“Clerical Sexual Violence in Ecuador: Mapping Impunity”, published in early September, details how priests and other people with authority in the Church use their power to perpetrate abuse.
The document describes a number of cases of abuse that occurred in the past decades but still have consequences in the present, especially due to the Church’s decision to avoid addressing them through the civil judicial system.
An emblematic case which opens the report is that of a former Congress employee who committed suicide in the Ecuadorian Assembly building in March of 2024.
The man, referred to as “Ricardo” rather than by his real name, waited for 36 years for justice. As a boy, he was abused several times in a Salesian orphanage on the Galapagos islands by a lay man who worked there.
In 2003, Ricardo sent a letter to the inspector of the Salesians in Ecuador, 18 years after his abuse. The answer said the perpetrator was not a member of the Salesians anymore. By that time, the man had been ordained a diocesan priest in Galapagos. He learnt of Ricardo’s complaint and tried to make him abandon it.
In 2006, Ricardo contacted the Salesian community again, asking them not to exempt themselves from their responsibilities. There was no answer. Ten years later, he sent a letter to the Apostolic Vicariate of Galapagos, with a copy to the Ecuadorian bishops’ conference.
A Church inquiry began, but Archbishop Giacomo Morandi, secretary of the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, said he could not make a decision and told the Ecuadorian bishops to act. The Vicariate of Galapagos suspended the priest from clerical duties for one year.
Ricardo met Fr Marcelo Farfan, the inspector of the Salesians in Ecuador, about a month before his death, and learned that his abuser remained mostly unpunished.
The full case became known to the public only in June of 2024, when an article about the abuse Ricardo suffered was published by Wambra, a community media outlet in Ecuador. At that time, the priest was working in a school in Galapagos. He was then suspended again from his priestly duties.
Ricardo’s widow has continued to pursue justice, but there have been no further advances in the case.
Sara Oviedo, an activist for children’s rights in Ecuador and a member of the Coalition of Combat to Sexual Violence in Spaces of Faith – which produced the report – said the Church has a behavioural pattern when it comes to abuse.
“Every time, there’s an effort to cover up the scandals,” she told The Tablet. “Either the perpetrator is moved from a parish or diocese to another one or he’s sent to a retreat. Information is always hidden by the church from the victims and from the public.”
Oviedo said the coalition recently asked for information about the number of cases of abuse known to the Ecuadorian Church, but the bishops’ conference said it didn’t have that information and that each diocese should be consulted.
“And I’m sure that the dioceses would tell us to consult the parishes, and the parishes would say that nothing had happened,” she said.
Oviedo said that the study also demonstrates that the church repeatedly fails to report abuse cases to the authorities, preferring to deal with them internally.
“When they lose control over a case and it reaches the civil authorities, they generally keep withholding information and declaring they don’t know anything about it.”
The cases described in the report show that the church “manages abuse cases in a criminal way”, she said. “And the national states, like Ecuador, tend to wash their hands as well, in order to avoid clashes with the church.”