pray for him,” meaning Carlos.
From that point, it appears no action was taken, Carlos said, saying
he was never informed of whether a diocesan investigation into his
allegations was made, and if so, what the result was.
From 2010 until June 2015, according to archdiocesan records,
Rodríguez Ramos maintained his position at the Toledo minor seminary,
and was therefore in regular contact with minors, even though diocesan
leadership had already been informed of the abuse.
In July 2015, Rodríguez Ramos was appointed rector of the church of San Ildefonso in Toledo, and in September 2020 he was appointed by Cerro as a member of the archdiocesan vicariate for clergy in Toledo.
The church’s failure to act against Rodríguez Ramos prompted Carlos
to pursue civil justice, filing a civil complaint against Rodríguez
Ramos in June 2016.
The priest was found guilty in October 2023 and sentenced to seven
years in prison, ordered to pay a fine of 40,000 euros ($42,190) in
compensation to Carlos, and prohibited from coming within 250 meters of
him.
However, Rodríguez Ramos appealed the verdict and in February 2024
was acquitted on grounds that the failure to have an expert vet the
complaint during the preliminary investigation and the absence of his
lawyer in the presenting of evidence harmed the priest’s defense.
Carlos has appealed the acquittal, and the case is currently before
Spain’s Supreme Court, with the Supreme Court prosecutor’s office
pushing for the original verdict to be upheld.
In a statement over the summer, the prosecutor said, “the examination
of the trial sentence places us before a complete, integral evaluation
of the evidence proposed in which all parties, therefore also the
defense, were able to question as many witnesses and experts as they
were interested in.”
“Therefore, it does not seem that there was any lack of contradiction and therefore of defenselessness,” it said.
Despite the civil trial and initial guilty verdict of Rodríguez
Ramos, and after his mother’s 2010 complaint, Carlos said the church did
not take any restrictive measures against the priest until 2021.
The current archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Cerro also sent Rodríguez
Ramos on a mission trip to Moyobamba, Peru in 2020 in which he was in
contact with minors, four years after Carlos made his complaint to
Spanish civil authorities.
Carlos’s case went public in an article in Spanish newspaper El Pais
in April 2021, and he believes that it was only in response to media
pressure that Cerro imposed restrictions on Rodríguez Ramos and issued a
statement saying that an internal procedure had been conducted, with
the presumption of innocence.
However, Carlos said no one contacted him or his family, and they
were unaware that any procedure had been conducted, or what it entailed.
“No one told me anything,” he said. “They affirm that the canonical
process was initiated, but no one asked me anything. And, in addition,
during the trial the priest who abused me confirms the archdiocese knew
it since 2010,” he said.
It wasn’t until late 2022, he said, that he finally got a call from a
diocesan representative for abuse prevention in Toledo, days after the
then-secretary general of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference, César García
Magán, who is how auxiliary bishop of Toledo, was questioned about the
inaction of the church on Carlos’s case during a press conference.
From March 2010, when his mother first spoke with Rodríguez Plaza,
until that phone call in 2022, “there was no help for me or my family as
a victim, only continuous attempts to discredit us,” Carlos said,
saying “it took them twelve years to do anything, and only after my case
got attention in the media.”
Action in Rome
Carlos has also sought to sound the alarm in Rome over the apparent
coverup of his abuse by ecclesial authorities in Toledo, specifically
accusing Rodríguez Plaza, Cerro, and García Magán of coverup in their
roles as authorities in the Toledo archdiocese.
Carlos, who has kept all of the documents, which Crux has
seen, to chronicle his actions, first went to the Vatican’s Dicastery
for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) in December 2022 and delivered
documents relevant to his case. He went again in January 2023 to follow
up but received no response.
He went back to the DDF two months later, in March 2023, to deliver
another letter to the then-prefect, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, which he did
not receive an answer to. However, Carlos said he got “continuous calls”
over the next two days from one of the bishops he denounced, but
refused to respond, and reported those calls to the DDF, but received no
response.
Fed up with the lack of action, Carlos said he went to the DDF again
in April 2023 to file a formal complaint against Cerro for coverup.
Around the same time, in May 2023, he said, his civil trial began and
various priests from the Toledo ecclesial province, including the
now-rector of the Seminary of San Ildefonso of Toledo, testified in
favor of his abuser.
In September 2023 Carlos again traveled to Rome to meet with members
of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (PCPM) and to
file a complaint with them. He met with the commission leadership,
including its president, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, again a month later to
discuss further steps regarding the inaction of the Roman curia with his
case.
After that meeting, in which he said he was encouraged to present
complaints in other Vatican dicasteries, Carlos delivered formal
complaints of coverup to the Vatican Dicasteries for Bishops and for
Clergy, as well as the Secretariat of State, which Crux has seen. He is still awaiting a response.
Carlos has also written to Pope Francis on several occasions, sending
at least one letter in 2022 and four more missives in 2023 providing
various details about his case, and denouncing the lack of action on the
part of ecclesial authorities, both in Toledo and in Rome.
He said he met Pope Francis in December 2023 to discuss his case, and that they have stayed in touch ever since.
During their meetings, Carlos said he has handed over his various
complaints and provided evidence of the apparent abuse and coverup to
Pope Francis himself, since “my experience, so far, has taught me that a
victim and survivor cannot trust in Church offices or dicasteries.”
Questioning ecclesial norms
Lamenting the church’s continual failure to act over the past 15
years, Carlos said, “my abuser and the people covering up stole God and
my vocation to the priesthood from me.”
“But now the lack of action in the Roman curia adds further dramatic consequences,” he said.
He said church norms imposed by Pope Francis to crack down on coverup such as his 2016 edict Come una madre amorevole, which outlined procedures to remove a bishop from office for negligence or coverup in abuse cases, and his 2019 law Vos estis lux mundi, enforcing mandatory reporting to ecclesial authorities, among other things, have not been applied in his case.
“My case demonstrates how, even with access to evidence and the
ability to prove the coverup, some in the Vatican prefer not to do
anything and exhaust victims and survivors in an eternal labyrinth
characterized by no news about the process,” Carlos said.
“Vos estis lux mundi and Come una madre amorevole
don’t work and they make victims waste their time and energy. In fact, I
feel like that’s the purpose of some part of the Vatican hierarchy, to
exhaust victims and protect the institution,” Carlos said, saying he is
getting impatient in waiting for justice that never seems to come.
When Pope Francis rolled these measures out, and when he lifted the
rule of “pontifical secrecy” in clerical sexual abuse cases, making it
easier to cooperate with civil authorities, they were hailed as
significant steps forward.
However, nearly eight years after Come una madre amorevole and five years after Vos estis lux mundi,
Carlos’s case proves that these measures are still a major work in
progress, and that far from making the process more user-friendly, the
result has not been friendly at all.
On Nov. 7 Pope Francis met with seminarians and authorities from the
ecclesiastical province of Toledo, which includes several different
dioceses. Among them were Cerro and some of the individuals who
testified against Carlos during the civil trial.
After seeing pictures of Pope Francis shaking hands with these men,
Carlos sent another complaint to the Vatican lamenting the agonizing
journey that victims and their families are often subject to when
seeking ecclesial justice.
“Some of the people who failed to protect me or listen to me, and
that even tried to discredit me during the trial met Pope Francis. I
have formally denounced it to Pope Francis,” he said.
Given the Vatican’s lack of action on his case thus far, and in the
wake of the pope’s meeting with Cerro and those who spoke out against
him, despite the pope’s personal interest in his case and his
encouragement to keep fighting, Carlos said he does not expect anything
to change.
“It has been years of inaction, and handing over evidence shows the
inefficiency of the system when there is no follow up,” he said, saying
he wants justice not only as a matter of principle, but also to help him
to find his way back to the God that “these people claim to represent.”
“I am still waiting for the canonical process to start. Nothing has
happened, nothing. It’s not that it hasn’t been resolved. I haven’t even
been notified,” he said, saying, “I feel that the inaction of every
instance in the Catholic church is keeping me, and other survivors, in a
spiritual abyss. Is this the Vatican’s ‘zero tolerance’ policy we
always hear about in the media?”
Neither the archdiocese of Toledo nor the Vatican have responded to requests for comment for this article.
