Catholic Church in Bolivia offers ‘mea culpa’ for child sex abuse cases

Senior officials of the Catholic Church in Bolivia this week acknowledged their guilt for allowing systematic cases of child sexual abuse to occur in the 1970s and 1980s. They said the church “did not listen” to the suffering of the victims.

Spanish newspaper El País recently revealed the story of Spanish Jesuit priest Alfonso Pedrajas, who died in 2009 but left behind a secret diary filled with confessions of how he sexually abused children in several Bolivian schools — and how his congregation shielded him from accountability. “We have been directly or indirectly involved in the deep pain caused to innocent people,” a group of Bolivian bishops admitted this week.

The diary suggests that the priest sexually abused at least 85 children. Mr. Pedajas  also worked as a professor and director in a traditional Jesuit school in the city of Cochabamba, 374 kilometers southeast of Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. 

The revelations have taken Bolivia by storm. Prosecutor General Wilfredo Chávez announced that his office would open an investigation into the case, which he called a “horror systematically covered up by the Catholic Church.” And while the investigation into Mr. Pedrajas is being conducted in secret, another priest was recently arrested for child sex abuse. 

The Bolivian Society of Jesus, which promises to spare no effort to end impunity, is also beginning to expel priests who served in the congregation at the time of the Pedrajas scandal.

The case quickly went beyond Bolivian borders. It includes government consultations with the Spanish Consulate, followed this week by President Luis Arce’s letter to the Vatican, in which the head of state urged that the backgrounds of priests sent to Bolivia be carefully checked: “May these acts never happen again.”

In the face of this escalating crisis, Pope Francis also sent priest Jordi Bertomeu to Bolivia a few days ago, tasking him with investigating the allegations. Mr. Bertomeu has already worked on similar cases in Latin America, including an outrageous episode that nearly dismantled the entire Chilean church back in 2018.

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