In 2015, a Mexican Salesian priest named Pedro Mario Ayala Ceja, then a missionary in Amsterdam, traveled to Rome to meet with the worldwide superior of his congregation.
He had just received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and had written to the Vicar of the Rector Major stating that during his adolescence he had suffered abuse at the hands of another Salesian priest. He wanted to leave the congregation and the ministry.
He was received by Ángel Fernández Artime, Rector Major of the Salesians since March 25, 2014 — the superior of an order that at the time had 16,000 religious in 136 countries, today a cardinal and Pro-Prefect of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life, the Holy See’s body that oversees religious life throughout the Church.
Two accounts exist of that meeting, the victim’s and the cardinal’s, and they essentially coincide. Artime describes it this way in his response to the questions sent by InfoVaticana:
“I tell him something very important: I tell him that, once he has entrusted to me what happened to him, I ‘CANNOT BE AN ACCOMPLICE TO THIS’ and therefore he must authorize me to ask the person who holds juridical authority (the Superior of the Province in which the Salesian he was denouncing was incardinated) to open an investigation.”
The Rector Major arranged for Ayala a year of therapeutic and spiritual accompaniment in a Salesian community in Madrid, paid for by the congregation, and offered him support if he decided to file a civil complaint, an offer that—according to both accounts—the victim declined at that time because he did not feel ready.
The victim himself has publicly acknowledged this treatment.
The controversy is everything that came afterward. To understand it, one must go back to the beginning.
Irapuato, 1993-1996
According to Ayala’s testimony, the events occurred while he was in formation with the Salesians in Irapuato (Guanajuato, Mexico) under the authority of Father Jaime Reyes Retana, who was his formator and spiritual director.
The complainant places the start of the abuse in the 1993-94 academic year: “I was 15 years old, I had just turned 15,” he states in the interview with Aristegui Noticias.
He describes spiritual-direction sessions with sexual content, “massages” the priest taught him to give him, “wrestling games” involving touching, and nighttime visits to his bed in the common dormitory, from which he claims to have awakened “on more than three occasions.”
He also points to two more serious episodes: one in December 1994 and another in April 1996.
The ages matter, because they would later determine the entire juridical handling of the case: 15 at the start, according to the testimony; 16 years and four months in the 1994 episode; 17 years and eight months in the 1996 episode.
The first warnings: 1998
According to his testimony, Ayala reported the abuse to his novice master in 1998. The response he says he received: “there are brothers we have to put up with.”
Years later he told it again to the director of the theologate, who is said to have replied: “maybe you provoked it yourself.”
The cardinal’s letter does not mention these episodes; his account begins in 2015.
The formal complaint and the investigation: 2016
On March 11, 2016, Ayala signed his written statement, received by the Vicar of the Rector Major.
Deemed credible, the complaint was forwarded to the provincial superior of Guadalajara, to whom the accused was juridically subject, and who on April 12, 2016 opened the preliminary investigation provided for in canon 1717 of the Code of Canon Law.
The cardinal’s letter stresses that this was the legally established channel: competence to investigate belongs to the provincial superior of the accused, not to the Rector Major.
Regarding the content of the complaint, the cardinal’s letter defines the object of the investigation in these terms:
“The complaint referred to two incidents: the first occurring in December 1994 (when P.M.A. was 16 years and 4 months old) and the second occurring in April 1996 (when P.M.A. was 17 years and 8 months old). According to the canonical legislation in force at that time, a person under 16 years of age was considered a ‘minor’ (can. 1395 §2 CIC 1983). This fact was highlighted by the canonists consulted by the Provincial of Mexico.”
From that premise, always according to the letter, the canonists drew three conclusions: that there had been no offense “with a minor,” because of the victim’s age in both episodes; that consequently the case did not fall under the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith; and that the remaining offense—“against the sixth commandment with violence,” since the victim “was in no way consenting”—was prescribed, twenty years having elapsed since the events against the five-year period then in force.
The cardinal writes:
“According to the information I received, the facts reported by P.M.A. were not transmitted to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, because they were not within the competence of that Congregation, but of the Provincial.”
Here appear the first two open questions of the case.
The first concerns scope. If the 2016 statement included the events prior to December 1994—the ones that, according to the testimony, occurred when he was 15—the premise of the reasoning changes: acts with a minor under 16 did constitute an offense “with a minor” under the same legislation of the time that the letter invokes.
InfoVaticana expressly asked the cardinal whether the March 11, 2016 statement included those events and whether they were the object of the investigation.
He has not replied.
The document that would settle it—the signed statement—is in the possession of the congregation. What is indisputable is that the victim, in his public testimonies, does clearly describe acts of abuse at age 15.
The second concerns procedure.
The Circular Letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of May 3, 2011, addressed to bishops and major superiors, established that credible cases of abuse of minors under 18 should be sent to that dicastery after the preliminary investigation, with the CDF—and not the local superior—deciding on competence and, where appropriate, on the derogation of prescription, a faculty it habitually exercised in historical cases.
In this case, the classification, competence, and prescription were resolved at the provincial level.
“We sent it to Rome, but Rome sent it back”
On this point there is also a direct contradiction between the two versions.
Against the cardinal’s assertion that the file was not transmitted to the CDF, the victim told Aristegui Noticias that, when he asked for explanations, his superiors told him the opposite: “we sent the file to Rome, but Rome sent it back,” specifying that “Rome” was the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
According to his account, it was after that communication that he was informed the case would be taken up “not as abuse, but as a violation of the sixth commandment.”
Both statements cannot be true at the same time. If the file was sent, there is a protocol, a date, and a response that can be produced.
If it was not, the information given to the victim does not correspond to what happened. InfoVaticana asked the cardinal whether there was any communication, consultation, or referral of the case to the CDF, at any time and in any form. So far he has not replied.
The 2019 decree
On February 21, 2019, almost three years after the investigation was opened, the provincial resolved the case by decree, without a canonical penal process or the intervention of an ecclesiastical tribunal.
The cardinal’s letter details its content:
“It has taken into account J.R.R.Z.’s admission of guilt and his full willingness to ask P.M.A. for forgiveness; it has imposed on J.R.R.Z. the prohibition of being part of formation communities and the obligation for three years to undergo a program of psychological and spiritual accompaniment, with successive evaluations at the end of the program.”
The central fact is therefore provided by the cardinal himself: the accused admitted his guilt.
The measures taken in response to that admission were the prohibition of formation communities and psychological accompaniment.
There is no record of suspension from ministry, nor of a penal process, nor of communication to civil authorities.
According to the victim’s account, the resolution was communicated to him in April 2019 in Piedras Negras.
Before reading him the document, he claims, the then-provincial asked him three questions: “Are you doing this for money? Do you want money?”; “Do you want him expelled from the congregation?”; and “You are the only victim; we have not found other victims.”
This last phrase indicates that a search for other possible victims was carried out, the scope and results of which have not been publicly documented.
Ayala also states that he was not given full access to either the file or the resolution, because it was a confidential decree addressed to the accused.
The cardinal’s letter maintains, for its part, that the victim “was presented with the resolution of the decree” and that he was offered “welcome, listening, and accompaniment.”
Tijuana, August 2019
In May 2019 Vos estis lux mundi came into force, Pope Francis’s universal norm on abuse and the responsibility of superiors.
In August 2019, six months after the decree, Jaime Reyes Retana was appointed director of the Youth Center of the Oratory of St. Joseph in Tijuana (Baja California): a Salesian work dedicated to minors and young people. He was removed from the post after the case appeared in a press release. He was subsequently assigned to another youth center as assistant director.
The CDF Circular of 2011 established that readmission of a cleric to the public exercise of ministry should be excluded “if such readmission may pose a danger to minors or a risk of scandal to the community.”
The February 2019 decree prohibited the sanctioned priest from formation communities. It is up to the reader to judge whether a youth oratory is compatible with either of those restrictions.
Asked about these appointments, the cardinal replies in his letter:
“Any reasonable person can understand that, with two thousand Salesian presences spread across 136 nations and with 16,000 Salesians at that time, it is altogether illogical to think that each of the Provincials (92 at that moment) must consult and inform the Superior General about the decisions he makes regarding each of the Salesians under his jurisdiction.”
The same letter states, however, a few lines earlier:
“Throughout this entire period and in the course of the whole process I have asked for information from the then Provincial, who has told me he met with P.M.A. 4 or 5 times during all this time.”
Both statements sit uneasily together: the volume argument describes the cases the Rector Major does not follow; this one, according to the letter itself, was followed “in the course of the whole process.”
InfoVaticana asked the cardinal on what date he learned of the Tijuana appointment and the subsequent assignment as assistant director of another youth center, and what actions he took upon learning of each. So far the cardinal has not replied.
One further fact completes this chapter: the provincial who conducted the investigation, signed the decree, and under whose mandate the Tijuana appointment occurred, Hugo Orozco, was elected in 2020 a member of the congregation’s General Council, the worldwide governing body presided over by Artime.
InfoVaticana asked whether at any time consideration was given to examining his handling of the case in accordance with Vos estis lux mundi or Como una madre amorosa. He has not replied.
The review after Vos estis
To InfoVaticana’s questionnaire on whether the case was reviewed after the entry into force of Vos estis lux mundi to verify its conformity with the Church’s universal standards, and whether its handling satisfied the diligence criteria of Como una madre amorosa, the cardinal answered: “The answer is affirmative in both cases.”
The letter provides no date, body, act, or document of that review. It is worth recalling that the Tijuana appointment came after Vos estis entered into force.
The juridical framework, in two paragraphs
To assess all of the above, the reader must know two norms. Since the motu proprio Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela (2001), sexual abuse of a minor under 18 committed by a cleric is reserved to the Congregation—today Dicastery—for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the 2011 Circular ordered bishops and major superiors to send credible cases there, reserving to Rome the decision on prescription.
And since 2016, the motu proprio Como una madre amorosa—promulgated while this case was under instruction—establishes that major superiors of religious institutes, equated with bishops, may be removed from office for grave negligence in the exercise of their office; in matters of abuse of minors, the norm specifies, it is enough that the lack of diligence be grave, without need of intention or malice.
Vos estis lux mundi (2019) added the obligation to investigate actions or omissions by superiors aimed at interfering with or evading investigations. These are the norms according to which any competent ecclesial instance would have to examine the handling of this case.
What remains open
The Ayala case today presents the following uncontested elements: a complaint deemed credible in 2016; an accused who admitted his guilt; a resolution without a penal process, adopted at the provincial level without referral to Rome according to the cardinal’s version; two subsequent assignments of the sanctioned priest to youth centers, the first after Vos estis came into force; and a victim who has not had full access to the file of his own case.
And it presents four questions whose answers lie in documents that exist and can be produced: the March 11, 2016 statement, which would say whether the events at age 15 formed part of the investigation; the possible protocol of referral to the CDF, which would settle which of the two versions about “Rome” is accurate; the record of the review after Vos estis that the cardinal claims was carried out; and the files of the Tijuana appointment and the second youth-center assignment.
InfoVaticana sent these questions to the cardinal in explicit form. At the close of this article, they have not received a response.
Ángel Fernández Artime is today the Pro-Prefect of the dicastery that oversees consecrated life throughout the Church, the same body that would ordinarily be competent to examine the conduct of a superior general.
The documents that would clear up each of the doubts set out here are in the archives of the congregation he governed for ten years. This editorial staff remains willing to publish in full whatever is provided to it.